The Emergence of Football: Sport, Culture and Society in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Peter Swain's monograph The Emergence of Football: Sport, Culture and Society in the Nineteenth Century makes an important contribution to one of the major ongoing debates within the historiography of soccer. This centers on the significance afforded to the public schools and their former pupils in the codification of the game, its spread, and the extent to which forms of folk football had died out by the 1830s. The book is structured around ten chapters. Following the introduction, chapter 1 examines the earliest evidence for football in Britain. Swain carefully chronicles its presence from (possibly) the twelfth century onward, mainly through evidence of government legislation and rulers’ attempts to curtail its existence, owing to its sometimes violent nature.This is a solid opening before the author goes on to discuss the historiography of the Industrial Revolution in chapter 2. Having provided new evidence for the presence of camping or “camp-ball” until its demise in the 1830s, the author then moves on to challenge the view posited by Graham Curry and Eric Dunning that there was “a cultural marginalization of folk football” during the period from 1780 to 1850, in which a “civilizing spurt” occurred whereby people became less inclined to participate in or view violence.In chapter 4, Swain draws largely on the work of fellow “revisionist” Adrian Harvey and, at times, challenges his opinions on the state of folk football in the nineteenth century. Swain then provides evidence in chapter 5 of how folk football continued in forty-two areas in England and Scotland, arguing that “the so-called ‘civilising spurt’ had bypassed vast areas, if not all, of the country and that, after 1830, mass, folk and traditional forms of football were certainly not ‘dead’ as claimed by many ‘dominant paradigm’ historians.” In chapter 6, Swain provides more evidence for forms of football outside the public schools, although as he admits, the origins of the game were complicated, and some forms gave way to religious interference and other “immense economic, social and cultural pressures, particularly with regard to Parliamentary enclosures and migration, and collapsed under the pressure” (124–25).In chapters 7 and 8, he specifically addresses the idea that the playing of football went into decline “in the wider community between 1830 and 1860” by providing more evidence to the contrary. For example, Swain has unearthed reports of a ten-a-side match between the parishes of Ruskington and Walcot in 1831, while it was also played in Sheffield, London, and Bedford that year (135). Chapter 8 is the shortest chapter, but at the end, Swain references an array of examples he has found in the newspapers covering the 1840s until the 1850s, highlighting, as he states, “that the game was extant all across the country outside the public schools” (166). His references include reports from the army, religious meetings, the workplace, school outings and festivals, clubs, and other forms of associational culture.The final two chapters focus on the formation of the English Football Association in 1863 and the development of clubs in Sheffield, Lancashire, and elsewhere. In chapter 9, Swain stresses that a strong culture of football in Sheffield “prevented the FA from disbanding in 1867” and that this area had a much stronger influence on the rules of the game than has been acknowledged elsewhere (186). The growth of professionalism within football in Lancashire was aided by an existing culture of commercialized sport and the influence of the lower middle class. In the final chapter, Swain reaffirms his belief in the importance of these men, rather than the educational elite, in helping to get the FA off the ground as the organization was “saved from oblivion by Sheffield and then recast into the professional game by the lower middle and working classes, particularly in the cotton towns of south-east Lancashire, drawing on their own footballing cultural heritage” (232).Generally, the overall structure of the book's chapters might have been improved as the author varies between the use of subheadings (some chapters have none) and more structured sections. Chapters 5, 6, 9, and 10 each have a conclusion, while the others do not, and the book lacks an overall conclusion at its end. More maps would also have been welcome given the rich geographical detail throughout. In producing such a passionate work, Swain has certainly made his mark on the historiography of the origins of association football, with his highly detailed research adding greatly to the study of regional areas and to what we know about how the world's most popular sport initially developed.