[...]... third teams The cost and attendance at athletic events in the Sheffield area 1862–67 The receipts from annual athletic sports meeting The numbers on each side in matches within the Sheffield area 1865–67 The Youdan Cup knock-out competition in 1867 The list of delegates at the first FA meeting The list of delegates at the second FA meeting The list of delegates at the third FA meeting The list of delegates... the real truth of the first hundred years of modern football The book consists of the following chapters In Chapter 1, we consider the football that was conducted on Shrove Tuesday, a variant that was often rough and wild and popularly regarded as the earliest variety of the game In Chapters 2 and 3 we consider more regularly occurring contests, first those conducted in public schools and then in the. .. that the effect of legislation on popular sports has been substantially overrated The third point made by advocates of the view that popular recreations were being eroded during the first half of the nineteenth century relates to the impact of enclosures and the migration 4 The history of Shrove-football of the population from rural to urban areas This, they contend, deprived the lower orders of the. .. reasons the Shrove-game at Derby in 1845 was used by the local working class, especially the framework-knitters, as ‘a vehicle for social protest’.51 Since their defeat by the manufacturers in a bitter strike in 1833–34 the framework-knitters had suffered from the steady erosion of their wages and Delves believes that they tried to use the Shrove-game to accomplish three goals In the first place, the. .. though the picture for the preceding decades is mixed.17 As we can see from the above there is little to support the contention that changes in the social and economic circumstances of the labouring population led to a decline in their access to recreations in the period between 1750 and 1850.18 Having accomplished this, we must now consider the second part of the chapter, an examination of the fate... many aspects of the established history of football, particularly the role of the public schools in the creation of the modern game In 1991, after an examination of the archives of one of the earliest football clubs, Sheffield, I began to realise that the role of the public schools in the creation of modern football had been severely exaggerated Since then I have expanded my research and the product of... time in which they could pursue recreation Finally, the general standard of living, in terms of the capacity of wages to purchase food and accommodation, fell, thus resulting in a decline in both the disposable income and the health and energy of the labouring population.3 Cumulatively, according to Malcolmson, these developments meant that during the first half of the nineteenth century the newly urbanised... can be seen, the number of games increases as the centuries progress, there being over four times as many in the eighteenth century as there were in the sixteenth To an extent, of course, this might simply be a reflection of the amount of available source material, but given the comparative copiousness of the chronicles from the sixteenth century it appears unlikely that this would explain the disparity... the frozen surface of the river Tees in 1855, or the game in 1830 between two players at Bridge-end.30 The image that we have of Shrove and other traditional football games is an extremely violent one, in which long-hostile groups are given the opportunity to vent their hatreds There are many examples of this For instance, the football at Whitehaven, ‘a game without rules’, between the miners and the. .. aspects of the code While the rules of soccer have always been credited to the public schools, in actual fact they sprang from many sources and were modified xxiv Introduction significantly One of the major sources of these transformations was the football culture that emerged in Sheffield during the 1850s With regard to football as a commercial sport, in the final quarter of the nineteenth century there . English public schools in the 1860s subsequently became the sport of the masses. Football: The First Hundred Years provides a revisionist history of the game, challenging. in the light of Harvey’s research. Football: The First Hundred Years provides a very detailed picture of the football played outside the confines of the