Rugby Union: Its origins, its significance today, and why it is more than snobbish alickadoos

Rugby is foreign to me. Being from Ireland, the number 1 ranked rugby team in the world, on the men’s side at least, it would seem logical that rugby would play a key role in the lives of young Irish people. You would think that schools across the country were incubating the next Ronan O’Gara or Johnny Sexton, regardless of how remote the outpost may be. You would think that Irish kids all over the country would be learning the ropes of rugby coaching and learning to speak French like ROG. After all, my cousins, who live in a sparsely populated part of southern New Zealand, play the sport in school; surely the same is true of Ireland?

Not so. My exposure to rugby has been very limited. It isn’t just me; in secondary school, just two of my classmates, out of a class of 57, had any experience of playing rugby. As a teenager from West Cork, I associated rugby with “Pres” and the “Christian Brothers”, each name hurled by us culchies to denigrate the bourgeois men in blazers in Cork city. I imagined alickadoos like Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, hurling €5 notes from his Beemer at deprived citizens in north County Dublin. Rugby had nothing on the Gah, sods of turf, Nathan Carter, Superdry jackets or old Puntos suckin’ diesel.

In this essay, I seek to discover the origins of rugby. I wish to go beyond the stereotypes and the clichés by finding out where rugby really came from. I will talk about football in medieval Britain, and the repeated attempts to ban it. I will discuss the ways in which rugby was adopted by English public schools, to engender the ideals of Christian manliness into their students. I will dissect the split between rugby league and rugby union, and touch on modern controversies, such as rugby’s response to apartheid South Africa.

The game that we would recognise as rugby union originates in the 19th century. Nevertheless, full-contact ball games are much older than that. Calcio Fiorentino emerged in the Middle Ages in Italy. The game, based on a Roman-era ball game called Harpastum, combines football, rugby and wrestling. The game was played by Italian aristocrats at the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence in the 16th century and was even played by three popes in Vatican City. The game was revived in the 1930s by Mussolini’s Fascists and is played annually in Florence today. Other antecedents for rugby include Lelo Burti in Georgia, Marngrook and Kemari in Japan.

Football in England dates from the Middle Ages. The 9th century Welsh monk and scholar, Nennius, references a ball game in his book, Historia Brittonum (History of the Brittons), writing that players “came to the field … in the district of Glevesing, where a party of boys were playing at ball”. This game may have been related to Cnapan, a medieval ball game played during Christian festivals in southern Wales. Cnapan could be played by up to 2,000 people, and often spanned miles of Welsh countryside.

In England in the late 12th century, William FitzStephen, a cleric in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s court, wrote an account of London. FitzStephen documented a ball game played on Shrove Tuesday, observing that “the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game … older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their youth vicariously”.

Similar games were played in the open fields and rivers of townlands such as Workington, where thousands of people played matches that spanned miles. These games were played on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. They were violent games, and often descended into mass brawls. Deaths were common; in Ulgham, Northumberland, in 1280, a player was killed after being stabbed by an opponent’s dagger.

In 1314, troubled by the unruliness of the game, King Edward II banned it, stating that “for as much as there is great noise in the city, caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils might arise which God forbid, we command and forbid, on behalf of the king, a pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future”. A similar game, known as la soule, was banned by the French King in his realm in 1331.

Between 1314 and 1667, football games in England and Scotland were banned on more than 30 separate occasions. English monarchs saw the game as a distraction from more productive pursuits, such as archery, which required fit individuals to defend the kingdom. In 1477, for example, King Edward IV issued a statute, proclaiming that “no person shall practice any unlawful games such as dice, quoits, football and such games, but that every strong and able-bodied person shall practice with the bow for the reason that the national defence depends upon such bowmen”. Not all English monarchs disliked football though. Henry VIII owned the first recorded pair of football boots, despite passing laws that banned the sport to maintain public order.

Despite the repeated attempts to ban ball games, enforcement was often lax. One English precursor for rugby was Camping, played in East Anglia. The game, played between the 15th and 19th centuries, was described in an 1823 account as having “two goals, ten or fifteen yards apart. The parties, ten or fifteen on a side, stand in line, facing their own goals and each other, at about 10 yards distance”. The game was resembled modern rugby; the account referenced passing between team members. If a player was tackled, “he throws the ball to some less beleaguered friend more free and more in breath than himself … and he in like manner hastens homewards, in like manner pursued, annoyed, and aided”.

