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The Oldest Firm: Institutional Football in Medieval Scotland

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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’.

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. 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. ↩︎
  4. 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. ↩︎
  5. Durham University Special Collections, DCD-Halm.Rolls, 1492 Spring, Billingham and Cowpen Bewley. ↩︎
  6. Norman Reid, ‘Five Centuries of Dispute: The Common Land of St Andrews’, Scottish Archives 21 (2015), p. 31. ↩︎
  7. Mason, pp. 288-296. ↩︎
  8. 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. ↩︎
  9. I hope to write soon on college football in Tudor and Stuart Cambridge. ↩︎
  10. 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). ↩︎
  11. See chapter 2 of my thesis for details on the Chester game. ↩︎

The Autumnal Experience of Work in Early Modern England

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This post is part of a series marking the print and online Open Access (free) publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and myself (Taylor Aucoin). It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. This is a crosspost from Cambridge University Press’s blog Fifteen Eighty Four.

Autumn is most definitely here: leaves crunch underfoot; the air is crisp and cool; pumpkin and apple spices waft from the coffee shops. But while the season brings many changes, it does not alter work patterns dramatically for most modern people, though teachers might disagree. Of course, things were quite different in the agrarian society of early modern England, where the seasonality of labour loomed large. Our new Open Access book The Experience of Work in Early Modern England examines this subject of time-use, alongside many others central to social and economic history. The ‘Rhythms of Work’ chapter in particular asks how early modern worktime differed in its seasonal, weekly and daily experiences, and according to gender, occupation or employment status. This blog post offers a taste of the chapter and book (with just a hint of apple spice), as we take a brisk walk through the autumnal experience of early modern work.

Public Domain Image: Labors of the Months. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence. Image Description: Late 17th-century English needlework showing typical labours of the month. Focus shows a woman picking apples in October, and a woman spinning in November.

The book is the collaborative and co-authored fruit of over a decade of research, across multiple projects led by Jane Whittle at the University of Exeter. It is based on a dataset of nearly 10,000 ‘work tasks’ spanning northern, eastern and south-western England, 1500 to 1700. We have collected these incidental references to specific work activities (and any ancillary information) by reading tens of thousands of witness testimonies from England’s church, criminal and coroners’ courts. These depositions yield incredibly rich vignettes of everyday life; our book blends qualitative readings of these narratives, with quantitative analysis of the work tasks extracted from them. 

Almost exactly ten years ago, Mark Hailwood wrote a blog post exploring Autumnal Gatherers and Cider Makers, based on work tasks collected in the very early stages of our research. He raised questions about the gender division of fruit picking and cider production, and our project’s potential to shed new light on such subjects in the future. It seems fitting to return to this subject now. And appropriately, the ‘Rhythms of Work’ chapter opens with an anecdote about apples, cider and other autumnal labours in seventeenth-century Cheshire.

Margaret Johnson of Handley, the wife of a butcher named Ralph, had neighbours over for a drink in late September 1662, selling perry (pear cider) from her house. The sixteen-year-old servant Thomas Stockton out-drank his money, but paid back Margaret later on St Luke’s Day (18 October) with some apples and pears. Margaret accepted these, but ‘for fear of her husband’, had Thomas leave them in a shed instead of the house. As later revealed, Thomas had stolen the apples from his master (thus prompting the court case), though Margaret apparently did not know this when she received them. One week later, in the early hours of Saturday morning, she stored the fruit in the loft secretly while Ralph looked out the horses and cart. Together, husband and wife cut down and prepared their butcher’s meat, before transporting it to market day in distant Chester.

The episode is flush with time-use details, more than can be discussed here; it features early morning work in the dark or candlelight; workweek patterns pivoting around Saturday markets; people labouring on legal holidays. And it speaks to some of the work closely associated with autumn in early modern England and its gendered dimensions: fruit harvest; the storage and processing of produce and other foods (like meat); and commerce.  

