Every year Ashbourne is brought to a standstill. The town is decked out in flags in and bunting , cars entering the town are advised to do so with caution as the streets are filled with people. For the two days of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday the Up’ards face the Down’ards in a celebration of the way football existed for over a thousand of years. Goals are positioned on mill stones three miles apart. The pitch is the entire town. To score the ball must be kicked three times against the mill stone by the heaving massed throng. The game is unsurprisingly manic but good natured.
Of course “good natured” was not always an apt description.
It is an obvious statement that war is bloody and brutal. Celebrating victory can be just as brutal. The spoils of battle coming in all forms. Gold. Furs. Women. Body parts. Severed body parts. In the 8th Century one particular British victory yielded the gruesome trophy of the decapitated head of a Danish prince. The head was kicked around the village streets in triumph of vanquished. Football.
The story is believed to be apocryphal but this is still referred to as the “legendary match”. Heads may not have rolled every game but matches were renowned for their violence. Lesser known as football, more commonly called “the mob game”, as there was no limit to the number of players on each team. There were very few rules, only homicide and manslaughter were illegal, every other method to get the ball to the goal was fair game. On numerous occasions royalty attempted to ban the game. King Edward II passing a ban in 1314. It was not successful. The game was far too popular. A 16th century school master wrote;
“The football strengtheneth and brawneth the whole body but it is now commonly used, with the thronging of a rude magnitude, with the bursting of shins and breaking of legs”.
Queen Elizabeth I passed a law that anyone playing football faced prison, followed by church penance. Still the game thrived and increased in popularity. This was not a game of skill but of brute force and physical power. Who needs skill when there are no rules? Punch, kick, throw, carry, rip and wrestle that ball to the target.
A shift began at Parker’s Piece, Cambridge. A plaque is in place declaring;
“Here on Parker’s Piece, in the 1800s, students established a common set of simple rules emphasising skill above force, which forbade catching of the ball and ‘hacking’. These Cambridge rules became teh defining influence on the 1863 Football Association rules.”
Each school came up with it’s own version of the game. Rugby school had it’s own, now well known, rules for the game, favouring the carrying of the ball. Eton had a version of the rules that favoured dribbling, as did Charterhouse, whose game permitted forward passing. In 1848 the Cambridge rules were fully accepted as a way to codify the schools and, as illustrated above, moved football towards a universal set of rules.
The rules have evolved over time. Each evolution has increased the emphasis on skill and technique. Moving away from the violent. Removing the heaving mob. Creating a defined area of play. Taking away the ability to physically abuse an opponent. In recent times harsher punishments on certain types of foul (the tackle from behind etc) have allowed for greater expression from imaginative individuals.
This path towards the technical has only been in existence for 200 years. Which sounds like a long time but is a relatively short expanse of the time football has existed en mass in Britain. In effect it represents a turning of a tide against long established psychology.
Pick a team that is equipped for battle. As for almost a thousand years the “mob game” was just that. A no holds barred scrap. Surround yourself with the biggest, the toughest and the strongest. A game for bulldozers and tanks. These were the attributes most prized and this has left a marker on the mentality. That is what deep history does, it forms an established norm and a set of values to fall back on. The small players are far less valuable because they will be over powered in the rough, tough, hacking scrummage. No matter how adroit this runt, the powerful thug can easily nullify them.
This may sound familiar to some. As when the rules and circumstances are such that power can prevail, skill will be marginalised. It has been the battle of centuries to allow skill to flourish in British football. After all it is no longer a bloody and brutal war. There is no prince’s head spewing blood across the field. It is a game. One to be enjoyed by those watching and those taking part. The battlefield has been left behind but it for all of us to create an arena in which the artist is more prized than the warrior.
Timeline – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_association_football#Pre_1869s
Alternative timeline – http://www.topendsports.com/sport/soccer/history.htm
Medieval football – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_football
FIFA history – http://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/the-game/britain-home-of-football.html
Mob football – http://graveshamtrophycentre.com/pages/129-mob-football-in-norman-britain-1066-1400ad
Shakespeare and football – http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/blog/shakespeare-beautiful-game/
Ashbourne football – http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2016/feb/11/ashbournes-royal-shrovetide-football-match-photo-essay