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DEPARTMENT OF REGULATORY REGULATION

DIRECTOR   Vanita Merck

ABOUT

In 1349 football and other games were forbidden by Edward III. in favour of archery. It was again forbidden by statute under Richard II. in 1389, which statute was re-enacted in 1401. These statutes had, however, but partial and temporary success. Football came again under the ban of the law in the sixteenth century, both under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. There seems, however, to have been reasonable excuse for these repressive measures, judging from the violence with which it was played. *Mr Montague Shearman cites various official records as to serious or fatal results from football of the sixteenth century;2 and these might be materially increased by reference to coroners' rolls. *After the dissolution of the monasteries, when Sir Roger Townsend was pulling down the tower of Coxford Priory, Norfolk, to build himself a goodly house, the steeple came down with a crash and fell upon a house near by, " breaking it down and slaying one Mr Seller, that lay lame in it of a broken leg gotten at foot-ball."8 *Sir Thomas Elyot, in his charming little work entitled The Soke named the Governour, first published in 1531, says of football that it "is nothyng but beastely fury and extreme violence, whereof procedeth hurte, and consequently rancour and malice do remayne with thym that be wounded, wherfore it is to be put in perpetuall silence."4 *In Stubbes' Anatomie of Abuses (1583) football is described as "a develishe pastime . . . and hereof groweth envy, rancour, and malice, and sometimes brawling, murther, homicide, and great effusion of blood, as experience daily teacheth." *And yet there must have been gentler forms of this exercise. The married women and spinsters of Inverness used to have a Shrovetide match of football; and a writer in Notes and Queries for 1892 cites the following lines as to matron and girls playing from Sir Philip Sidney's Dialogue between Two Shepherds :— A time there is for all, my mother often says, When she, with skirts tucked very high, With girls at football plays.