The game of football is undoubtedly the oldest of all the English national sports. For at least six centuries the people have loved the rush and struggle of the rude and manly game, and kings with their edicts, divines with their sermons, scholars with their cultured scorn, and wits with their ridicule have failed to keep the people away from the pastime they enjoyed. Cricket may at times have excited greater interest amongst the leisured classes; boat-races may have drawn larger crowds of spectators from distant places; but football, which flourished for centuries before the arts of boating or cricketing were known, may fairly claim to be not only the oldest and the most characteristic, but the most essentially popular sport of England. Football has now developed into a variety of highly organised games, and the difficulty of finding its actual origin is as great as that of discovering the commencement of athletic contests. If men have run races ever since the creation, it may almost be said that they have played at ball since the same date.

Of all the games of ball in which Englishmen are naturally so proficient the original requisites were simply a ball and a club; from the simple use of the ball alone came the 'caitch,' fives or hand-ball and football, and when to these requisites a club is added we find all the elements for tennis, cricket, hockey, golf, croquet, and the like. As balls and clubs are provided with the slightest exercise of skill and trouble from the resources of nature, we may be certain upon abstract reasoning that ball-play became popular as soon as the aboriginal man had time and leisure to amuse himself.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the Greeks and Romans both played at ball; even as early as the days of the Odyssey we find Nausicaa and her maidens playing at the caitch,' as King James I. would have termed it. What is perhaps of more importance is that the Greeks had a game in which the kind of ball known as the was employed, and this game bore a rough resemblance to football in England. The players of one side had to carry the ball over a line defended by the other, by any means in their power. Thewas, as its name betokens, a small ball. The Romans, however, had another pastime with a large inflated ball, the follis; with which, as many of our readers will recollect, Martial the epigrammatist advises all to play.

Folle decet pueros ludere, folle senes.

The follis, however, was undoubtedly a handball, and the game was probably the same as the 'balown ball' of the middle ages, which consisted in simply striking into the air and 'keeping up' a large windy ball, a sport which is still to be seen exhibited with great skill in Paris. All this, however, has little concern with football, except that it is pretty clear that the 'follis' or 'baloon ball' was the same that is used in the game of football, and it is a matter of some importance to discover whether football is merely a game brought by Roman civilisation into Britain, or a native product. It is hardly to be believed that it should never have occurred to a man playing with the 'follis,' to kick it with his foot when his arms were tired, but be that as it may, we know of no mention of a game played by the Romans where the feet were used to kick the ball, and of the game known from the middle ages to the present time as football no trace can be found in any country but our own.

Before we come to a definite record relating to football, it may perhaps be worth while to point out that the legends connected with football at some of its chief centres point to its immense antiquity. At Chester, where hundreds of years ago the people played on the Roodee on Shrove Tuesday, the contemporary chroniclers state that the first ball used was the head of a Dane who had been captured and slain and whose head was kicked about for sport. At Derby, where (also on Shrove Tuesday) the celebrated match of which we shall have to speak later on was played for centuries, there was a legend (as stated in Glover's ' History of Derby ') that the game was a memorial of a victory over the Romans in the third century. The free quarrymen of the Isle of Purbeck commemorate the original grant of their rights at a time beyond that within legal memory by kicking a football over the ground they claim. These and other signs, apart from any written record, would be sufficient to show the antiquity of the sport.

FitzStephen, who wrote in the twelfth century, and to whom we have referred in the former part of this work, makes an allusion to a game which there is very little doubt must be football. He says that the boys 'annually upon Shrove Tuesday go into the fields and play at the well-known game of ball' (ludum pilae celebrem). The words are of course vague, but they undoubtedly refer to one special game and not to general playing with balls, and no other game of ball is ever known to have been specially connected with Shrove Tuesday, which there is abundant material to show was afterwards the great 'football day' in England for centuries.

There is also ample proof of the fondness of the London boys and 'prentices for football in succeeding centuries, which makes the inference irresistible that by 'Indian piles celebrem,' the writer refers to football. It is also noticeable that Fitz-Stephen probably refrains from describing the game because it was too well known throughout the country to require a description.

By the reign of Edward II. we find not only that football was popular in London, but that so many people joined in the game when it was being played in the streets that peaceable merchants had to request the king to put down its practice. Accordingly, in 1314, Edward II., on April 13, issued a proclamation forbidding the game as leading to a breach of the peace: 'Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls (rageries de grosses pelotes) . . . from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.' We believe the expression ' rageries de grosses pelotes ' has puzzled many antiquarians, possibly because they were not football players, but a footballer can hardly help surmising that 'rageries' means'scrummages,' and 'grosses pelotes' footballs. As football acquired royal animadversion as early as 1314, it would seem that the early footballers played no less vigorously, if with less courtesy,, than the players of the present day.