Figure 1

* Harvest additions and monthly weights applied; Integral included; Female adjusted (x2.58). See Ch. 1 and Ch. 4 for adjustment details.

For the purposes of our seasonality analysis, the autumn quarter runs from October to December. But as Figure 1 shows, most of our apple and pear picking tasks occurred in August and September, trailing off in October. We don’t know if Margaret or Thomas Stockton were directly involved in such picking, but our data suggests a near fifty-fifty gender division in this type of labour. The tailor Thomas Clarke testified in 1681, for example, that ‘sometime since apples were growing upon the trees this year’ [in August], he, his wife and son had been ‘gathering of apples’ together in one Mr Master’s orchard in Cloford, Somerset, when they heard information pertinent to a matrimonial church court case. 

Once the fruit was in storage, it could be turned into cider. We recorded just four cider production tasks, all done by Devonshire men. But the qualitative richness of testimonies can help with quantitative limitations. Margaret’s involvement in cider production is never explicit, for instance, but it is heavily implied by the sale of perry from her house, combined with her acceptance and storage of apples. Keeping her husband in the dark, though perhaps tied to the apples’ suspicious origins, also suggests a degree of independence to her enterprise. Women’s connection to cider production comes through elsewhere in the dataset: nearly all buying, selling or serving of cider was done by women (89%), while women dominated the malting and brewing work category (80%).

Malting and beer brewing could take place throughout the year, but it had a definite autumnal flavour; tasks clustered between September and November. This was part of a shift in focus from the cultivation and harvesting of food in the summer half of the year, to its processing in the winter half. As Figure 2 shows, food processing rose to a crescendo in the autumn quarter, underpinned by brewing, threshing and winnowing, and corn milling, but also slaughtering. Butchery tasks were at their height in these three months (38%), and could in turn prompt a flurry of transport and commerce. Butcher William Cubbech, for instance, purchased a heifer in Setchey market, Norfolk in November 1674, before droving it home for slaughter and sale at Lynn market in December.

Figure 2

* 100 = monthly average. Harvest additions and monthly weights applied; commerce excludes integral tasks; food processing reflects raw numbers. See Figure 4.3. Female adjusted for food processing (x2.58), commerce (x2.36). See Ch. 1 and Ch. 4 for adjustment details.

As this episode hints, market activity reached its zenith in the autumn quarter, with a December peak for the buying and selling of most types of goods, and not just livestock.  Men and women, like Ralph and Margaret, shared fairly evenly in this commerce, though the former were more likely to contract the pricey livestock exchanges. Beyond commerce, women might generate income for the household through food and drink provision, as with Margaret’s perry party. Autumn ushered in a busy festive season for such social events; and commerce, food processing and provision all hinged around the frenzied Christmas season. One Cheshire miller summed up the mania in 1622, explaining that he never slept in his corn mill, except from ‘about a fortnight before Christmas because of that time there is much grinding’.

Grinding teeth might be more apt for modern Yuletide consumers, but the hectic holiday season sounds relatable nonetheless. With it, the early modern autumn came to a close. This season had much to keep people busy, in contrast to the old narrative of a lax and lazy cold half of the early modern economic year. And as our work-task approach illustrates, both men and women played crucial and overlapping roles therein.

In this way The Experience of Work seeks to capture the contributions of all workers and types of labour in early modern England, engaging with major debates about the preindustrial economy and shining new light on the contours of Tudor and Stuart working life.

A Green Ghost Story: Popular Verifications of the Supernatural in Early Modern Lancashire

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About the end of October 1662, Nathaniel Smith, a thrower (wood turner) from Hyde told a ghostly tale while staying in Henry Mather’s house in Openshaw, outside Manchester. The story soon landed him in hot water with the law for its ‘seditious & scandalous words’. According to Henry’s daughter, Sarah, Nathaniel claimed ‘the King [Charles II] should but reign three years & that he should Turn papist & be in danger to be murdered by one of his own house’. Yet as Nathaniel himself would depose, this prophecy was but part of a much stranger tale – one worthy of Halloween in its spooky subject matter.    

