Easter Football 1598: Surprising Details from some Star Chamber Depositions

Posted on April 22, 2026 by merryshrovetide

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.

The National Archives (TNA), STAC 5/L30/23, Deposition of Simon Watts. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
TNA, STAC 5/L3/19, L30/23, L31/124, L35/5. ↩︎
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). ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Goulstone’s Football’s Secret History (2001) was a pioneering work in this regard. ↩︎
Laura Gowing, Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2021), p. 6. ↩︎

The Oldest Firm: Institutional Football in Medieval Scotland

Posted on March 12, 2026 by merryshrovetide

It’s a historic time for Scottish football: the men’s national team has qualified for the World Cup, ending a near three-decade drought. And there’s a distinct possibility a club outside the ‘Old Firm‘ could win the top Scottish League for the first time since 1985. The erstwhile dominance of Celtic and Rangers has me wondering: what is the oldest ‘firm’ in the history of Scottish football? I don’t mean this in the modern sense of oldest surviving or earliest documented football club. Rather, what is the oldest evidence we have of Scottish organizations or institutions supporting football in a sustained way, and how did they do so?¹

The answer takes us back to medieval or pre-Reformation Scotland, and specifically the 1530s, when Perth’s trade incorporations (i.e. guilds), and St Andrews’ city government and university were all sponsoring football in some sense. I’ve written at length about the Perth guilds in my thesis, so this essay will focus on institutional patronage in St Andrews. It’s a good opportunity to consider how premodern football was organized and played, and its complicated relationship with authority.

Annotated map 'Scotia Regnum' c. 1595 by Gerhard Mercator, highlighting Perth and St Andrews as the first known locations of institutional football in Scotland, c. 1530s. — Annotation of map ‘Scotia Regnum’ c. 1595 by Gerhard Mercator, highlighting Perth and St Andrews as the first known locations of institutional football in Scotland. Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY

Football in Medieval Scotland and St Andrews

Football – as a broad family of games where a ball is contested via foot and/or hands and usually advanced to goals – has deep roots in Scotland. Unfortunately, the country’s relatively sparse medieval records make it difficult to assess just how deep, or to illuminate the early game’s nature. Our oldest Scottish references date to the fifteenth century, when official prohibitions suggest that football was already popular among the rural populace and university students. As the slide below shows, the crown, Parliament and other authorities didn’t much approve of the sport.

Powerpoint slide detailing various parliamentary acts and university statutes from Scotland concerning the prohibition of football and other sports from the 1400s and early 1500s.

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, St Andrews University and its constituent faculties and colleges deemed the game ‘dishonest and dangerous’, threatening to expel or excommunicate students who played. But considering this hostility, it’s perplexing to find the bursar of the university’s Arts Faculty purchasing footballs: for 6 pence and 8 pence Scots in 1535 and 1537 respectively (roughly equal to a building labourer’s day wage at the time). An entry in the Faculty’s act book dated to 19 February 1537 sheds further light on the curious sponsorship (translated from the original Latin on the slide below). It records the minutes of a faculty congregation which discussed, among other things, disorder caused by football play the week prior on Shrove Tuesday, the pre-Lent Carnival (known as Fastern’s E’en in Lowland Scotland). By digging into the dense and sometimes confusing details of this act, the bursar’s payments, and some other comparative and contextual evidence, we can piece together the story of Scotland’s oldest firm.²

Powerpoint slide on the institutional patronage of football in St Andrews, featuring a quote in translation from the University's Faculty of Arts acts dated to February 1537. It demonstrates that the Faculty and the burgh government sponsored football on Shrove Tuesday, and that the Faculty planned to withhold this support in future due to the disorder caused by the sport.

Let’s summarize what we know. During the 1530s and presumably earlier, the provost (mayor) of St Andrews – or the city bailies (bailiffs) on his behalf – customarily provided one football each to the three main colleges of the university on Shrove Tuesday for play in the fields outside the city. For some undeclared reason, in 1537 (and based on the bursar’s accounts presumably 1535 too) the Faculty of Arts’ Dean (instead of the burgh provost) furnished the football for one of the colleges called the Pedagogy. But then on the day of play, the Faculty’s Beadle (a type of officer) ended up confiscating that same ball, causing a ‘great schism’ in the fields. Prompted by this particular disorder, and the ‘many ills’ the football had engendered in the past, the Faculty decided to withdraw their tacit or direct support for the tradition: Arts students should no longer receive a ball from the burgh hereafter.

