This summer’s football World Cup has prompted lots of talk of ‘historic’ matches and rivalries that have played out over decades, but the game’s history – and its connection with geographic identities – goes back much further than you might think. In this guest post, Taylor Aucoin, University of Edinburgh, takes us back several centuries to some early modern footballing rivalries. You can follow Taylor’s project on medieval and early modern football here.

Every Sunday in the early months of 1765, Welsh and Irish sides numbering in the hundreds played football in the White-Conduit Fields of Islington (better known for early games of cricket). One such ‘grand camping match’ caught the attention of the London newspapers. When a Welshman called one Irishman a slur, the game dissolved into a bloody brawl. Both sides armed themselves with ‘sticks and other weapons…forced from the spectators’, and waged a desperate pitched battle. Eventually, ‘the ancient Britons were obliged to retire, and leave the Hibernian heroes masters of the field’.[1]

The reports portray premodern football as a violent and chaotic game, but there are familiar elements too: a popular spectator sport played regularly in defined spaces by ethno-national teams. While these games between immigrants were a far cry from the first international matches between England and Scotland in the 1870s (both rugby and association rules), they underscore the sport’s longstanding and special relationship with geographic identity. Well before World Cups, FIFA, national teams, or modern associations and clubs, football epitomized place and home throughout early modern Britain.

All sports can be engines and emblems of identity; through organised play, people forge a sense of self and community, and put it on display. Football is not unique to this process, yet its modern codes (especially association) have become privileged vehicles of local, regional and national identity in their respective sporting cultures. But this is nothing new. Modern football forms trace their shared heritage to medieval and early modern folk games, especially those of the ‘Home Nations’. And more so than other sports of that time, premodern football manifested locality through its representative teams, its interaction with place and countryside, and its defence of customary land rights.

Home Teams

Eighteenth-century London had a vibrant football culture, catering to an ever-expanding migrant population. As with the Welsh and Irish in Islington, people far from home could find community and flaunt pride of place through this team sport. Regional sides, however, were more common than national ones, with many matches pitting county against county. One advertisement in the London Journal of October 1721 challenged six men of any county to play ‘six Derbyshire men’ for a prize of half a dozen gloves. Players were to meet at ‘The Mitre and Two Brewers in Highgate’, and play in ‘a very Fine field provided for the purpose’.[2]

Gentlemen played in similar challenges for much larger stakes (see image below), or they might arrange the event. A Norfolk gentleman set up a challenge in 1735 for ‘the first two goals in three at Foot-ball’ between twelve of his countrymen, and twelve of any other county. Eligibility reflected the transitory nature of migrant identity (and probably clamped down on hired guns): players needed to be from said county, but also to have ‘lived in London or the Bills of Mortality [i.e. the suburbs] twelve months at least’.[3] For those settled in the metropolis, there were more parochial loyalties to develop and defend. On a Thursday in January 1729, for example, there was ‘a great Foot-Ball Match’ between the suburb of Shoreditch and the neighbouring London ward of Coleman Street. The London press (no doubt impartial) deemed the suburbanites a ‘cowardly’ bunch, beat ‘so shamefully…tis thought they will never attempt to challenge [Coleman Street] again’.[4]

Genteel football at the Derbyshire Wake on Islington Road. Daily Journal, Saturday 13 September 1729 (London). Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale.com.

Representative teams from the eighteenth-century capital mirrored those in the provinces, Wales and Scotland. ‘Parish versus parish’ was perhaps the most common arrangement, especially for the big festival fixtures, analogous to derbies or marquee match-ups today. During the early eighteenth century in Anglesey, Llanbadrick and Llanfechell played annually on the Llanbadrick Wakes Day in March, while twelve men from each parish arranged a special match on Whitsun Monday 1749. Llanbadrick men were keen footballers: on Easter Tuesday 1734, a squad of twelve squared off against a dozen from Llanfairynghornwy and Llanrhwydrys. Around 500 spectators, including the great and good of the region, enjoyed a real cracker of a match. ‘Both sides with equall courage, skill & resolution’ won an ‘end’ or goal before calling it a draw and going drinking together.[5]

Parochial teams were not reserved for the high feast days. Parishioners of Rayne and Culsalmond (Aberdeenshire) were punished for ‘a public footballing’ on the Lord’s Day in 1648. Nine from Coggeshall played nine from Great Tey at a camping match in Essex on Sunday 1 June 1600.[6] The format was found across the regional variations of football, camping being the East Anglian one. Hurling was the Cornish variant, described in Francis Willughby’s ‘Book of Games’ as ‘the same with Football but that it is throwne with the hand.’ It was played ‘one parish against another, or Easterne men against the Westerne, or Cornwall against Devonshire’.[7] Today annual matches still occur in St Ives and St Columb Major, with town facing country in the latter every Shrove Tuesday. Town versus country was another classic geographic division, found for example in seventeenth-century Carlisle and nineteenth-century Sedgefield (Durham).[8]

Other forms of identity could structure play within a single community: trade versus trade in early Tudor Chester; married versus single in lowland Scottish towns like Scone, Duns or Musselburgh (East Lothian), where we find rare evidence of women playing premodern football in 1795. For the hurling in nineteenth-century St Ives, all men named Tom, John or Will formed one team against everyone else. Yet the primacy of geography and a sense of place remains visible in the dozen or so surviving British folk ball games of today. Whether Uppies and Downies, Up-Streeters and Down-Streeters, or Easties and Westies, home or birthplace within the town determines allegiance.[9]

Defending Territory and Rights

Geography was also central to the gameplay of premodern football, which came in two main formats. The first and more familiar was played in defined spaces, like a ‘longe streete, or a close [enclosed field] that has a gate at either end’ to serve as goals, as Willughby put it.[10] This format lent itself to small and even sides (usually). Pastures, fallow fields and enclosures of willing (or unwilling) landowners were often used. Commons like the White-Conduit Fields or the Old Links of St Andrews provided shared space for football and other recreations. Whether streets or fields, football transformed these multi-purpose spaces into play places. The change was transient, but football left more indelible marks on the landscape and its place names too: dedicated Ball Greens, Football Fields, and Camping Closes dot the island, the deeply-embedded memories of a long-beloved game.[11]

The second format of football was boundless, played through towns and countrysides by unconstrained and uneven sides advancing the ball to landmark goals. Llanbadrick strove for the boundaries of Llanfechell village, while Llanfechell aimed for a cliffside some three miles distant, gaining victory in 1743 when they ‘drove the foot ball over the precipice beyond Porth Badrick’ (see image).[12] Goals could be church porches and mills (Duns), a river or hole in the moor (Scone), bridges (Kingston-upon-Thames), villages and gentlemen’s houses (Cornwall), among other human and natural markers. Players in early Tudor Chester carried the ball from the common field to the city’s Common Hall.[13] It was really this phenomenon which set football apart: other sports also transformed the land (bowling greens, tennis courts), or fielded representative teams. But by the game’s nature one single football could entertain an entire community and mobilize it to defend the boundaries. The very fabric and soil of one’s home became a part of the game as the ball traversed the miles between localities; navigated thicket, stream and street; struck landmark goals; and crossed borders. Football might even alter those borders. According to folklore, the outcome of the annual Coldstream and Wark match on the Scottish Borders determined whether the no-man’s land Ba’ Green belonged to England or Scotland.[14]

Porth Padrig, Anglesey, where in 1743 Llanfechell bested rival Llanbadrick by driving the football ‘over the precipice beyond Porth Badrick’. Photo © Chris Andrews | BY-SA

Football could also defend territory and access to land rights in a broader sense. The game’s warlike nature and propensity to summon large crowds made it an ideal vehicle and cover for riots. As common fields were enclosed or marshes drained in the name of progress, people used football to assert rights to the land and its essential and shared resources. This was especially true when the fens were drained during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1638 ‘a foot ball play or camp’ in Whelpmore Fen of Cambridgeshire mustered hundreds from surrounding towns, who proceeded to play across country and level enclosure ditches in the process.[15]

One of the rights and resources that commons provided was recreation itself. When the burgh council of St Andrews allowed the Archbishop a rabbit warren in the Old Links in 1551, the contract reserved to the townsfolk their rights of ‘playing at golf, football, shooting at game, with all manner of other pastimes’. Again, football players were uniquely well equipped to violently and ritually claim such rights to recreation, should they be threatened. In February 1483, parishioners of Bethersden (Kent) riotously staged a football match against the prior of St Gregory’s enclosure attempts, defending their rights ‘to pleie’ upon ‘the comen grounde and comen pleying place for all men of this parisshe’.[16]

Around four centuries later, in 1860, villagers of Steeple Bumpstead (Essex) responded to the gradual enclosure of their Camping Close in a strikingly similar way. After three young tradesmen scattered the encroacher’s manure over the grounds, twenty other villagers joined them to play football in the close, thereby treading the manure into the land and symbolically invoking their recreational rights to it. Just three years later, the Football Association would form in London, where it standardized, rather than invented, a code of football. It adapted a traditional sport which had long created, performed and defended premodern people’s sense of place and identity. This fashioning of home through play remains an intangible heritage, passed down and paralleled in our own national and club loyalties of today.

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[1] Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Tuesday 26 March 1765 (London); Lloyd’s Evening Post, 22-25 March, p. 287, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection, Gale.com. The newspapers cited here are all from this collection.

[2] London Journal, Saturday 14 October 1721, p. 5.

[3] London Daily Post and General Advertiser,Monday 20 October 1735 (London).

[4] Daily Post Boy, Saturday 1 February 1729.

[5] The William Bulkeley Diaries (Bangor University).See regular recaps on the Wakes football match in the March entries. For the even-sided matches see entries 1734 April 16 and 1749  May 15.

[6] John Davidson, Inverurie and the Earldom of the Garioch (Edinburgh, 1878), p. 302; Essex Archives, D/ACA/25, fol. 107, Archdeaconry of Colchester Act Book, Sep 1598-Jun 1602.

[7] Francis Willughby’s book of games : a seventeenth century treatise on sports, games, and pastimes, (eds) David Cram, Jeffrey L. Forgeng and Dorothy Johnston (2003), p. 169.

[8] I discuss the Carlisle game extensively in chapter 2 of my thesis.

[9] On these folk survivals see Hugh Hornby, Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008).

[10] Willughby, p. 168.

[11] The classic study of camping closes is David Dymond, ‘A Lost Social Institution: The Camping Close’, Rural History 1, 2 (1990), 165-192. 

[12] The William Bulkeley Diaries (Bangor University).Entry 1743 March 21.

[13] For the wide variety of goals see Hornby and Francis Magoun, History of Football from the Beginnings to 1871 (1938). I discuss the Chester game extensively in chapter 2 of my thesis.

[14] Coldstream and Scotland eventually won permanent rights, allegedly because their village (and therefore football team) grew so much larger than Wark’s. See I. Crofton, A Dictionary of Scottish Phrase and Fable (Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2013), 25.

[15] On fenland football riots see Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution, (London, 1982), pp. 101-105, 232.

[16] The National Archives (Kew), KB9/365, m.22.