Depositions concerning the case were collected in early December 1662, in the house of esquire Nicholas Mosley of Ancoats. They were recorded in a notebook of judicial business related to Mosley’s duties as a justice of the peace (JP). Nicholas had inherited the book from his father, Oswald Mosley, and Nicholas’ grandson (another Oswald) would make use of it again in the 18th century.1 If the names of these JPs sound a bit familiar, it’s because they were the ancestors of notorious 20th-century fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. While the notebook doesn’t contain anything quite so scary as fascism, the supernatural does make several appearances.

Nathaniel Smith’s deposition provides the most vivid example, worth repeating in full. According to him, Sarah Mather’s testimony was missing a few essential details:

…he told the said Henry Mather that there was an house where an innkeeper had lately lived, taken by another to live in and a maid of the house went to sweep the room. There came up loose moulds & as she was sweeping a knife fell out of her bosom into the place where the said loose moulds appeared. She stooped to take up the knife and felt a stave. She thereupon pulled up the stave and stooped down again to see what was in the place, supposing their might be some money hid there. She found dead man’s bones at which she was afraid.

Thereupon there appeared unto her a spirit in green colour & said it had been killed about 13 years & said there was three persons that did murder him, whereupon 2 was dead & one woman was alive. The spirit bade the said maid go to a Justice of peace & to make it known. She said she was but a woman & the Justice would take no notice of it because she wanted evidence. But the said spirit bade her go & she should not want for evidence. So she went & informed the Justice who sent for the said woman & she confessed all that the spirit had told.

The said spirit further told her that the King had two of his own servants that should turn papist & betray him. But denies that he said the King should reign but 3 years & that he should turn papist & be in danger to be murdered by one of his own house.2   

There’s so much striking and entertaining about this little ghost story, it’s hard to know where to begin: the spirit’s verdant shade, the bones under the boards, maid and ghost working together to crack a 13-year-old cold case. But what I find especially funny is how the spirit, after giving detailed instructions on how to ‘aveeenge meee!’, dropped a seemingly unrelated and last second prophecy of national importance, just for good measure: ‘Thanks for your help. Oh and btw, the king shall be betrayed. OK bye!’.

The prophecy’s incongruity with the rest of the ghost story might make sense in the context of Smith’s indictment for seditious words, which forecasted the king’s conversion to Catholicism and death. Perhaps Smith fabricated the ghost story to put as much distance between himself and the seditious speech as possible. Not only was Sarah Mather mistaken about what Smith had said, it wasn’t even really him who’d said it. No, no, no. He’d heard it from a maid, who said she’d heard it from the spirit of a man dead 13 years.  Why should Smith be blamed?

Yet this interpretation seems a bit too cynical, and cannot really account for (what seems to me) the most interesting thing about Smith’s story: it’s more concerned with the validity and accuracy of the green spirit than anything else. Indeed, only the last two lines of the deposition address the very serious crime with which Smith was accused.

The interactions between the maid and the spirit centre on matters of proof and believability. She fears that no justice of the peace will listen to her – because she ‘wanted evidence’ and because gender and low status weaken her credit. But the ghost’s words are proven accurate twice over: first when the maid’s testimony successfully sparks an investigation, and second when the accused murderess confesses ‘all that the spirit had told’.

Ghost stories were popular subjects of printed pamphlets, like the one above, particularly during the second half of the 17th century.

In many respects, Smith’s tale reflects tropes common to the early modern ghost stories circulating in popular printed media of the time. Apparitions often came back from the dead to right wrongs, exact vengeance and offer prophesy; women were often key mediators and contacts. But the fixation on evidence was more typically a feature of learned writing on ghosts. During the 1600s, intellectuals (clergymen in particular) compiled examples of supernatural phenomena and ‘adopted experimental methods to prove the existence of spirits’. They did so to counteract a perceived erosion in supernatural belief and religiosity as ideas of natural and mechanical philosophy gained traction.3  

This is partly what makes Smith’s account so fascinating: Smith was a craftsman of rural and presumably humble origins. Yet in many ways his story reads like a ‘sensible proof of spirits’ found in the collections of contemporary intelligentsia.4

Nor is this the only example in Mosely’s justicing book of ordinary folk taking critical, empirical approaches to the supernatural.  

