CONSIDERED A CRIME

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 November 1929, Page 4

CONSIDERED A CRIME

PLAYING OF FOOTBALL.

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 well, for a few hundred years later they were still issuing proclamations on the subject. Finally they gave it up, and the time came when all Englishmen cheer'ed the remark of the Duke of Wellington that Waterloo was won 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 just now, the ’.“American Historical Review” publishes facts which may serve to remind the British how seriously their ancestors regarded what now is an approved and established form of play (says the New York “Times,” in an editorial). . The information is distributed at a time of year when, each Saturday, great throngs in America fill the college amphitheatres. As now played in the United States, football is rather a different 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 infinitely ancestral Barclay’s lines, written in 1514: Each one contendeth and hath a gieac 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 paine; Renning 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 indus try 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. Nicholas de Farndon, Lord Mayor London, was so disturbed- 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 111. the matter became a moral issue and the clergy were directed, by the synod or Ely to desist. “The realm is like to be without archers,” lament the Bishop-Secretary. . 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 XXII., not so much for the accidental killing as because it had happened during a game of the banned sport.