St Andrews and Shrovetide Sport

To make sense of all this, we need to start with the institutions involved. The provost and his two baillies were the elected leaders of the burgh council. This was the city government made up of select burgesses/freemen (merchants and craftsmen who were members of the city’s ‘freedom’ with its special economic and political privileges). The colleges in question were St Leonard and St Salvatore, and the Pedagogy – a quasi-college run by the Faculty of Arts. Like at Oxford or Cambridge today, these colleges were semi-autonomous educational institutions responsible for the housing and teaching of students. Teachers, curricula and exams were organized under faculties, with Arts being the lowest and largest, acting as a prerequisite for the three higher faculties of Medicine, Law and Theology. Faculties and colleges all came under the unifying authority of ‘the University of St Andrews’ which had been incorporated under a foundational charter from the pope in 1413. The sixteenth-century map below summarizes when and where the institutional players in this football drama emerged over the course of the university’s first century.³

Annotated map of sixteenth-century St Andrews 'S. Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana' c.1580 by John Geddy, highlighting key institutions and locations for patronage of Shrove Tuesday football in 1530s. — Annotation of sixteenth-century map of St Andrews ‘S. Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana’ c.1580 by John Geddy, highlighting key institutions and locations for patronage of Shrove Tuesday football in 1530s. Map reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. CC-BY

We can deduce that the Shrove Tuesday football tradition changed over the years, merely by looking at when the colleges had been founded. St Leonard’s had only come into existence about two decades prior to the 1537 incident. Before this time, the burgh presumably only had two footballs on its Shrovetide gift list. Or perhaps the whole tradition was a quite recent innovation. For several reasons, however, I think the custom stretched back into the fifteenth century, and was simply adapted as the university grew and changed.

For one, Shrovetide sports are documented at the university from its earliest years. In 1415 the Faculty of Arts allowed the grammar schoolboys their old customary privilege of Shrovetide cockfighting, as long as these bloodsports were restricted to three days, rather than three weeks (!). No mention is made of football then, but cockfighting, football and Shrovetide were a package deal in many medieval communities. In twelfth-century London, scholars held cockfights on Shrove Tuesday morning, and played a ball game in the afternoon, while the great and good of the city looked on with approval. Likewise in the fifteenth-century Norman town of Abbeville, the schoolboy who won the Shrovetide cockfight helped the mayor preside over the ball game.⁴ It’s therefore quite possible that students and the burgh council were already involved with football back when the university was founded.

Certainly, by the end of the century, football was popular enough to prompt university, faculty and college bans. But where would that leave any established Shrovetide matches? While football was technically an unlawful game, many authorities in medieval and early modern Britain made an exception on Shrove Tuesday and other important festivals. South of the border, for example, Durham priory regularly banned football among its tenants during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet in 1492 the prior explicitly allowed certain villages to play the game on two days of the year: Plough Monday and Shrove Tuesday.⁵

Reasons for Institutional Support of Football

Why would those in power make such exceptions? Tolerating or even sponsoring football on established occasions could give officials a degree of control over a rowdy game – a chance to channel students’ festive energies into approved and supervised outlets. But as I’ve written elsewhere, institutional interest in football often went beyond a desire for social control. This was especially true for civic institutions, like the burgh government of St Andrews. Many urban craftsmen and tradesmen in medieval and early modern Britain were deeply invested in football, whether as players or patrons. Some within this burgeoning middling sort found great value in the sport, despite its illegal stature and violent nature. It could be a marker of a freeman’s status – both a privilege and obligation – to facilitate football, and thereby provide entertainment and ‘manly exercise’ for the ‘commonwealth’. We see the currency of football as a common good and right of the people of St Andrews in a 1553 contract between the burgh council and the Archbishop. It allowed the Archbishop a rabbit warren in the common links (pictured below), but reserved to the community ‘all manner of right and possession’ on the commons, including ‘playing at golf, football, shooting at game, with all manner of other pastimes as ever they please’.⁶

St Andrews Old Course. Once the common links of the city used for resources, and recreations like football as well as golf. It is likely where the Shrove Tuesday football took place in the medieval burgh. Image credit: UK Golf Guy.