Sir Edward Mosley (a cousin of Nicholas) died at Hough End in late October 1665. Soon after, Mary Fletcher of Didsbury reportedly claimed that the knight ‘being then dead was come again & had ridden his old horse Jordy to the death’. Several depositions investigated the truth of this spectral rider, all of which hinged on the condition of Jordy the horse. Rebecca Chorlton, the wife of a husbandman from Withington, doubted Fletcher’s tale specifically because Jordy was not dead at the time of its telling. But another witness from the town, John Holt, claimed that Jordy was indeed dead by that time. Furthermore, he added that Lady Mosley (Edward’s widow) was ‘frighted with going into a chamber in Hough End Hall’, presumably because of the whole uncanny ordeal.5

Hough End Hall, Chorlton-cum-Hardy/Withington. Where a ghostly Sir Edward Mosley reportedly rode his faithful steed Jordy into the afterlife in October/November 1665.

Apart from the undead knight’s appalling disdain for animal welfare, this episode further underscores a couple of things about early modern belief in ghosts. It was not limited to ‘the folk’, nor was verification of supernatural experiences through logic and observation limited to elites. Reading thousands of quarter sessions depositions from collections throughout England has left me with similar impressions. Witches, cunning folk, spectres and devils haunt the pages of these testimonies, especially in northern counties like Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire.

Certainly, such records warrant further study, especially since much supernatural history has relied on elite perspectives.6 Although mediated by the judicial process, these depositions give unrivalled insight into deeply held folk beliefs.  Moreover, they can illuminate ordinary people’s attempts to interrogate those beliefs and vet their uncanny experiences. Layfolk’s aims and purposes in doing so were not the same as clergymen’s – they were not interested in supporting ‘the whole edifice of religion’ with their proofs.  Nonetheless, early modern men and women were invested in discerning the truth of spectral experiences, the reliability of prophecies, or the efficacy of cunning folks’ cures.

Will all this in mind, Smith’s story appears much more than an attempt to distance himself from seditious speech. Maybe he wished to show his words were not mere scandalous rumour. Nay, they were a fair and dutiful warning to the crown from a credible source – a supernatural source but one proven to be real and trustworthy.

And in the end, who are we to question the green spirit’s credentials? True, he was not right about Charles II’s fate. But maybe he was just a bit confused about what year and reign it was. Being dead for 13 years might do that to a person. Perhaps he meant Charles II’s brother and successor instead? After all, James VII and II did ‘reign but three years’; he did ‘turn papist’; and he was put in danger (and deposed) by ‘one of his own house’.

Spooky stuff indeed. 

  1. Manchester Central Library, GB127.MS f 347 96 M2. Part of the justicing notebook (covering the first seven years) has been published in Manchester Sessions. Notes of Proceedings before Oswald Mosley (1616-1630), Nicholas Mosley (1661-1672), and Sir Oswald Mosely (1731-1739) and Other Magistrates. Vol. I 1616-1622/3, ed. Ernest Axon, (The Record Society for the Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. XLII, 1901). The rest of the book has never been published. MCL holds the transcripts, which I have been working from here.      ↩︎
  2. MCL, GB127.MS f 347 96 M2, pp. 178-9.  I’ve modernised the spelling and added some punctuation for ease of reading. ↩︎
  3. Quote is from Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal, 63, 2 (2020), pp. 339-359, at p. 343. On ghost belief more broadly see also Owen Davies, The haunted: a social history of ghosts (Basingstoke, 2007). ↩︎
  4. For more on early modern elite interests in ‘proving’ supernatural phenomena, see Jo Bath and John Newton, ‘”Sensible proof of spirits”: ghost belief during the later seventeenth-century’, Folklore, 117 (2006), pp. 1-14; Michael Hunter, ‘The decline of magic: challenge and response in early Enlightenment England’, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 399-425. ↩︎
  5. MCL, GB127.MS f 347 96 M2, pp. 199-200. ↩︎
  6. Bath and Newton (2006), for example, ‘concentrate on elite attitudes to the phenomena…since it is largely through such sources that accounts of ghosts have filtered through to us’ (p. 2). They point to the potential of legal records as evidence of folk belief, but opine that ‘very little information on spectres has been found in the legal records so far’ (p.9). ↩︎

