The Records of Early Football series highlights types of evidence and sources central to the study of medieval and early modern football, as compiled in the REF database. This post spotlights court depositions (legal witness statements).

During Easter celebrations in 1598, the villagers of North Moreton, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) gathered to watch and play football in the close of William Leaver, a wealthy yeoman farmer and high constable of the hundred. Multiple matches were ‘made and played’ on the day, including a particularly consequential one ‘between six persons’. Simon Watts, a husbandman from nearby Sandford, Oxfordshire and servant to a local gentleman, was present that day as a player and spectator:

…he and some others went to play at football in a close…. and after [he] had there played awhile he left off and then a new match was made and played in the said close between William Field, John Field, Robert Field, Richard Gregory, John Leaver and a boy of one Sydbury’s and in that play the said Richard Gregory stroke the said John Field with his fist at two several times and at the last time John Field with his fist stroke Richard Gregory again (at which time one Brian Gunter, William Gunter and this defendant and John Gregory and diverse other persons were looking on the said play). John Field and Richard Gregory then buffeting one another, William Gunter went to them to part them and thereupon a quarrel began and blows were given between William Gunter and John and Richard Gregory. And then Brian Gunter seeing that affray drew his poniard [dagger] and coming to the Gregories did therewith strike and wound them both a little on the heads that the blood followed in some small measure...¹

While this ‘small measure’ of bloodshed ended the fight, both of the young Gregory brothers would die some weeks later, allegedly from the head wounds sustained. The incident sparked a long-running family feud between the Gunters and the Gregories, which crackled on through a rising conflagration of assaults, witchcraft accusations, litigation, and ultimately an intervention from King James I himself. Historian Jim Sharpe masterfully reconstructed this sordid tale in his microhistory The Bewitching of Ann Gunter, which I highly recommend.² But here I want to focus on the football match which started it all. The testimonies of Simon Watts and many other witnesses come from a 1601 case before the notorious Star Chamber Court in Whitehall.³ The evidence demonstrates how rich court depositions can be as a source for early football, challenging some preconceptions about the premodern game.

The Star Chamber case was launched against Brian Gunter and his men by various well-heeled yeomen of North Moreton, including the owner of the close where the football had taken place. The Gunters exerted considerable influence in the village, being the only gentry family. But the senior Brian was clearly an unpopular figure. The bill against him and his household alleged much lawbreaking and violence (not just the football incident). Simon Watts was one of Gunter’s servants and fellow defendants. His testimony was hardly impartial, but a wide array of witnesses corroborate the basic details of the event. Taken together, we can reconstruct a day of play in an Elizabethan village, gaining some insight into the two main questions of football history: how was the sport organized and played; how was it viewed and valued within society?

To take game play and organization first (see slide above), the North Moreton matches do not conform to the typical popular and scholarly image of premodern football as a mob game: ‘played by variable, formally unrestricted numbers of people sometimes in excess of 1000’, with ‘no equalisation of numbers’, ranging ‘over open countryside and through streets of towns’, exhibiting a ‘loose distinction between players and spectators…and an unusually high level of violence’.⁴ Mass games like this were certainly played during the Tudor period. For example, in March 1576 some 100 people assembled to play football in the rural parish of Ruislip, Middlesex, a game which eventually gave rise to ‘a great affray’. And mass games are also the main form of traditional football that survives today, in festive fixtures like the Easter Tuesday ‘ba game’ at Workington, Cumbria (pictured below).

Yet North Moreton’s Easter football in 1598 did not look like this.⁵ At least one of the games featured very small sides: just three matched against three. There was an element of formality in delineating these teams, seen in the distinction between ‘making a match’ and the playing of it. There were far more spectators than players and the lines between these two were quite clear. Simon Watts had played in a match earlier in the day, but stood ‘looking on’ for the second one. When the spectators closed in, it was not to participate in an ad hoc way, but to break up a fight. The game was not played across country or through streets, but within the relatively defined space of a local close – by definition a smaller piece of land often enclosed or fenced. Within this close, the game must have been fairly spaced out, considering the small numbers involved. But the players also must have regularly come together for close contact, since Richard Gregory struck John Field twice before the fight even began. Gameplay may have looked something like the contemporary woodcut pictured below, showing six ‘country swains’ at football.

Over the last few decades, football historians have increasingly recognized that games of small and even sides existed alongside mass games, long before the codifications of the nineteenth century.⁶ London schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster advocated for this type of football play as early as 1581, while schools and colleges in Aberdeen were putting it into practice in the early 1600s. Significantly, the North Moreton evidence shows that this type of football also existed outside elite and educated circles, among rural farmers. It is also of note that, though the Fields, Gregories and Leavers were not necessarily highly educated or of gentle status, they did come from the most powerful families in the village. Looking at the background of the players and spectators can tell us something about football’s place in this agrarian society.

Football was technically an ‘unlawful game’ in Tudor England – the Ruislip players of 1576, for example, were indicted for the offense. Despite this, the local oligarchy of North Moreton clearly embraced the sport. Play took place in the close of a high constable; this was a significant legal office (usually held by lower gentry or prosperous yeomen) with criminal and administrative jurisdiction over a subdivision of the county called the hundred. Moreover, the list of spectators included a veritable who’s who of the parish – wealthy and elder yeomen and husbandmen who periodically held local offices (see slide below). Our list of those present on the day is undoubtedly biased towards the upper crust of village men: they would have been favoured as witnesses in the Star Chamber case. But those of more humble status were probably there too, to judge from the attendance of poorer husbandmen and servants like Simon Watts and John Taylor. It may be significant that Simon played a separate match to the one between the higher status yeomanry. Perhaps these matches were a reflection (and reinforcement) of local social hierarchies.