Freemen who did not uphold football could be punished severely, like the maltman from Rutherglen (near Glasgow) who had his goods seized in 1626 because he didn’t join the rest of the burgesses on the town green for the annual Fastern’s Eve match. There’s a seriousness about football here that I think modern fans would recognize, although you won’t get fined for missing the derby these days! And I think this seriousness is key to understanding the 1530s incident. When the provost stopped giving a football to the Pedagogy, he seems to have continued giving ones to the two rival colleges. I suspect the Arts Faculty stepped in to make sure their associated college received proper due as befitted its equal status and privileges, something all three colleges guarded fiercely. Moreover, receiving the provost’s football gifts and participating in the Shrovetide sport likely reaffirmed symbolically the city and university’s important (yet sometimes fraught) relationship. The Faculty may not have approved of football themselves, but exclusion from a longstanding and laudable Shrovetide custom would be a dishonour on many counts. This prompts the question: why did the burgh slight the Pedagogy by withholding their ball, and why did the Dean’s substitute ball end up causing controversy? Context is key here.

Since its founding in the early fifteenth century, the Pedagogy had been chronically underfunded. Periodic attempts over the century to re-found it as a proper college with adequate endowment and buildings had failed. After 1533, the Pedagogy and its buildings were in such decay that student enrollment plummeted. While St Salvator’s and St Leonard’s were graduating around thirteen students a year, the Pedagogy could claim zero. Something was finally done in February 1538, one year after the Faculty pulled out of the Shrovetide football. The Pedagogy was re-founded as the properly endowed St Mary’s College.⁷ With this context in mind, I hypothesize that the burgh stopped giving the Pedagogy a customary ball once it became clear there was no coherent student body to accept it; the Faculty tried to save face for a few years by purchasing their own balls before withdrawing support for the custom entirely. This theory tracks with the Arts bursar’s accounts, which span before and after the 1530s, but only show football purchases in 1535 and 1537.

St Mary’s College, St Andrews. Built on the location of the old Pedagogy in the sixteenth century. Image Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ID PGA-6-10 © The University of St Andrews

Football Play and Profitability

We don’t get any specific details on how the St Andrews football games were played, but we can speculate based on the ball distribution, location, and comparative examples. Historians have assumed the game was either intercollegiate or between city and university. These are reasonable assumptions. We can find examples of town vs gown Shrovetide matches in early modern Cambridge and Oxford. In the late fifteenth century, rivalry between the Pedagogy and St Salvator’s led to bloodshed, while about a century later St Leonard’s and St Salvator’s students were ordered to take recreation in different fields to avoid conflict.⁸ However, based on the fact that each college received their own ball, it seems more likely to me that the games were intra-collegiate: students played their own college peers. We find this structure later in the century at Cambridge, where football was allowed but only within colleges, never between them.⁹ Similarly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the University of Aberdeen’s Marischal College propagated weekly football matches within the college student body. Students were further divided based on their year, and there were complicated rules for how new balls should be supplied when the ones in play inevitably burst (see slide below).

Slide with some examples of institutional support from schools universities and burgh governments for football after the Scottish Reformation. It details regulations from Marischal College (Aberdeen) in 1605 and mentions of David Wedderburn's educational contributions to the sport in the 1630s. The text also details burgh corporations like Glasgow and Rutherglen providing footballs and promoting the game during the late 1500s and 1600s.

It’s often assumed that premodern football was a bloody free-for-all with uneven throngs of players, indeterminate boundaries, and no rules. But not only could this cross-country style of play exhibit sophisticated tactics and rules in its own right, it was also not the sport’s only form.¹⁰ From post-Reformation Scotland we can also find examples of small and even-sided games, defined playing areas and goals, passing and goal keeping. Play at the Aberdeen schools and colleges had some of these features, and if the St Andrews Shrovetide football was intra-collegiate and confined to the links it may have looked similar. Certainly, university officials (normally hostile to football) were more likely to tolerate play of this more structured form.

On the other hand, it is possible there was just one free-for-all game where the balls were tossed up in turn. This was how the civic-sponsored Shrove Tuesday game worked in Chester during the 1530s.¹¹ Plus, the Faculty act technically refers to a ‘game’ in the singular (ludo) which followed the receiving of the balls, though this could also be translated as the more ambiguous word ‘play’. Perhaps the provost even gave out additional balls to other civic institutions (beyond the colleges) which went unmentioned in the Faculty records. Later in the century, for example, the Glasgow burgh council annually bought six footballs for their town’s own Fastern’s Eve festivities, though no rhyme or reason was ever given for such a specific number (see slide above). But again, I think the events narrated in the Faculty’s act support the intra-collegiate hypothesis. If the Pedagogy’s ball was just one of a series to be played by everyone in the fields, it’s not clear why it specifically should prompt disorder and confiscation. There was obviously something controversial about who should possess this particular ball. I suspect that without a substantial Pedagogy student body to play with the Dean’s football, students from the other colleges tried to claim it for themselves. When the Arts Beadle intervened, the students were not pleased.