Coronations and the Festive Calendar in Medieval and Early Modern England

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In its artwork and design, the invitation to Charles III’s coronation on 6 May 2023 deliberately evokes the seasonal setting of the celebration. According to the official website of the royal family, the central motifs of flowers, foliage and Green Man are ‘symbolic of spring and rebirth, to celebrate the new reign’. Yet, while the occasion of modern coronations is an important factor in practical and symbolic terms, it was of central significance to medieval and early modern monarchs throughout Europe. We can see this from as early as Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 AD. But English kings and queens (and their advisors) were particularly keen to pair occasions of political priority with ones of liturgical and popular resonance.

The Coronation of Edward the Confessor on Easter Sunday 1043 (Chetham MS 6712 Flores Historiarum c. 1250)

The Liber Regalis, compiled in the late fourteenth century, specified that English monarchs must be crowned ‘always on a Sunday or some Holy-day’. Looking at the long-term history of the coronation ceremony suggests that this rule merely codified ancient custom. As the table below shows, from Edward the Confessor’s ceremony on Easter Sunday in 1043, through to Anne’s on St. George’s Day in 1702, forty-eight out of fifty coronations took place on a Sunday or Holy Day.

Table of English Coronation Dates. Sunday or Holy Days in bold. Coronations not following this tradition (2 total) are shown in blue. Dates collected from the ODNB.

MonarchConsortDateWeek DayFeast Day, Holy Day, Saint’s Day
Edward the Confessor3 April 1043SundayEaster
Harold Godwinson6 January 1066Epiphany
William I25 December 1066MondayChristmas
Matilda of Flanders11 May 1068SundayPentecost
William II26 September 1087Sunday
Henry I5 August 1100SundayOswald
Matilda of Scotland11 November 1100SundayMartin
Adeliza of Louvain25 January 1121TuesdayConversion of Paul
Stephen26 December 1135ThursdayStephen
Matilda of Boulogne22 March 1136SundayEaster
Henry IIEleanor of Aquitaine19 December 1154Sunday
Henry the Young King14 June 1170Sunday
Margaret of France27 August 1172Sunday
Richard I3 September 1189Sunday
Berengaria of Navarre12 May 1191Sunday
John27 May 1199ThursdayAscension
Isabella of Angoulême8 October 1200Sunday
Henry III (1st)28 October 1216FridaySimon and Jude
Henry III (2nd)17 May 1220SundayPentecost
Eleanor of Provence20 January 1236SundayFabian and Sebastian
Edward IEleanor of Castile19 August 1274Sunday
Edward IIIsabella of France25 February 1308SundayQuinquagesima (Shrove Sunday)
Edward III1 February 1327SundayVigil of Purification of Mary
Philippa of Hainault25 February 1330Sunday
Richard II16 July 1377Thursday
Anne of Bohemia22 January 1383ThursdayVincent
Isabella of Valois7 January 1397Sunday
Henry IV13 October 1399MondayTranslation of Edward the Confessor
Joanna of Navarre27 February 1403SundayQuinquagesima (Shrove Sunday)
Henry V9 April 1413SundayPassion Sunday
Catherine of Valois23 February 1421Sunday
Henry VI6 November 1429SundayLeonard
Margaret of Anjou30 May 1445Sunday
Henry VI Readeption13 October 1470SaturdayTranslation of Edward the Confessor
Edward IV28 June 1461Sunday
Elizabeth Woodville26 May 1465Sunday
Richard IIIAnne Neville6 July 1483Sunday
Henry VII30 October 1485Sunday
Elizabeth of York25 November 1487SundayCatherine
Henry VIIICatherine of Aragon24 June 1509SundayJohn the Baptist (Midsummer)
Anne Boleyn1 June 1533SundayPentecost
Edward VI20 February 1547SundayQuinquagesima (Shrove Sunday)
Mary I1 October 1553Sunday
Elizabeth I15 January 1559Sunday
James IAnne of Denmark25 July 1604MondayJames
Charles2 February 1626ThursdayPurification of Mary (Candlemas)
Charles II23 April 1661TuesdayGeorge
James IIMary of Modena23 April 1685ThursdayGeorge
William III and and Mary II11 April 1689Thursday
Anne23 April 1702ThursdayGeorge

