The Early Modern Period
The (lack of) rules of football changed little in the Early Modern Period. Alexander Barclay‘s poem from 1510 describes the game as played in his native South East England: ‘they get the bladder and blowe it great and thin, with many beanes and peason put within, It ratleth, shineth and soundeth clere and fayre, While it is throwen and caste up in the eyre, Eche one contendeth and hath a great delite, with foote and hande the bladder for to smite, if it fall to the ground they lifte it up again… [they] Overcometh the winter with driving the foote-ball’.
Others were decidedly unimpressed with the game. In 1531, Thomas Elyot had the following to say about football: ‘foote balle, wherin is nothinge but beastly furie and extreme violence; wherof procedeth hurte, and consequently rancour and malice do remaine with them that be wounded’. Despite its continuing thuggishness, it seems to have found royal patronage, as Henry VIII, in slimmer days, had a pair of leather shoes for playing football made in 1526, the earliest reference to football boots (cleats). The oldest football in existence, a pig’s bladder encased in leather from Stirling Castle, Scotland, survives from this period.
However, it is in the Early Modern Period that an alternative to so-called mob football is recorded, and the first instance since the days of Cuju of something resembling modern soccer. In a late 15th-century text on the miracles of Henry VI of England, a game is described taking place in Cawston, Nottinghamshire: ‘young men, in country sport, propel a huge ball not by throwing it into the air but by striking it and rolling it along the ground, and that not with their hands but with their feet… kicking in opposite directions’, on a pitch with marked boundaries.
References to similarly primitive versions of modern soccer continue through the Early Modern Period, and an interesting variant was simultaneously taking place in Italy. Calcio Fiorentino (‘Florentine Football’, depicted above) was played from the late 15th century on piazzas covered with sand. Each team had 27 players, and the aim was to score more goals than the opposition using any part of the body. Although there was a referee, violence was very much a part of the game. Since there was only one goal and four goalkeepers at each end of the pitch, it was first necessary to incapacitate the opposition.
Once enough opposition players had been beaten or pinned to the ground, goals could be scored, with the teams switching ends after each. Despite the necessity of street-brawling, no substitutions were allowed. Mercifully, the games only lasted 50 minutes. As well as being played, surprisingly, exclusively by aristocrats, Calcio Fiorentino also began the peculiar relationship between popes and football, as several Renaissance popes were known to have played, and a pitch was installed in Vatican City. In more recent times, John Paul II (1920-2005) was a fanatical soccer fan and a fantastic goalkeeper in his youth, regularly watching Cracovia Cracow.