English Public Schools and the Game
Despite the embryonic versions of the modern game of soccer that took place contemporaneously amongst the mass of brutal, mob-based, versions, it wasn’t until the 19th century that a set of rules was actually enforced on football. For this innovation, we have the elite schools of England to thank. From the late 16th century onwards, English Public Schools (called private schools in the rest of the world) began to notice the passion and occasional skill required to play football successfully, and saw an opportunity to form the characters of the boys they were tasked with educating at great expense.
The pioneer of this civilizing of football was Richard Mulcaster (c.1531-1611), a former student at Eton College who served as a headmaster at Merchant Taylors’ School and St Paul’s School. He differentiated football from other ball-games involving arms and hands, organized boys into teams, and made them play according to rules. In his 1581 Positions Wherein Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie for the Training up of Children, Mulcaster argued passionately for the educational value and physical and mental benefits of playing the game, and sport is still a vital part of private education in England today.
Mulcaster’s game involving kicking the ball was far from the only iteration of football taking place at public schools. Other schools had their own variations, which bore a closer resemblance to medieval football in permitting players to use their hands. This eventually led to a schism when the rules of football were written down in Eton, Aldenham, and others, over which limbs were permissible in the game. The game of Rugby, named after the school, was allegedly invented when William Webb Ellis picked up a football during a Mulcaster-esque game and ran towards the opposition goal in 1823.
Although the benefits of physical activity for children cannot be debated, the importance of football for character development took a ridiculous twist in the Victorian period. The Victorians are often lampooned for their publicly anti-sex stance, and one of the great fears of the period was the problem of masturbation. The Reverend Edward Thring, the eminent and powerful headmaster of Uppingham School, believed he had come up with a solution to the onanism epidemic facing Victorian Britain. He identified masturbation as symptomatic of weakness, and argued that the best way to stop boys ‘self-polluting’ was to toughen them up through football.