Picking the right festive occasion for a coronation was an enduring matter of strategy, symbolism and affective piety. While we are rarely privy to the planning and decision making process behind medieval and early modern coronations, this is clearly evident in some of the dates chosen over nearly seven centuries. At one end, William the Conqueror followed in Charlemagne’s footsteps, cementing his newly won rule with a coronation on Christmas Day 1066. At the other, late Stuart monarchs Charles II, James II and Anne all staged their English coronations on the feast day of England’s patron saint, George – a mini-tradition which came to an end, ironically, with Georgian rule.

The custom existed, though was less strong, in Scotland as well. James IV, for example, was crowned on Midsummer’s Day 1488, which was also the anniversary of the great Scottish victory over the English at Bannockburn 1314. James IV’s eventual brother-in-law Henry VIII would also be crowned on Midsummer (1509). It’s not difficult to see the appeal of this feast of bonfires and Summer Lords to two youthful Renaissance princes.

The careful selection of an ideal festive occasion seems to have obtained under various political circumstances. Stephen (26 December 1135) and James I (25 July 1604) were both crowned on the feast days of their respective saintly namesakes. Yet James had over a year to plan his spectacle on St James’ Day, after acceding to the throne in March 1603 without much overt challenge. Stephen, on the other hand, seized the throne on 22 December during a dynastic crisis. He was crowned only four days later, but on a sacred occasion which he may have hoped lent intercessory and legitimizing value.

Similar tactics can be spied at other moments of dynastic unrest. When Henry IV was crowned only days after usurping the throne from Richard II, the coronation took place on the Translation of Edward the Confessor (13 October 1399). In the words of historian Chris Given-Wilson, the new king was ‘appropriating the saint who had become the talisman of English monarchy’, and one especially important to Richard II. Not for nothing, the day also marked the anniversary of Henry’s exile by Richard one year previously. During the height of the Wars of the Roses, in October 1470, the Kingmaker Earl of Warwick would likewise choose the Translation of Edward the Confessor as the occasion for a hasty re-crowning of Henry VI.

While an ideal sacred and festive occasion might lend legitimacy to a new reign, it was of course not always the top priority of a new monarch and their advisors. This was particularly true during times of domestic instability, or when a child acceded to the throne. Both scenarios were in play when nine-year-old Henry III was crowned on 28 October 1216, amid the chaos of the First Barons’ War and only nine days after the death of his father John. Yet due to the slapdash nature of the ceremony, another coronation was held in the more stable climate of 1220, this time on one of the chief celebrations of the Christian year: Pentecost.

Pentecost or Whitsunday was a consistently popular occasion for coronations. Three Whitsun coronations took place over the centuries (1068, 1220, 1533), equalled in prevalence only by St George’s Day (1661, 1685, 1702), and Shrove Sunday (1308, 1403, 1547). Shrove Sunday, the Sunday before Shrove Tuesday (or Carnival) was a popular occasion for coronations elsewhere in Europe as well. Henry III of France, for example, was crowned not once but twice on Shrove Sunday within the span of two years (1574-5), first as the elected king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then as king of France. Carnival speaks to the fact that coronations were not just sacred rituals, but also public and popular spectacles. When the boy-king Edward VI was crowned on Shrove Sunday 1547, the celebrations coincided with the public merriness of Shrovetide (a festival especially associated with childhood); masques, plays and jousts extended onto Shrove Monday and Tuesday.

