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There are no rules

Michael Owen doubtless doesn't know it, but he probably owes some of his success as a footballer to the Victorians. Before the 1800s, 'football' was a pretty rough pastime and a man of Michael's size would have been at a distinct disadvantage. Had they existed, the laws of the game would have read something like this: rule one - there are no rules. Bone-crunching tackles were literally that, and there were no referees, blind, biased or otherwise, to offer protection.

In 1602, Sir Richard Carew described the Cornish hurling game, a forerunner of today's field sports, thus:

Luckily for Michael, matters would change. The course of the Victorian period saw a drive towards a more civilised and controlled society. In sport this manifested itself by a desire for rules and regulations, changing the emphasis from manly physical pursuits to moral and spiritual exercises with disciplinary value and a spirit of fair play.

Leading English football players, 1881  © It was a process that was largely driven by the Industrial Revolution. Industry began to dominate the economy and workers moved from field to factory and developed a new-found desire for material wealth. This gave their middle class employers greater control and the chance to dictate how employees should live their lives. A campaign was mounted against violent sports like football which left men injured and unable to work, while working hours were increased to levels previously deemed unacceptable leaving fewer opportunities to play.

A game of two halves

A game of rugby, 1897  © But things were different in one area of society. In the public schools the aristocratic pupils held sway over their middle class teachers, and were free to play as they pleased. Nevertheless, parents were becoming concerned about the treatment of youngsters who, under the prefect-fagging system, were put in goal and suffered the brunt of the violence. Schools had to take action or face the prospect of parents taking their children elsewhere.

Thomas Arnold, headmaster at Rugby school, wanted his pupils to grow up into moral Christian gentlemen. He therefore moderated the prefect-fagging system and advocated regulated sports which provided exercise and encouraged healthy competition. By 1845, the pupils at Rugby felt it necessary for the first time to write down the rules of football at their school to establish exactly what constituted fair play. In the Rugby version, handling the ball was allowed, but, in 1849, pupils at Eton created a rival game. It may well have been an attempt to outdo the 'upstarts' at Rugby, but football Eton-style greatly restricted the use of the hands.

The pupils took their games with them to university, the only problem being that everyone played different versions. A need for a common set of rules arose and at Cambridge University four attempts were made in the 1840s and 1850s. Eventually, in 1863, they decided on a set of rules in which handling the ball was outlawed.

At the end of that year, players from around the country came together to form the Football Association and the Cambridge rules were adopted. It didn't suit everybody, and the representative from the Blackheath club withdrew because he favoured the Rugby style of game. He also advocated a type of tackle that they called 'hacking' - these days we would probably call it GBH.

Laying down the law

So the modern games of football and rugby were born (although rugby would divide again into league and union games) and these sports were portrayed as healthy rather than destructive. Of course legend has it that rugby was invented in a moment of inspiration by one of the pupils at Rugby. A plaque on the school grounds reads:

Sadly the evidence to support the myth is harder to find - still it's a nice story.

The formation of the FA was a symptom of the desire for order prevalent at the time. Other sports soon followed suit - the Amateur Athletic Club was formed in 1866, the Rugby Football Union in 1871, and the Lawn Tennis Association in 1888. There was evidently a social aspect to these organisations (most were formed in pubs), but they enabled the establishment of rules and the arrangement of competitions. The first ever FA Cup followed in 1872. The Rev RWS Vidal, known as the 'Prince of Dribblers', lived up to his name and set up MP Betts to score the only goal as the Wanderers beat the Royal Engineers.

Mixed doubles on a Victorian lawn, c.1878  © In tennis the cart came before the horse, with the first Wimbledon championships being held in 1877, 11 years before the launch of the LTA. The game's birth can be traced back to 1858 when Major Henry Gem marked out the first court on a lawn in Edgbaston. But it was Major Walter Wingfield who developed the modern game of tennis. Helped by the invention of a rubber ball which would bounce on grass, he patented a game he catchily called 'Sphairistike' which used a 'New and improved court for playing the ancient game of tennis'. Wingfield sold sets of his game for five guineas - they included balls, four racquets and netting to mark out the hourglass shaped court. Not surprisingly 'Sphairistike' did not stick, and the name lawn tennis was adopted.

