There can be no doubt that from the earliest days football was an obstreperous and disreputable member of the family of British Sports, and indeed almost an 'habitual criminal' in its character, a fact to which we owe most of the earliest references to the game, as many of these records refer to little else but crimes and grievances. In 1349 football is mentioned by its present name in a statute of Edward III., who objected to the game not so much for itself, but as tending to discourage the practice of shooting, upon which the military strength of England largely depended. The King writing in that year to the Sheriffs of London, says that 'the skill at shooting with arrows was almost totally laid aside for the purpose of various useless and unlawful games,' and the Sheriffs are thereupon commanded to suppress 'such idle practices.' The injunction can hardly have been of much avail, however, for forty years afterwards Richard II. passed a similar statute (12 Rich. II. c. 6. a.d. 1389) forbidding throughout the kingdom 'all playing at tennise, football, and other games called corts, dice, casting of the stone, kailes, and other such importune games.' The same statute had to be re-enacted by Henry IV. in 1401, so that it is tolerably obvious that, like some other statutes still in force and relating to sporting matters, it was more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Football was evidently too strong for the House of Lancaster, and all attempts to coerce the merry Englishman into giving it up were hopeless failures. Similar measures in Scotland in the next century altogether failed to persuade the Scottish sportsmen to give up football and golf. In 1457 James III. decreed that four times every year reviews and displays of weapons were to be held, and 'footballe and golfe be utterly cryed down and not to be used;' but as in 1491 his successor had again to prohibit golf and football by a fresh statute providing that 'in na place of this realme ther be used futeball, golfe, or other sik unprofitable sportes,' it appears that in Scotland as well as in England football was strong enough to defy the law. In the sixteenth century the House of Tudor again tried to do what the House of Lancaster had failed in doing, and Henry VIII. not only re-enacted the old statute against cards, dice, and other 'importune games,' but rendered it a penal offence by statute for anybody to keep a house or ground devoted to these sporting purposes. The English people, however, both in town and country would have their football, and throughout the sixteenth century football was as popular a pastime amongst the lower orders as it has ever been before or since.

The game was fiercely attacked, as some of the succeeding extracts will show, and the same extracts will suggest that the nature of the game played at that period rendered the attacks not altogether unreasonable. In 1508, Barclay in his fifth eclogue affords evidence that football was as popular in the country as in the town. Says Barclay The sturdie plowman, lustie, strong, and bold, Overcometh the winter with driving the foote-ball, Forgetting labour and many a grievous fall.

Not long after this, Sir Thomas Elyot in his 'Boke, called the Governour,' inveighs against football, as being unfit for gentlemen owing to the violence with which it was played. Sir Thomas, however, had a courtly hatred of anything energetic: he prefers archery to tennis;'boulynge,' 'claishe' and 'pinnes' (skittles), and 'koyting' he calls 'furious,' and the following remarks therefore about skittles, quoits and football, are only such as one would expect. 'Verilie,' he says, 'as for two the laste' (i.e.'pinnes' and 'koyting') 'be to be utterly abjected of all noble men in like wise foote-balle wherein is nothing but beastlie furie and exstreme violence whereof procedeth hurte, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded, wherfore it is to be put in perpetual silence.' Doubtless 'hurte procedeth' from football upon occasions, but if there had been 'nothing in' football but beastly fury, it would hardly have held its own so bravely to the present time. Sir Thomas Elyot had some foundation for his strictures, as the coroner's records of the day show; but before we proceed to give these, we should describe in some sort the nature of the game as it was played in the sixteenth century.

There is no trace in ancient times of anything like the modern 'Association game,' where the players only kick the ball and may not strike it with their hands, throw it or run with it. Probably the name 'football' was first used to describe the ball itself, and meant a ball which was big enough to be kicked and could be kicked with the foot. The game of football was the game played with this kind of ball, and it was simple to an extreme degree. The goals were two bushes, posts, houses, or any objects fixed upon at any distance apart from a few score yards to a few miles. The ball was placed mid-way between the two goals at starting, the players (of any number) divided into two sides, and it was the business of either side to get the ball by force or strategy up to or through the goal of the opposite side. When confined to a street, or field of play, it is obvious that the sport was the original form of what is now known as the Rugby Union game. At the times before any settled rules of play were known, and before football had been civilised, the game must of necessity have been a very rough one, and an unfriendly critic may well have thought that the ball had very little to do with the game, just as the proverbial Frenchman is unable to see what the fox has to do with fox-hunting. Undoubtedly the game of football was until quite recent times a vulgar and unfashionable sport, as indeed were cricket, boat-racing, and most other athletic pastimes.

For many centuries in England any pedestrian sport which was not immediately connected with knightly skill was considered unworthy of a gentleman of equestrian rank, and this will account in a great measure for the adverse criticisms of football which proceed from writers of aristocratic position.