Edward VI’s procession through London on Shrove Saturday before his coronation on Shrove Sunday 20 February 1547. Engraved from a drawing by S. H. Grimm of a contemporary painting at Cowdray, Sussex. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Certain feast days had clear symbolic or practical advantages, but sacred days (whether Sundays or Holy Days) were also thought by many to hold innate ritual power during this period. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of this comes from the reign of King John. The regnal years of English monarchs were usually calculated from the date of their accession (when they came to the throne) rather than their coronation. But due to dynastic dispute, John’s reign did not begin until his crowning on Thursday 27 May 1199, the Feast of the Ascension. Suggestive of the power of sacred time, it was the feast day, rather than the calendar date of 27 May, which marked the beginning of each new regnal year. And since Ascension was a moveable feast falling forty days after Easter, this meant each year varied in length according to when the holy day occurred. In this special case, the festive occasion of a coronation literally warped time.

It is difficult to say how long this metaphysical outlook on sacred or ritual time maintained, but it is clear that English monarchs continued to plan coronations in conference with festivals well into the early modern period. The time-honoured tradition was finally broken when the Hanoverians came to the throne. And though occasion and season have remained relevant, British coronations of the last three centuries have made far less use of the ritual, symbolic and social power available in the festive calendar.

Some Sources on the History of English Coronations

L. G. W. Legg (ed.), English Coronation Records (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1901).

P. E. Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. L. G. W. Legg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937)

A. Hunt, The Drama of Coronation Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2008).

R. Strong, Coronation: A History of the British Monarchy (Harper Collins, 2022).

See also http://kingscoronation.com/ for blog posts describing individual coronations.

Common Wealth Games: Civic Shrove Tuesday Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

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An adapted version of this post was published as Pancakes and football: a brief history of Shrove Tuesday in the UK for The Conversation.

For nearly a millennium, Brits have celebrated Shrove Tuesday with food and sport. Today, pancakes have become the chief focus of what was once a more elaborate pre-Lent festival called Shrovetide. But during the medieval and early modern periods, a spirit of communal play and competition pervaded almost every aspect of Britain’s Carnival. Shrovetide games ranged from cruel animal blood-sports like cock-fighting, to tug-o-wars and skipping. Yet no Shrovetide sport was more widespread and long standing than football.

According to players from the Scottish Borders town of Duns in 1686, it was ‘an ancient custom throughout all this kingdom to play at football upon Fastens Eve [i.e. Shrove Tuesday]’. And indeed, Shrovetide ball games are documented from the 12th century onwards, in scores of communities throughout Britain and northern France, with several surviving today in England and Scotland. Despite legal bans on football in pre-modern Britain, many Shrove Tuesday matches benefited from the support of those in charge, like the bailiff and elders of Duns. Why did some civic institutions and leaders embrace this game in the face of prohibition, and what can this tell us about the social value of football, sport and festivity in the past?   

Shrove Tuesday football in Ashbourne, Derbyshire on 9 February 2016. Two games are played every year. One on Shrove Tuesday and the other on Ash Wednesday. Evidence for the tradition may date back as early as 1683. Photo Credit: Taylor Aucoin

‘Football’ in this pre-modern sense refers to a loose family of games where players contested a ball with hand and/or foot, usually towards a goal. As ancestors to our modern football codes (association, rugby, American, etc.), ‘folk football’ matches varied considerably in manner of play. Shrovetide games were often the marquee match-ups of the day, mass games with scores or even hundreds of participants. Whether town versus country, or married against bachelors, teams battled to move the ball through streets and countryside, towards goals like mills, streams, or even the kirk.  

