It was land enclosures in the countryside and heavy industrial building in the towns and cities which began to do what the authorities had failed to do - squeeze football off the national agenda. An article in The Times in 1842 says, 'The Poor have been dispossessed of their games, the amusements and their mirth.' Football, when played at all, became much toned down, the number of players and even the space involved limited.
Help and eventually salvation came from the English public schools. They were not, in the first half of the nineteenth century, well ordered preserves designed to serve and lead a country and an empire. They were often freewheeling, rambunctious pens into which the sons of the rich were herded while they wreaked the havoc of adolescence. In 1797 at Rugby a revolt among the pupils was quelled only by the arrival of the army and the reading of the Riot Act. In 1808 the young Byron led a mutiny at Harrow against an unpopular master. In 1818 at Winchester the militia with fixed bayonets came in to put down another schoolboy rebellion. This was rich soil for the growth of football. Sometimes they were encouraged by the school authorities: better football, it was thought, than rebellion.
What happened at these schools was that the game took on not one but several shapes. In Charterhouse School, for instance, which was then housed in an old Carthusian monastery in London, a very confined space, the art or craft of 'dribbling' the ball was developed. On the vast playing fields of Eton the ball could be kicked high and long, and it was. At Rugby, between the 1820s and the 1840s, the boys caught and ran with the ball and began to develop what would become a separate game but was then called, as they all were, football.
We are moving into a period of muscular Christianity. As Hunter Davies writes in Boots, Balls and Haircuts, headmasters came to see football as 'a way of instilling order and discipline and also providing a healthy activity for adolescent boys, distracting them from probably more controversial or even disgusting personal activities'. Two of the key men in this respect were Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby and, more importantly, Edward Thring, the headmaster of Uppingham School from 1853 to 1887.
At Uppingham, Thring developed the idea of an education for the full man, in body and in mind: 'mens sana in corpore sano'. Thring wrote the 'Simplest Rules of Football' in which he emphasised fair play, equal numbers in each team, team spirit and discipline. All this has been seen as part of the preparation of these boys for their imperial role, when all over the globe a few handfuls of young British males from a damp and underpopulated island were almost accidentally dragooned into world governance. Discipline, cohesion, team spirit - as the empire grew so these characteristics had to be put in order and mass produced. Headmasters like Thring and Arnold saw team games, classical learning and no-nonsense Anglicanism as the three pillars of Imperial Wisdom.
There's a passage in the Labour Force Survey Quarterly of 1863 which reads: 'the fascination of this gentle pastime is its mimic war, and it is waged with the individual prowess of the Homeric conflicts ... The play is played out by boys with that dogged determination to win, that endurance of pain, that bravery of combative spirit, by which the adult is trained to face the cannon-ball with equal alacrity.'
Football had come a long way since medieval times. What was once disorder, mayhem, a threat to public peace is now the way to train the gilded youth who will lead and expand a nation. And where once football was seen as, among other things, a distraction from the much more vital honing of the arts of war, it is now seen as an influential factor in the essential, dangerous disciplines of world domination.
Football, then, was up and running in the public schools but struggling to gain space in the big industrial cities, especially in the North and the Midlands. It was the public school men who pushed it forward.
The problems arose when the boys from different schools went to Oxford and Cambridge, wanted to continue to play football and found that because different schools followed different rules, all hell broke loose. This is from the description of a match played in Cambridge in 1848: '... The result was dire confusion, as every man played the rules he had been accustomed to at his public school. I remember how the Eton man howled at the Rugby man for handling the ball.'
There was no difference at that stage between what we now call football and rugby. It became common practice to play half a match by one side's rules, the second half by the other's. That's how half-time evolved.
It was not satisfactory, however, and the public school men who were putting the world in order turned their minds to the game they had come to love with a passion. They beat a path through the jungle and finally arrived at a Book of Laws. The beginning of the process may be claimed by Cambridge where, in the middle of the century, it was agreed that fourteen players from different schools should frame a set of rules: these took the game towards football. These were codified in 1863 as 'the Cambridge Rules' by nine Cambridge men representing Shrewsbury, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough and Westminster.
But these were almost immediately superseded, only a few days later, on 26 October 1863, in a pub, The Freemasons' Tavern, in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. There will be those who say that the finalising of the rules of the most influential game in the world in a pub is deeply satisfying; others might say, 'Typical'. In Britain, at any rate, discussions and disputes on the rules of football have been a feature of our pubs ever since.
