England banned football in 1314
I believe it was Thomas McDonald who posted a link to this timeline in a previous thread http://www.timelines.info/history/ages_and_periods/. Of the many interesting things that emerge, one of the oddest might be that England banned football in 1314?

I remember reading someplace that "tournaments" sometimes took place between towns or villages, involving three-way contests of grappling, sword-fighting and "footeball". Which leads me to suspect that the rules of football in the 13-hundreds would be slightly more interpretable than it is today.

I would love to hear if anyone could give a picture of what football was like in the 14th century! I bet there wasn't many penalties, free-kicks or offside-rules...
Re: England banned football in 1314
Borger Kruge wrote:
I believe it was Thomas McDonald who posted a link to this timeline in a previous thread http://www.timelines.info/history/ages_and_periods/. Of the many interesting things that emerge, one of the oddest might be that England banned football in 1314?

I remember reading someplace that "tournaments" sometimes took place between towns or villages, involving three-way contests of grappling, sword-fighting and "footeball". Which leads me to suspect that the rules of football in the 13-hundreds would be slightly more interpretable than it is today.

I would love to hear if anyone could give a picture of what football was like in the 14th century! I bet there wasn't many penalties, free-kicks or offside-rules...


In Ashbourne in Derbyshire (English Midlands) there is a traditional game still played at Shrovetide that has sometimes been suggested as a representative of medieval football (my brother used to play it when he worked in the area, and I was born there, but grew up elsewhere). From my brother's descriptions it appeared to consists of the males of the town dividing into two sides, each of which spent several hours (it used to run on into the evening) trying to get a ball to a particular scoring point (sorry, I don't have detail of the method of scoring). The ball could be kicked, carried, hidden up your jumper, kept behind the bar in the pub, or whatever. Aside from that, there was a lot of consumption of alcohol, a lot of trespass onto private property, running around in gangs, fights etc.. I'm not sure if I ever heard of anyone actually scoring. I suspect it may have been banned elswhere to prevent riotous behaviour. Given the timing, in spring, you have to wonder if there were original, much older, versions played with a head or some other recently living substitute for the ball, but that is just speculation on my part.
Geoff

Page 1 of 1

Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum




All contents © Copyright 2003-2006 myArmoury.com — All rights reserved
Discussion forums powered by phpBB © The phpBB Group
Switch to the Full-featured Version of the forum