CONSIDERED A CRIME

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 119, 15 November 1929, Page 3

CONSIDERED A CRIME

PLAYING OF FOOTBAH, , LAW OF 500 YEAfcS AGO America is still much younger than England was-in 1314. ' Yet, although several centuries of civilisation had then been known.- in the ' island,,-the authorities in that year were busy trying to enforce a sort of prohibition. They never succeeded very wellj -for a few hundred years later they .v/ere still issuing proclamations. on the- subject. Finally \they gave it- up,' ana the time came when all Englishmen cheered the remark of the Duke ofWellington that Waterloo was woe- on the playing field of Eton. ; It was football ' which England for so many centuries . sought to prohibit, and, .if American liquor laws seem particularly humorous " to them now, the " American-Historical Review" publishes facts which may •rye to remind the British now serious- ' ly their ancestors regarded what now is an approved and established form*of play (says the New York "Times;" in an editorial). . , -, -„,.:'■■: IN THE TWENTIETH CENTTJBY. The information' is • distributed' at • a time of year whan, each Saturday, rgreat throngs in America fill the college amphitheatres. . As now played in. the United States, football is rather adifferent game from Rugby, and entirely unlike the "football" against which' the Mayors and Sheriffs of. London were inveighing from the fourteenth century. onward. That, under the name of Soccer or "old Gaelic," continues to be played, but the football game wherein the ball'is carried part .of the time by the players is most widespread. . Yet the devotees of all forms of the sport will recognise as cvfinitely ancestral Barclay's lines, written in 1514: -•'"''. -. Each one contendeth and hath a great delite With foote and hande the.bladder for to smite; If it fall to grounde they lifte it up again, This wise to labour they count it for no patne; Kenning and leaping they drive away the colde. For several hundred years before this poem was written,. England and Scotland regarded, football much as certain of our big business men regard liquor—as a menace to the-industry and defence of the nation. In those days Government had to have plenty of bowmen, but many who should-have been, practising at archery were busy on the ball-fields.. ...... > THE MAYOE'S PROCLAMATION. Nicholas de Farndon, Lord Mayor, of London, was so disturbed1 over this light-mindedness shown while Edward 11. was busy fighting the Scots/that he issued a proclamation:.threatening imprisonment to those who played at football. Under Edward HL the matter became a moral issue and the clergy were directed l>y the Synod of Ely to desist. "The realm is'like to be without archers, ' ' laments the BishopSecretary. Henry V., more direct than, most, ordered his subjects to practice the bow immediately.and provided gaol' sentences for football players; and Canon William de Spalding, happening to kill a friend in the game, was granted a specific dispensation by • Pope John XXIX, not so much for the accidental killing as because it had hap-, pened during a game of the banned sport. .