From the 16th century onwards, Shrove Tuesday was the most important date on the footballing calendar. The British authorities saw it as a day of indulgence for the masses before the hardships of Lent, so it was seen as a chance to let off some excess energy. One of the most famous English Shrovetide festivals occurred at Ashbourne, Derbyshire, which still takes place today. Thousands of players on both sides competed to move the ball from one side of the town to the other.

As time passed however, the game became too popular to be played just once a year. Many workers, for whom Sunday was their only day off, began to play the game on weekends, and on special occasions such as Christmas. Devout Christians, many of whom were Puritan Protestants, were horrified by football matches, which they saw as a violation of the Sabbath. The Puritans ignored a 1618 declaration from King James I, which encouraged churchgoing Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike, to play football every Sunday afternoon, after morning service.

The Puritans saw football as inherently sinful, and incompatible with their idea of an austere lifestyle. The Puritan pamphleteer, Philip Stubbs, wrote in 1583 that football was a “bloody and murdering practice [rather] than a fellowly sport or pastime”. He also condemned its “wickedness”. Violations of Puritan doctrines, in both England and the English colonies in North America (now the East Coast of the United States), were punished severely. Transgressors could be locked into a set of stocks for hours, have their ears cut off, or have their tongues pierced. Some were even hanged.

In 1647, a Puritan-led English Parliament banned Christmas, which some young men responded to by playing football and rioting on the streets. After the First English Civil War, and the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the Puritans and their allies established the Commonwealth of England, Britain’s first (and so far only) attempt at republican rule. Leisure activities such as football were banned on moral grounds, a move that was surely influenced by the disorder from two years previously.

During the 1650s, clashes between football players and the Commonwealth’s authorities were common. In the winter of 1659–60 in York, players smashed the windows of a church, and the city Mayor imposed heavy fines on them. In response, a crowd of over one hundred assembled “in warlike manner … with halberds, swords, muskets, fowling pieces and other guns and weapons”, and stormed the Mayor’s house. The leader of the riot was fined 400 shillings (over £1,000 today).

In the decades following 1660, and the restoration of the English monarchy, the significance of Puritan ideology declined in England. Furthermore, the Enclosure Acts, passed by the British Parliament in the 18th and 19th centuries, privatized much of its land, making sprawling games of football more difficult. These games of football, formerly played by English workers and peasants, were adapted and refined by the country’s private schools.

These private boarding schools, confusingly referred to as public schools in England, adopted their own versions of football. Charterhouse School adopted a version of Association Football (soccer) as a winter sport, and even played the game in an old medieval monastery until 1872. This sport was similar to rugby, but did not allow outfield players to use their hands or arms to control the ball. The Charterhouse version of the game would act as a basis for the Cambridge rules, from which the modern rules of association football are derived. Eton played the Wall and the Field games, related to rugby and soccer respectively. These games are still played in the college today.

In 1749, a newly established school for boys, located on the outskirts of the town of Rugby in Warwickshire, introduced a new type of football. This new game had few rules: the ball could be caught and handled, but players were not allowed to run with the ball in their hands. Progression towards the opponent’s goal was generally made by kicking the ball. These football games often consisted of over 200 players, and games could last for five days.

Rugby has its roots in the philosophical notions of Christian morality and manliness. In 1857, Thomas Hughes, who attended Rugby School between 1834 and 1842, published the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In the book, Hughes, who attended Rugby School between 1834 and 1842, describes Tom Brown’s life at Rugby. The novel describes Tom’s experiences of the bully Flashman and emphasises Christian morality and manliness.

As historian John Tosh writes, the English public school system, which endeavoured to produce good Christian gentlemen, was focused on piety, gentlemanly conduct and intellectual capability. Norman Vance notes that proponents of Christian manliness saw “physical strength, courage and health” as “attractive, valuable and useful in themselves and in the eyes of God”.

In 1823, according to popular legend, a student at the Rugby School, called William Webb Ellis, broke the rules during a game and ran with the ball. This legend persists; Webb Ellis’ name adorns the World Cup. Like all legends, this is a simplistic story that is easy to remember. However, the truth is more complicated. Rugby journalist Mike Aylwin writes that the story comes from a 1876 newspaper article by Matthew Bloxam, an antiquarian and Rugby school alumni, which he published in The Meteor, a newspaper for Old Rugbeians. Bloxham credits Webb Ellis with the sport’s invention.