The Faculty of Arts used this incident as pretext for withdrawing support from the Shrovetide game, at least ‘so far as concerned it’. This wording speaks to the Faculty’s limited jurisdiction in the matter. Although the congregation couched the decision as in the best interests of the whole university, the Faculty only held power over its own students and the Pedagogy. They could not stop the burgh from offering the footballs, nor the other colleges from accepting them. This makes it even more likely the single game referred to in the act was the Pedagogy’s game, something the Faculty had some say in, rather than a general free-for-all. It’s also a reminder that Shrovetide football may have continued in St Andrews long after the Faculty signaled its disapproval. If the 1553 contract concerning access to the common links (mentioned above) is anything to go on, the burgh council remained sympathetic to football for some time, as did many civic institutions in Scotland.

Slide summarizing conflicting views on the social value of football in medieval and early modern Scotland, featuring points from various sources including quotes from Parliament acts and notable figures, discussing football's dangers and unprofitable nature on one hand, and benefits as a manly exercise on the other.

The burgh and university’s differing attitudes towards football point to an ongoing and underlying ideological debate about the premodern sport’s social value (see slide above): was it a manly exercise of good fellowship and community worthy of patronage, or an unprofitable waste of time, health and property to be prohibited? This St Andrews case shows how complicated this sort of cost-benefit analysis could get. When the Faculty’s ledger finally swung fully to ‘unprofitable’, it cited the ‘many ills’ and disorder football brought to the university. But it was perhaps just as much (or more) about avoiding further embarrassment over the derelict state of their Pedagogy and its lack of students. After all, the Faculty had only just gone out of their way to keep the Pedagogy involved in the custom. Clearly, football held a value that was difficult to quantify or ignore, something which prompted educational and civic institutions throughout premodern Scotland to invest.

As we know, universities and cities (schoolboys and workers) would continue to shape the development of Scottish football into the modern era. The story of the ‘oldest firm’ shows just how deep that heritage goes. And for just how long Scottish football has been ‘more than a game’.

This question formed part of a talk I gave for the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in November 2024. The slides in this post are from that talk. For football in medieval and early modern Perth, see pp. 120-125 of my thesis. ↩︎
The bursar payments are in St Andrews Special Collections, UYUY412 Faculty of Arts. Bursars book, 1456-1853, fols. 27v, 28v. The faculty act is printed in A. I. Dunlop, ed. Acta Facultatis atrium Universitatis Sanctiandree 1413 – 1588, 2 vols. (Scottish History Society, 1964), vol. 2 pp. 380-381. For digitization of the original manuscript see SASC, UY411/1 Acta facultatis arterium. 1413-1728, fol. 166v. From 1534-7, day wages for building labourers in Linlithgow, Falkland and Edinburgh averaged 8-10 pence. See A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout. Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (CUP, 1994), p. 313. ↩︎
Roger A. Mason, ‘University, City and Society’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), pp. 268–297. ↩︎
On Shrovetide sports in St Andrews see David Ditchburn, ‘Religion, Ritual and the Rhythm of the Year in Later Medieval St Andrews’, in K. Stevenson and M. Brown (eds.) Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Boydell & Brewer, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, 2017), p. 105. For Shrovetide cockfighting and football in Britain see chapters 1 and 2 of my thesis. The Abbeville reference is to the football-like ball game of ‘cholle’ or soule. See John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions, 2 vols. ed. Henry Ellis (1811 edition), vol 1, p. 66. ↩︎
Durham University Special Collections, DCD-Halm.Rolls, 1492 Spring, Billingham and Cowpen Bewley. ↩︎
Norman Reid, ‘Five Centuries of Dispute: The Common Land of St Andrews’, Scottish Archives 21 (2015), p. 31. ↩︎
Mason, pp. 288-296. ↩︎
Ronald Gordon Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (3rd edition, 1992), pp. 32,37. St. Leonard’s students were ordered to take recreation in St Nicholas fields, outside the city near their college, while St Salvator’s students were to go to the old links, near their college. ↩︎
I hope to write soon on college football in Tudor and Stuart Cambridge. ↩︎
On the sophisticated tactics of traditional cross-country football games see Hugh Hornby, Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008). ↩︎
See chapter 2 of my thesis for details on the Chester game. ↩︎