Such interest across the social ranks shows how deeply embedded football was within village life. Moreover, it suggests a respectability to this sport, rather at odds with the view of contemporary intelligentsia. Most of them saw football as a brutal and dangerous pretext for settling scores, and engendering bad blood. In 1583, Puritan writer Phillip Stubbes derided it as ‘more a friendly kind of fight, than a play or recreation, a bloody and murdering practice, than a fellowly sport or pastime’. The North Moreton football would seem a case in point, until we look a bit closer.

There’s little evidence that the three-a-side match was an outlet for any pre-existing factionalism or enmity among the players and wider community. Or that such factionalism led to the fight. In fact, the depositions show the Field, Gregory, Leaver, and Sydbury families making common cause against the Gunters’ various indiscretions over the following years. Rough football play certainly led to the fisticuffs between John Field and Richard Gregory, but a multitude of witnesses saw William Gunter and others trying to break up or part the ‘buffeting’ players, rather than escalate things. According to John Taylor, the fighting was actually successfully quelled. But John Gregory objected to how William Gunter had handled his brother Richard, so they ‘fell to words and then to blows’. It’s this secondary fight that carried fatal consequences.

Rather than craving bloodshed, the players and spectators were seemingly trying to avoid it, trying to get the game back on track. Premodern football was obviously a violent sport: it was a close contact struggle to possess and advance a ball, prone to serious injury, flared tempers, pride and passion. But the same could be said for modern football codes. Bruising contact remains central in American and rugby football, while factional fighting has notoriously devolved to the hooligans and ultras in association football. The narrative that premodern football exhibited an ‘unusually high level of violence’ which the leisured classes then needed to reform during the 1800s to make our modern ‘civilized’ codes is a tidy story. Perhaps it is a comforting tale of progress to some. But using the past as a foil for the present does not make for good history.

As the rich incidental and contextual detail in this Star Chamber case hopefully makes clear, legal depositions can be an ideal source for premodern football history – something of a gold standard. Newspapers and antiquarian accounts may surpass them in detail, but those sources are invariably written from an outside perspective, usually elite and/or educated. And of course, newsprint only survives in numbers from the eighteenth century onward. What makes depositions particularly special is how they open windows onto the perspectives and experiences of ordinary people. We don’t have to simply take the hostile word of Stubbes or an indictment for granted: deponents can tell us (directly or indirectly) how and why they played football.

But just like any source, depositions have their own problems and limitations. For one, depositional references to football are exceedingly rare, though they can be found across the medieval and early modern periods. More problematic is the issue of reliability. Like today, legal witnesses such as Simon Watts were rarely impartial or infallible: they often had skin in the game and certainly had malleable memories. Testimonies could often contradict one another, and they were all mediated by convention, the legal process, and scribal language. How do we know the words on the manuscript reflect reality?

One approach is to compare and corroborate evidence across other sources, and the depositions of other plaintiffs, defendants and more impartial witnesses. You can then pair this with a degree of reasonable inference: Simon Watts would likely try to downplay any violence and injury, and portray himself, William Gunter, and others in his party as being concerned with keeping the peace, rather than causing a ruckus. But even witnesses who were no friend to the Gunters largely backed up Watts’ account. Moreover, he had far less reason to lie about the general organization of the football play, our main topic of interest. Beyond these techniques, we can use depositions as records of the plausible if not the definitively true. As Laura Gowing, historian of early modern gender and work, eloquently explains:

Fictions woven for court cases tend to reveal fantasies that had real power over people’s minds, and the power of the plausible means that fictionalised, exaggerated versions can be as useful to historians as strict truths. Alongside the key contested events, most testimonies include significant extraneous detail that reveals who was doing what, where and when. From the answers witnesses gave to leading questions, a landscape of daily life can be reconstituted alongside an attention to the fantasies and fictions people wove around their daily lives.⁷

Depositions from this Star Chamber case thus show early modern football as not merely a ‘bloody, murdering practice’, but a sport deeply inscribed into the ‘landscape of daily life’ in an Elizabethan village.

1. The National Archives (TNA), STAC 5/L30/23, Deposition of Simon Watts. ↩︎
2. James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A horrible and true story of deception,
   witchcraft, murder, and the King of England, (New York, 1999), chapter 2. ↩︎
3. TNA, STAC 5/L3/19, L30/23, L31/124, L35/5. ↩︎
4. John Goulstone, ‘Football’s Secret History – chapters 2 and 3’, Soccer & Society (2017), p. 2 quoting and critiquing E. Dunning, J. A. Maguire and R. E. Pearton, The Sports Process; A Comparative and Developmental Approach (1993). ↩︎
5. Sharpe dates the football play to May 1598, based on the death of the Gregories in May and a note in the burial register saying the injuries were sustained a fortnight prior. However, this register note was added later at an unknown date. The Star Chamber material consistently dates the football to ‘at/in or about the feast of Easter’ (16 April that year). Such dating could be vague and approximate but May Day would have been a more typical marker for something which occurred in early May. Regardless, this small-sided type of football was plausible enough as an Eastertide occurence not to raise any objections from deponents. ↩︎
6. Goulstone’s Football’s Secret History (2001) was a pioneering work in this regard. ↩︎
7. Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2021), p. 6. ↩︎