At that stage croquet that was all the rage, but that was soon to change. We know it by a different name now, but in 1875 The All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon chose to adopt tennis, and a tournament for all-comers was organised two years later to raise funds. Twenty-two players paid £1.05 for the privilege of entering, and Spencer Gore went down in the history books as the first Wimbledon champion, although he later confessed that he thought tennis would never catch on. He was very quickly proved wrong.

Ashes to ashes

The British cricketer W G Grace, 1898.  © Many other great contests were born in the Victorian era. Cricket's rules had been laid down as early as 1744, but in 1861 an English touring team travelled down under for the first time. Seven years later a team of Aborigines toured England, although the first official Test match was not until 1877 when Australia beat England in Melbourne. An inauspicious start, but worse was to come. When Australia won a Test in England for the first time in 1882, The Sporting Times published the famous obituary:

The 'body' is reputed to be one of the bails, and England and Australia have played for the Ashes ever since.

Like cricket, golf's rules were first laid down in the 18th century, but it is the Victorians we have to thank for the Open Championship which was first played in 1861. Prior to that, there had been separate competitions for amateurs and pros as professionalism did not fit with sport's new image. The Marylebone Cricket Club hired professionals for the menial tasks of bowling and fielding so the 'gentlemen' could practise their batting. This distinction between amateur batsmen and professional bowlers led to the annual matches between Gentlemen and Players. These ran from 1806 right up to 1962 and the two sets of players used different facilities and were not expected to meet other than on the field of play.

But spectator interest in sport was growing, helped by improvements in transport, and entrepreneurs cottoned on to the fact that there was money to be made. Football was a particular money-spinner and clubs vied for the top players. While the ex-public schoolboys of the FA found the notion of the professional footballer ungentlemanly, they gave in to the threat of a block withdrawal from the FA Cup by a group of teams from the North and the Midlands. In 1885 professionalism was legalised and three years later a league was formed.

Word gets around

A golf match on Blackheath in 1870.  © Not happy with just laying down the rules in their own country, British settlers spread the gospel wherever they went. Even today, many Argentine and Brazilian football sides betray their roots with English names. Closer to home, Italian clubs such as AC Milan and Juventus, who got their famous playing strip from Notts County, also have English connections.

But it was not just football that the English migrants took with them. Rugby and cricket would flourish in Australia and New Zealand, while India and Pakistan took cricket to their hearts.

And so sport entered the 20th century with a new image. The Victorians had cleaned it up and repackaged it as a moral, exciting spiritual activity, rather than a rough pursuit dependent on physical prowess. Tennis and golf would go from strength to strength, while athletics would flourish, particularly with the establishment of the Olympic movement.

The factory owners, who once did all they could to prevent their workers playing sports like football, now changed their views as sport was more likely to keep their employees healthy. In fact many employers encouraged the formation of works teams to try to foster feelings of solidarity among the workforce. Dial Square, formed by workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich in 1886, went on to become Arsenal FC; West Ham was formed by the workforce at Thames Iron Works in 1895; while Newton Heath, a club founded by workers from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, went on to become known by a slightly more familiar name - nowadays we call them Manchester United.

Find out more

Books

The Folk Origins of Modern Soccer by Eric Dunning (C.R.S.S./Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1994)

Notes on the Early Development of Soccer by Eric Dunning (C.R.S.S./Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1994)

Industrialisation and Popular Sport in England in the Nineteenth Century by Wray Vamplew (C.R.S.S./Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1994)

The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Tennis by John Parsons (Carlton/Hodder and Stoughton, 1998)

Professionalism and Amateurism in Modern Cricket by Keith Sandiford (C.R.S.S./Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1994)

The Daily Telegraph Football Chronicle by Norman Barrett (Carlton/Ebury Press, 1996)

About the author

Alex Perry is a senior broadcast journalist at ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport Online. He has previously written for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Match of the Day magazine and, as a freelancer, for numerous other publications. He maintains a keen interest in the history of sport.