My current research project, funded by the British Academy, provides a new cultural and social history of football in premodern Britain, illuminating how the sport was embedded within medieval and early modern conceptions of status, identity and rights.

Scholarship has tended to focus on football’s violence and illegality above all else, treating the sport as a rough prelude to its later ‘civilised’ association and rugby forms. Moving beyond these teleological approaches and fixations on violence, this project interrogates premodern football’s social value on its own terms. It asks what made it worthy of support or condemnation, and how this changed across time and space. Three research strands examine football’s contested nature, in terms of play, place, and social profitability.

Play: On a national (British) scale, the project quantitatively investigates how play
reproduced divisions of locality or identity (e.g. parish vs. parish, town vs. country, craft vs. craft, married vs. bachelor), and how rules, players, patrons and prohibitors varied and interacted with social changes over time and region.

Place: Using GIS, it spatially queries regional variation, and the contested way games transformed places, either permanently through patronage (e.g. into Camping Closes), or temporarily through play (in streets, marketplaces, commons).

Profitability: Qualitatively analysing print and popular culture, it reveals underlying valuations of football, sport and leisure which differed considerably across social strata. While elites largely deemed football a ‘vain, unthrifty and idle’ use of time, those they ruled often equated it with freedom and common profit.

Based on extensive archival research using legal, financial, newsprint and cartographic sources, as compiled into a database titled Records of Early Football (REF), these three research strands aim to challenge the image of premodern football as mindless mob violence, reshape ongoing debates about modern football’s ‘origins’, and illuminate the central role of sport and leisure within medieval and early modern society.

As research progresses, I will share my thoughts and results through blog posts, indexed below: