Blood & Mud

The Entirely Serious History of Rugby, Part 2: Hacking and The Great Schism

In Part 1 of our series, we demonstrated that the commonly helf belief that William Webb Ellis invented the game of rugby can best be described in technical historical terms as bollocks; there were many forms of football around in 1823, of which the Rugby rules were but one and none of which were cast in stone.  However, the Rugby rules did develop into allowing the player to run with the ball in the 1840s and it was from this point on that Rugby Football begins to proliferate around the country.

The reasons for this are not exactly clear; but it is most likely to be a combination of the success of Rugby as a school at that time and the number of Old Rugbeians who were so enamoured with their sport they set up clubs once settled around the country.  The expanding rail network allowed clubs to travel to each other play matches, sing "Climbing Up the Sunshine Mountain", strip off, and steal tour pendants and other club memorabilia from the wall.  This led to a point in the 1860s where "Football" was being played all over the shop without a codified set of rules. 

In 1863, a new draft of rules devised by Cambridge University were published widely in the press, becoming known, amazingly, as the "Cambridge Rules".  This particular rule variation forbade players to run with the ball in hand and also did not allow them be hacked, tackled or held by opponents as they attempted this action. 

In the same year, the fledgling Football Association had drawn up draft rules that were subsequently presented at its inaugural meeting at The Queen's Tavern, London.  Along the lines of the Cambridge Rules, the FA were not at all happy with either running with the ball, hacking or holding and sought to expunge them from their rules.  This is mainly due to the fact that, even in 1863, footballers were big, soft, diving jessies; or as Francis Maule Campbell a member of the Blackheath Club argued at the time, "to eliminate hacking would do away with all the courage and pluck from the game," and, hammering home the point by slandering a nation, "I will be bound over to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice". Good work Francis!

And so it was that in December 1863 Blackheath and numerous other clubs decided to ratify the creation of the FA, before immediately sticking two-fingers up at it by not affiliating due to the pansy-arse rules of what was to become known as Association Football (hence the abbreviation "soccer").  These stroppy clubs carried on playing the Rugby game, thus creating the Great Schism that led to the existence of two markedly different football games.

Next time: The formation of the RFU, many of whose founders are still on the board today.

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The Entirely Serious History of Rugby, Part 2: Hacking and The Great Schism

In Part 1 of our series, we demonstrated that the commonly helf belief that William Webb Ellis invented the game of rugby can best be described in technical historical terms as bollocks; there were many forms of football around in 1823, of which the Rugby rules were but one and none of which were cast in stone.  However, the Rugby rules did develop into allowing the player to run with the ball in the 1840s and it was from this point on that Rugby Football begins to proliferate around the country.

The reasons for this are not exactly clear; but it is most likely to be a combination of the success of Rugby as a school at that time and the number of Old Rugbeians who were so enamoured with their sport they set up clubs once settled around the country.  The expanding rail network allowed clubs to travel to each other play matches, sing "Climbing Up the Sunshine Mountain", strip off, and steal tour pendants and other club memorabilia from the wall.  This led to a point in the 1860s where "Football" was being played all over the shop without a codified set of rules.