Unfortunately, Webb Ellis died in 1872, so he could not present his take on the story. In 1897, a fifty-page pamphlet, The Origins of Rugby Football, was published by a committee of Old Rugbeians, which corroborated Bloxham’s article. One of the Old Rugbeians, Thomas Harris, a contemporary of Webb Ellis’ who was in his eighties when the report was published, recalled that Ellis “was generally regarded as inclined to take unfair advantages at football”, but confessed that he was “several years [Ellis’] junior, and had not either reasons or opportunities for closely observing his manner of play”.

Nevertheless, the myth stuck, and to this day, a plaque at the Rugby School describes how Webb Ellis, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it”. A bronze statue of Webb Ellis holding an oval shaped rugby ball also stands outside the school.

In reality, the origin of this myth likely has its roots in the divide between rugby league and rugby union, and the class distinctions between the two. The Old Rugbeians created the Webb Ellis myth to protect their idyllic vision of rugby. For them, rugby was not a sport, but a harbinger of a simpler, and for them, a better time, where rugby was played by people as well-monied as them, and not by a working-class rabble. The Webb Ellis story allowed them to credit one of their own for bringing the sport to the wider world.

In January 1871, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) was founded by 21 clubs in London, to codify the rules of the game, and to form a union for the sport. The sport’s early years were dominated by working-class clubs, mostly in the north. Workers that had moved from the countryside to the cities could rely on a sophisticated rail network. By 1852, there were over 7,000 miles of rail track in England and Scotland, joining cities such as Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester. Moreover, improved worker protections, such as the introduction of the five-and-a-half day work week in 1850, and the legalization of British trade unions in 1871, gave British workers more time to play and watch sports.

The increased proliferation of British workers in rugby horrified middle and upper-class members of the RFU, who wanted to keep the sport amateur. An amateur sport would not be good for working-class players. Though working conditions were improving for them, they could not afford to take time off work, and they could lose their jobs if they got injured while playing rugby.

In 1886, the RFU declared rugby an amateur sport. They were fearful that rugby could end up like soccer, which was dominated by clubs in textile-producing cities in England’s north-west. As future Harry Garnett stated at the time, “if working men desired to play rugby football, they should pay for it themselves, as they would have to do with any other pastime”.

In 1893, a motion to compensate rugby players for taking time off work was defeated by 282 votes to 136. The RFU concluded that the motion was “contrary to the true interest of the game and its spirit”. Two years later, 21 northern clubs met in Huddersfield to form a new rugby organisation, the Northern Union (now the Rugby Football League), which legalised broken-time payments for workers. The Northern Union, who called their sport “rugby league”, changed some rules, like reducing the number of players from 15 players to 13. In response, the RFU banned anyone connected to the new game for life.

As a colonial superpower, it should come as no surprise that Britain exported rugby abroad. Rugby was brought to New Zealand by Charles Monro, the son of the Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives. He attended Christ’s College at Finchley, near London, and persuaded the Nelson Football Club to try the new game of rugby in 1870.

Rugby was introduced to Australia in 1864, with the formation of the Sydney University Club. The founder of Australian rules football, Tom Wills, attended Rugby School and played an early version of rugby. This new game combined elements of Irish football and Marngrook, an Aboriginal ball game. The first rugby games in South Africa and Canada, two other former British settler colonies, were played in the 1860s.

The first rugby club in Ireland, the Dublin University Football Club (DUFC), was founded in 1854, and still acts as the rugby union club of Trinity College. Some Irish rugby cognoscenti claim that rugby has Irish origins; William Webb Ellis’ father spent time in Tipperary as a British Army officer, and may have told his son about caid, a precursor to Irish football.

The game was not just played by British expats; Eamon de Valera, of all people, played rugby for Rockwell College, and narrowly missed out on an Ireland cap while working as a maths teacher there. He once remarked that “There is no football game to match rugby” and told a group of his former classmates in 1957 that “I have not been at a rugby match since 1913 because I do not want it being raised as a political matter and having rows kicked up about it”.

The first known rugby games in the United States were played in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. Five years later, in 1874, two rugby matches were played between Harvard University and McGill University, a Canadian university. The teams played two games: one using Harvard’s American rules, and one using Canadian rules.

The Harvard team adopted the Canadian rules as their own, which included innovations such as running with the ball, and scoring under the posts for a “touchdown”. These innovations would be adapted by Harvard for their game against Yale the following year, giving us the first American football game.

Rugby was introduced to the modern Olympic games in 1900 by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games, and an admirer of the Rugby School’s ethos of Christian manliness and masculinity. 15 a side games were last played at the Games in 1924, though Rugby sevens were introduced in 2016. The inaugural Rugby World Cup was held in 1987 in Australia and New Zealand and was won by the All Blacks.

Perhaps the greatest issue to afflict rugby has been the issue of South African apartheid. The country remained a member of the International Rugby Board (IRB), now World Rugby, between 1948 and 1994, the years that its brutally racist apartheid regime remained in place. During this period, South Africa divided its rugby bodies along racial lines: one for whites, one for “coloureds” (mixed-race people), and one for blacks.

Until 1976, interracial club games were forbidden. The Afrikaner-Broederbond (Brotherhood), an all-male secret society of white Afrikaans-speakers, exercised their contacts in the South African government to elect pro-Broederbond rugby captains. Rugby was pointedly referred to as “apartheid at play” by South African commentator, Andy Colquhoun, ahead of the 2007 World Cup. Colquhoun further observed that it was “a crucial part of the white psyche”.

In 1960, New Zealand cancelled a rugby tour of South Africa, after the South African Prime Minister, the notoriously racist H.F. Verwoerd, refused to allow a Māori player to enter the country. Ten years later, three Māori players, and a Samoan-born player, were allowed to enter the country as “honorary whites”.

The Springboks continued to play international matches, despite the anti-apartheid movements that sprung up across the rugby world. In 1969, peaceful protests in Swansea by Welsh rugby fans against the visiting Springboks team were viciously put down by stewards. Over 100 people were injured, including 11 police officers.

In 1981, a game in Hamilton was cancelled, after New Zealand fans ran onto the pitch, to protest the touring South African team. The tour went ahead despite the Gleneagles Agreement, which discouraged Commonwealth nations from participating in sporting events against South Africa. 300 protestors linked arms in the middle of the pitch, declaring that they would not leave until the tour was called off. These protests came about even though the All Blacks played 15 Tests against the Springboks between 1962 and 1990, the years of Nelson Mandela’s incarceration on Robben Island.

After being excluded from the 1987 and 1991 World Cups, South Africa hosted the 1995 World Cup, one year after the election of Nelson Mandela, and the fall of apartheid. Mandela, ever the pragmatist, understood that rugby would help to make him relatable to white Afrikaners, and told his imprisoned comrades that rugby was worth “several battalions”. Ahead of the 1995 World Cup Final, Mandela told reporter John Carlin that “sport is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers”.

Before the World Cup Final in Johannesburg, in which South Africa played Jonah Lomu’s New Zealand, Mandela greeted the crowd of 63,000, of whom 62,000 were white, wearing a gold Springbok jersey and cap. The mostly Afrikaner crowd responded by shouting “Nelson! Nelson!”. Mandela presented the Springboks captain, Francois Pienaar, with the World Cup after the game, which South Africa won 15–12. Rugby, having previously acted as apartheid as play, demonstrated that it could be used to break down racial barriers, if leaders are willing to be pragmatic.

In this essay, I have presented a quick overview of rugby union. It is far more than snobbish alickadoos in south Dublin, or schools’ rugby aficionados belting out Stand Up and Fight at Thomond Park on a Friday night. The sport was banned in England on many occasions, under the auspices of law, order and Christianity. It was appropriated by English public schools to manufacture good Christian men in the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite also being used by South Africa’s apartheid regime, it helped to change that country for the better; Siya Kolisi, its first black captain, led his country to their third World Cup in 2019.

Though the rules of the games are still impossible to get my head around, rugby is far less foreign to me. It has adapted to the times, albeit slowly; the sport lifted the ban on professionalism in 1995. Since 1991, a Women’s Rugby World Cup has been played, which has been recognised by World Rugby since 1998. In 2007, the Irish rugby team defeated England 43–13 in Croke Park, the first time that GAA HQ had hosted the fixture. It’s surely about time that Ireland adds a new chapter to this story. Ireland, please don’t get knocked out in the quarterfinals of the World Cup again. Ireland, please win.