Due to its destructive potential, football oft fell afoul of authority. Medieval royal prohibitions called it ‘vain, unthrifty and idle’, while Puritans deemed it ‘a bloody and murdering practise’. But others in power obviously saw its appeal, to judge from its festive sponsorship in many cities and towns. Tudor Chester provides a detailed and prototypical example. Every Shrove Tuesday in the early 16th century, the Merchant Drapers’ Company received a football from the Shoemakers’ Company, a wooden ball from the Saddlers’ Company, and a small silk ball from each city freeman married within the last year. Under the mayor’s supervision, the Drapers tossed up the balls (which doubled as prizes) for the craftsmen and crowd to play from the common field to the city’s Common Hall.

The particulars of Chester’s Shrovetide sponsorship were mirrored throughout the British Isles. Craftsmen and guilds played key roles as participants and providers of the ball. On Shrove Tuesday 1373, skinners and tailors played in the streets of London, while butchers did the same in Jedburgh 1704. The Skinners’ and Shoemakers’ companies paraded the ball to the match between married and bachelor freemen in late 18th-century Alnwick. Indeed, leather-workers like shoemakers were especially important, crafting Shrovetide footballs in 15th-century London, 16th-century Glasgow and 17th-century Carlisle.  

Newlyweds also fronted the ball in many communities. As in Chester, recently married freemen of Dublin had to present a ball to city magistrates every Shrove Tuesday during the 15th and 16th centuries. Newlywed members of trade guilds in Perth and Corfe Castle (Dorset) also paid a Shrovetide ‘football due’, while a similar custom seems to have existed in medieval London. These were part of a broader folk tradition, where new married couples owed a ‘bride ball’ or ‘ball money’ to their community. Since weddings were customary during Shrovetide (and prohibited in Lent), it was an ideal time to collect.

Behind all this, civic governments might collect the ‘wedding ball’ dues, hire drummers and pipers to pump up the crowds, or pay for equipment. Gradually, authorities in most major cities did withdraw their support from Shrovetide football. Some cities like St Andrews simply banned it; in 1537 the burgh provost and university dean cancelled the annual match because of its ‘many ills’ and ‘disorder’. Others ‘reformed’ the games into less dangerous entertainments, like foot and horse races in 1540 Chester, or a public display of the city fire-engine’s capabilities in 1725 Carlisle. By the middle of the 18th century, officially sanctioned Shrovetide ball games were mostly confined to smaller market towns and villages. But why did official support for an ‘unlawful game’ linger as long as it did?

Carlisle chamberlain account expenses on ‘Shrovetewsday for the plaies’ in 1663, including 12 pence for a football. CRO: CA/4/3, 1 Mar. 1662-3. Credit: Image reproduced with kind permission from Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle.

Partially, sponsorship let officials (somewhat) contain a rowdy game that might happen with or without their consent. Certainly, outright bans were rarely effective, to judge from repeated mayoral ordinances ‘against football play at Shrovetide’ in the streets of Elizabethan London. Yet, the appeal of patronage went beyond social control. The often exclusive participation of guild or burgh members (known as ‘freemen’) in Shrovetide ball games reaffirmed corporate status, with its privileges and obligations. These obligations could include football itself. In January 1590, the shoemaker John Neil was made a ‘burgess’ or freeman of Glasgow in exchange for supplying ‘six good and sufficient footballs’ every Shrove Tuesday during his lifetime.

Failure to participate in or furnish football, via payments of the ‘wedding ball’ for example, could result in imprisonment, heavy fines, or the forced closing of a craftsman’s shop. The goods of maltman Robert Dykes of Rutherglen were distrained in 1626 because he failed to join the rest the burgesses on the town green for the annual Shrovetide match. These harsh consequences reflect the worth of Shrove Tuesday football to these pre-modern communities. To them it was not a ‘vain and idle’ game, but an ‘ancient and laudable custom’ of ‘goodly feats and exercise’. Rather than ‘unthrifty’, its value equated to the ‘benefit of the Company’, and the ‘common wealth of the city’, ideals which civic officials deemed well worth preserving.