Carnival and the Beginnings of Football

As many of you know, the birth of everything great tends to be Christian, and if old enough, usually that means Catholicism. 

Well, this may be a bit of a stretch as we all like writing in the Latin-script, and even our Church uses the terms diocese and other pre-Christian terms and inventions, as well as Arabic numerals, but the point is that many things that are great have Catholic origins. 

And, in sports, that is also true.

Football is a family of sport with all the same origins with most experts crediting the beginning of the sport to the British Isles and specifically England in the ancient and medieval practice of mob or medieval football!

Yes, you may be interested to know that mob football is the origins of the sports of Association football (soccer), American Gridiron football, Canadian Gridiron football, Rugby Union football, Rugby League football, Gaelic football, Australian Rules football, International Rules football, and even the ancient Florentine game of Calcio Storico Fiorentino. There are many more footballs that exist in the world including the variants of the ones mentioned and they all come from these origins.

And, today is the day all these footballs came to life!

Shrove Tuesday, also known as Fat Tuesday, Pancake Day, and plenty of other names, is the day before Ash Wednesday and is the day across England where people have been gathering in their local towns to play football since the 12th Century according to some estimates, with others writing even earlier than this!

In fact, some sport historians even credit earlier ball games as the origins of the sport and to this point, Saint Bede is the first to mention people playing a post-Classical age ball game in the British Isles as early as the 8th Century. 

But, today, we must narrow our scope to the definitve origins of the sport and that is the English based medieval football games. 

Across England today, we will see many football games played from the Southern limits of Cornwall to the Northern limits of Cumbria, but to limit the scope of this article, we will focus on two: The Royal Shrovetide Football Match and the Atherstone Ball Game.

The personal household clerk of Saint Thomas Becket, cleric, and Sheriff of Gloucester, William Fitzstephen, described English boys playing what is believed to be football in the 12th Century during Carnival as the English clergy quickly brought in ball sports to be included into the Carnival festivals.

It became very popular in the suburbs and rural areas such as Ashbourne in Derbyshire where The Royal Shrovetide Football Match continues to be played over nine centuries later.

The Royal Shrovetide Football Match epitomizes the best of medieval and mob rule football as it pits one part of Ashbourne called the Up'Ards against the other part called the Down'Ards. 

In typical mob football fashion, basically everything is legal and everywhere is playable. The ball may be moved by kicking, throwing, carrying and other physical means. People may not murder or manslaughter, use a motorized vehicle to move the ball, hide the ball in a coat, rucksack, or bag, and the ball may not be carried through the town's cemeteries, churchyards, or memorial gardens, but almost all else is legal. There are two goals at either end of the city 3 miles apart and these goals are millstones on the banks of the Henmore Brook. Therefore, as one can already notice, players really do use almost the whole town for their playing area which includes the street, shops, and even the river. 

To score a goal, a player must strike the millstone that is his goal three successive times. 

The match is played over two days on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. 

Both matches begin at 2 pm, and if a goal is scored by 6 pm or earlier, play continues for another goal. If not, play is ended for the day once a goal is scored after 6 pm or continues until 10 pm if no goal has been scored after 6 pm.

The ball is moved primarily by hugging (a big scrum where the ball is passed/handed off closely), and then there are runners ready to run miles once the ball breaks out to them to score the goal. The balls are quite heavy and are very decorative.

For those interested, Red Bull TV made a great video about the sport found on this link for free.

While many medieval games resemble The Royal Shrovetide Football Match with two sides of the town playing against each other using the whole town as their playing surface with minimal rules, the Atherstone Ball Game represents another version of football we often never see: football as an individual sport.

In the Atherstone Football Match, a ball is dropped in from an upper story window at the Conservative Club on Long Street and the players battle for two hours. The winner is the individual who possesses the ball at the end of those two hours.

You may not murder and the ball must stay on Long Street. But, besides that, almost all else is legal and there is lots of physical play.

Play begins at 3 pm when the ball is dropped, usually by a celebrity, and ends at 5 pm, all on Shrove Tuesday. 

The ball in the Atherstone game is also heavily decorated and quite heavy.

Originally, the game was actually a team sport with representatives from Atherstone's Warwickshire against representatives from nearby Leicestershire, but now it is an individual sport.

You can watch a video on the Atherstone Ball Game here.

While the winners of these competitions may not be as famous as Tom Brady or Lionel Messi, or as popular as the New England Patriots or FC Barcelona, in Ashbourne and Atherstone, these players and the teams of Ashbourne are their equivalents. 

And, due to the extreme severity of the scores and the minimal amount of games per year, the goal scorers and winning player are known for history.

Eventually, the famous public schools like Eton, Harrow and Rugby, as well as universities like Cambridge, sports clubs, and even cities like Sheffield began to create their own footballs in the 19th Century which saw the rise in more civilized and formalized football. 

Once these entities started to want to play against others, they merged their footballs with others to create the modern-rules we use today in a process called codification.

So when you watch the Premier League, the NFL, or even other leagues like the Australian Football League and Premiership Rugby, you can thank Shrove Tuesday and the tradition of Carnival in our Church for giving you football.