When the game is decided by snotches seven or nine are the game, and these if the parties be well matched take two or three hours to win. Sometimes a large football was used; the game was then called 'kicking camp'; and if played with the shoes on 'savage camp.'

These extracts show that in the original game of Rugby football, the football itself was hardly essential to the game. The original game from which both Rugby and Association football have been developed, as well as hockey and lacrosse, 1 was simply the getting of a ball to or through a goal in spite of the efforts of the opposite side to prevent it. When a small and hard ball was used kicking was naturally but little good, and either carrying, tossing, or striking it with a stick, was found more useful; and hence we observe that this variety of games arises from the same source, which was the same as the Roman game with the harpastum. This consideration also serves, in some measure, to answer the charge which used so frequently to be made against Rugby football in the days of big-sides, that it was not football at all, as there was so little kicking. The game was an old one handed down for centuries, and there is no trace in the original form of it to suggest that nothing but kicking was allowed.

The game in which kicking and nothing but kicking was allowed was a subsequent development about which we shall speak later, and, doubtless, the name of 'football' is more suitable to that game than to the other.

The foregoing descriptions of hurling' and 'camp-ball' also explain the meaning of the extract so frequently quoted from the 'Statistical Account of Scotland'; it is given by Hone, and was always considered mysterious by footballers. This is the well-known account of the game of football at Scone, in Perthshire, where no person was allowed to kick the ball. The game was the same as that known as ' hurling' in Cornwall, as 'camp-ball' in the eastern counties, and football elsewhere. The ball was 'thrown up' at the market cross at Scone, and 'he who at any time got the ball into his hands ran with it till overtaken by one of the opposite party, and then if he could shake himself loose from those of the opposite party who seized him, he ran on: if not he threw the ball from him, unless it was wrested from him by the other party, but no person was allowed to kick it.' 'The game was an annual one between the bachelors and the married men, and the object of the married men was to hang it, that is to put it three times into a small hole in the moor which was the 'dool' or limit on the one hand; that of the bachelors was to drown it, or dip it three times in a deep place in the river, the limit on the other; the party who could effect either of these objects won the game; if neither won the ball was cut into equal parts at sunset.

In the course of the day there was usually some violence between the parties; but it is a proverb in this part of the country that, 'All is fair in the ball at Scone.' The origin of the Scone game, like the origin of the annual game at Chester, Derby, Kingston, Corfe Castle, and elsewhere, is shrouded in obscurity, and is attributed to a victory gained by a parishioner of Scone over a foreigner in ancient times. What is curious about the Scone game is that every man in the parish was compelled to turn out and play, so that the 'compulsory football' of some schools seems to be only a modern revival. The same book also gives an account of another Shrove Tuesday match between the spinsters and married women of Inverness, in which the married women always won. This seems curious unless, as Addison says of the athletic maidens who performed in his time at country fairs, the women won their husbands on the football field; this might account for their always beating the spinsters, as the married women would be those who had earned their partners by success in games of football, and every year their ranks would be recruited by the best spinster players. However, to return to our history. There is no doubt that hurling, football, and camp-ball were in their origin the same.

The name hurling was eventually adopted for a kind of hockey played with sticks, called hurlets. Camp-ball has perished in name, just as stool-ball is dead or dying, to be recalled, however, by the stumps of cricket which originally represented the legs of the stool at which the ball was thrown: and pall-mall is also gone, leaving as its legacy the green cloth of the billiard table which represents the smooth green on which pall-mall was played. Now that the original game of 'hurling,' 'camp-ball,' or 'football' has produced three such excellent and entirely distinct games as hockey, Rugby Union football, and Association football, it is only natural that it should itself pass away; but as a matter of fact, it still survives in one or two out-of-the-way corners of England, as we shall point out afterwards.

To return to the history of football. As far as can be gathered from extracts, taken in their chronological order, it appears certain that the triumph of Puritanism considerably reduced the popularity of football. The political ascendency of this ascetic creed was short, but the hold that it took upon the manners and feelings of the nation not only put a stop in a great measure to Sunday football, but rendered the game less acceptable upon other days. We have seen that up to the age of the Puritans football was a national sport. From the time of the Restoration and onward for 200 years or thereabouts, until the athletic revival came in, there was a slow but steady decrease in the popularity of the game as a sport for men, although there is also no doubt that during the period football became a regular and customary school sport. Still, from the slight number of references made to football by eighteenth-century writers, it would appear evident that in that century the game was no longer of national popularity.