Carnival Countdown: Season of Love, Lust & Marriage

Posted on February 7, 2018 by merryshrovetide

The next day being Shroue-tuesday, a day of pleasure, and jollitie by custome, but farre more delightfull by reason of this magnificent mariage, which moued many occasions of mirth in his Highnes court…

The mariage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, vpon Shrouesunday last (1613)

Princess Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V, Elector Palatine married on 14th February 1613 (pictured above), staging their diplomatic pairing during the communal celebrations of St Valentine’s Day and Shrovetide. The choice of occasion was strategic, but also rooted in tradition, as Shrovetide and the ‘coupling month’ of February were strongly associated with love and marriage.

Indeed, Shrovetide was perhaps the most popular festival for weddings during the early modern period. It was the last chance before Lent, when marriage was strictly forbidden, and the season’s competing themes of lust and chastity could be resolved in a ceremony of mutual love.

Technically, however, marriage was forbidden during Shrovetide as well. Without special ecclesiastical dispensation, weddings could not be celebrated from Septuagesima Sunday, the ninth Sunday before Easter, until eight days after Easter. This did not seem to stop the eager betrothed: statistical evidence from marriage registers shows that the Shrovetide ban was frequently ignored or circumvented, while the Lenten ban was closely observed. Princess Elizabeth Stuart’s grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, hosted court weddings during four out of the six Shrovetides of her short personal rule (1561-1567). A letter written by Sir W. Knox in 1685 likewise conveys the association with acerbic wit:

Thy dear Sister is to be Married on Shrove-Tuesday, and at Night to be laid upon her back as flat as a Pancake, and no doubt will give and receive a curious time on’t.

With births and weddings abounding, Valentines exchanged, and the Lenten ban on marriage and conjugal relations looming, fertility stood front and center during the Shrovetide season. But this went beyond simple association, or vague fertility rites. Many early moderns believed they could pair festive time and custom to actively influence their own lives. This verse from Poor Robin’s Almanac (1682), although comical in tone, illustrates the medicinal purposes to which Shrovetide foods were put to use:

The Month with Shrove-tide out doth go,
When as the Boys at Cocks do throw,
The Broth of whom (the flesh being boild)
For them can’t get their wives with Child,
Physicians say is very good
To raise new viogour in their blood,
And so by using of this trade
Keep them from being Cuckolds made

Read more on Shrovetide customs here, and stay tuned for more anecdotes of Mardi Gras history.

Carnival Countdown is a series of brief blog posts sharing stories from the medieval and early history of Carnival, as we count down the final days of the season.

Carnival Countdown: Shrove Tuesday Sports in 12th Century London

Posted on February 4, 2018 by merryshrovetide

Annually on the day which is called Shrove Tuesday [Carnivora]…after dinner, all the young men of the city [London] go out into the fields to play at the famous game of ball. The scholars belonging to the several schools have each their ball; and the city tradesmen, according to their respective crafts; have theirs. The more aged men, the fathers of the players, and the wealthy citizens, come on horseback to see the contests of the young men, with whom, after their manner, they participate, their natural heat seeming to be aroused by the sight of so much agility, and by their participation in the amusements of unrestrained youth…

William Fitzstephen, Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae (circa 1170-1182 AD). Tr. John Stow, The Survey of London ed. H. B. Wheatley (London, 1987), p. 507.

The above account, written by a twelfth-century London cleric and biographer of Thomas Becket, provides one of the earliest descriptions of Carnival celebration in Europe. Although the word football (in Latin pila pedali) is never used, scholars have long considered Fitzstephen’s ball game to be one of the first references to football in England. Perhaps the best evidence for this is that Shrovetide/Carnival was the primary festive season for football matches from the medieval period through the nineteenth century in communities of Britain, France and Italy.

Read more on Shrovetide sports and football here, and stay tuned for more anecdotes of Mardi Gras history.

Carnival Countdown is a series of brief blog posts sharing anecdotes from the medieval and early history of Carnival, as we count down the final days of the season.

Corner Craftsman

Historian Taylor Aucoin

Category Archives: Sport History