lady, under whose auspices it was played on a lawn at the late Lord Lonsdale's seat in Ireland. Four years afterwards a well-known purveyor of pastime requisites saw the game in the sister isle, and began to manufacture croquet implements in England. Almost at once the game began a new lease of wonderful popularity, but now it seems as if it were destined to obey that law in the life of most contrivances, and drop into disuse just as it has attained perfection.

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CHAPTER VIII.

OLD FOOTBALL GOSSIP.

Thir ar the bewteis of the fute ball.

Poem in the Maitland MSS.

It is within comparatively recent times that football ceased to be a rude and lawless pastime of the people of this country. When put down by the force of public opinion, on account of the dangers attending its pursuit as then played on certain. long-established football saturnalia, the game was kept alive. almost entirely at the public schools for the thirty years before the great athletic revival that followed the Volunteer movement in 1860. Football as played at Rugby was likest the old rough game; how it was and is played we all know from "Tom Brown." At other schools, as Harrow, kicking the ball only was allowed, and from these two great types the game, under the fostering care of the Union and the Association, became the scientific winter sport so popular just now under its two different phases. This later aspect of football, however, lies outside the special purpose of this chapter, which is to gather together some of the many notable incidents in the long career of the old football—the rough, unscientific game of our ancestors for many centuries on both sides of the Border.

Indeed, except in name, the new and the old games have little in common. The roughest "Rugby game" of to-day is mild and harmless when compared with the contests of two or three hundred years ago, when parish fought parish, or all the men of one county kicked their hardest to defeat a neighbour

ing shire. In its primitive form the game was merely a trial of speed, strength, and endurance; there were no rules and little science. Naturally, therefore, when the player could use any means to bring victory to his side, a premium was put upon violence, and the roughness of the game soon greatly increased. The heroes of the field became those who could plunge into the struggling mass of players, grappling right and left, and giving at least as good as they got in "hacks" on the shins, or more direct blows that laid opposing players sprawling on their backs, with a strong probability of serious damage to limb or even to life. Victory in such a struggle was to be looked for more from the reckless use of muscular strength than from agility or skill; so violent, indeed, did many of the matches become, that at a very early period attempts were made to put them down by authority as a public nuisance. "From this Court," writes James I. to his eldest son, "I debarre all rough and violent exercises, as the football, meeter for lameing than making able the users thereof." The author of the following quatrain in the Maitland MSS. grimly recites the beauties of the game in much the same strain :

Brissit brawnis and brokin banis;

Stryf, discorde, and waistie wanis ; [dwellings]
Cruikit in eld, syn halt withall;

Thir ar the bewteis of the fute ball,

while in later days we find Bishop Butler, when head-master of Shrewsbury, though he was himself an old Rugbeian, forbidding football in the earlier years of his reign in the western school, and denouncing it as "only fit for butcher boys."

It is difficult to determine when football originated among us, though it is clear we owe its introduction to the Romans. The Greeks had a game called “episkuros," which is described in "Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities" as "the game of football, played in much the same way as with us, by a great number of persons divided into two parties opposed to one another." A

น

similar ball game seems to have been played by the Romans, though it is rather uncertain under what name, and from them the old Britons picked up the pastime. Fitz Stephen alludes to it, about 1175, among the pastimes of the youth of London in the time of Henry II., when on Shrove Tuesday all the lads went out to the fields of the suburbs, after dinner, to play. The first actual mention of the game as football-pila pedina -occurs in the proclamation of Edward III., in 1365, when that king found it necessary to put down our game and several others, because they interfered with the all-important practice of archery among his subjects. Eighty years afterwards the Scottish king had, for the same reason, to pass the first of a series of Acts against this and other "unprofitabill sportis"; but as he and his followers, keen players all, paid little attention to their own edicts, the game naturally continued quite as popular as ever. Thus, to give one instance, we find the High Treasurer of James IV., in 1497, a few years after Parliament passed one of those Acts, paying two shillings "to Jame Dog to buy fut balles to the king" while at Stirling, in April. In the next reign it was a popular game with all classes in Scotland. That type of the knighthood of his time, Squire Meldrum, of Sir David Lindsay's poem, was a proficient in the game :

He won the prize above them all,
Both at the butts and the foot ball,

the Lord Lyon tells us, while the same poet, in a

Flash of that satiric rage,

Which, bursting on the early stage,
Branded the vices of the age

And broke the keys of Rome,

makes a priest boast that, though he does not preach,

I wot there is not one among you all
Mair ferylie can play at the foot ball.

Barclay, the priest of St. Mary Ottery, in Devon, who adapted

Brandt's "Ship of Fools," has left us in his "Eclogues" a lively picture of football in a rural district in 1514 :—

And now in the winter, when men kill the fat swine,
They get the bladder and blow it great and thin,

With many beans or peason put within,

It rattleth, soundeth, and shineth clear and fair,
While it is thrown and cast up in the air,
Each one contendeth and hath a great delight
With foot and with hand the bladder for to smite :
If it fall to ground they lift it up again,
This wise to labour they count it for no pain,
Running and leaping they drive away the cold :
The sturdy ploughmen, lusty, strong, and bold,
Overcometh the winter with driving the football,
Forgetting labour and many a grievous fall.

And from many other sources we can gather that the game enjoyed a fair share of popularity for many ages.

Shrove Tuesday was the great day in the year for football matches in all parts of the kingdom. A great many of these contests were held in the streets of towns, when windows had to be barricaded, women kept indoors, and the place given over for the day to a contest that too often ended in fights and broken bones. Strutt quotes a Chester antiquary, who says that "it had been the custom, time out of mind, for the shoemakers yearly on the Shrove Tuesday to deliver to the drapers, in the presence of the Mayor of Chester, at the cross on the Rodehee, one ball of leather called a football, of the value of three shillings and fourpence, or above, to play at from thence to the Common Hall of the said city; which practice was productive of much inconvenience, and therefore this year (1540), by consent of the parties concerned, the ball was changed into six glayves of silver of the like value, as a prize for the best runner that day upon the aforesaid Rodehee."

Perhaps in no place was this Shrovetide sport pursued with greater energy than at Scone, in Perthshire. The sides consisted of the married and single men of the neighbourhood,