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Research spotlight: football’s contested origins with Dr Taylor Aucoin
16 Jan 2025

Dr Taylor Aucoin's (University of Edinburgh) British Academy-funded project, “The Contested Ball Game” uncovers how football—in a variety of idiosyncratic forms—was intricately woven into medieval and early modern society and culture. Utilising extensive archival research, including legal, financial, newsprint, and cartographic sources, Dr Aucoin’s work engages ongoing debates about modern football’s origins, and underscores the central role of sport and leisure within medieval and early modern society.
You are an historian of medieval and early modern Britain and your Academy-funded project looks more specifically at the social and cultural history of football – how did you arrive at this research interest and project?
I came to it through my doctoral research at the University of Bristol, which investigated the celebration of Shrovetide, a pre-Lent Carnival, in medieval and early modern Britain. During my thesis, it turned out that football was a huge part of how Carnival was celebrated in Britain and places like Northern France and parts of Italy from as early as the 12th century, to as late as the 19th.
It was so important that in some places Shrove Tuesday was called Football Day and in fact, there are still communities in England and Scotland that play traditional folk football around Shrove Tuesday. I wanted to explore what it meant to people in the past—not just how it was played but the social value of the sport—and see if that has bearing on how it became so successful in the 19th century.
Given that football is now seen as a quintessentially modern sport—being global and commercialised—is there anything you find particularly interesting about engaging with aspects of football beyond its recognisably modern form?
My project cuts off around 1800 and I don't particularly want to dive into debates about modern football's development. By examining football before that, we can ask what it meant to people before it became this giant, global, commercialised phenomenon. We can see how it's different and how it's quite similar in some fundamental ways. But of course, I can't pretend I'd be doing this research if football wasn't the huge cultural phenomenon it is today.
Modern football offers a wealth of sources for scholars, but your focus on an earlier time frame presents unique challenges. What kinds of sources are you engaging with, and how are you using them?
It's not straightforward to find records of premodern football—there is no club system with financial records and written rules to turn to. Instead, references pop up in a wide array of sources. I use several types of legal records, like royal prohibitions for instance. Coroner's reports are another source; since football was dangerous, these inquests sometimes detail injuries or deaths during games. There are also Sabbath-breaking cases, where people got in trouble for playing on Sundays. These sources help build a picture of who was playing, where, and sometimes even why.
Why was it intermittently prohibited by the authorities?
It depends on who is doing the prohibiting, and it changes over time. Starting in the 1300s, you get royal bans mostly concerned with the potential for dangerous crowds. Edward III bans football and other idle games because they're a distraction from practicing archery during the Hundred Years' War. After the Black Death, various laws are enacted to try to control how people work and play; football isn't seen as a worthwhile use of time in the eyes of the authorities.
Later, after the reign of Henry VIII, prosecutions focus more on profaning the Sabbath—it's not the sport itself but playing during divine service or in sacred spaces like churchyards. Civic governments also ban football due to concerns over property damage and injuries, especially during events like Shrove Tuesday when big crowds gather. It’s really a question of where and when as to why people are banning it.
What would a football match in early modern Britain look like – is it anything like the type of football we would recognise today?
We have specific and fixed ideas about what football is now. But it's useful to remember that rugby, American football, Australian football—they're all forms of football too, all descending from this folk tradition in Britain. Before games were codified, there was a wide range of ways it could be played, differing by region and locality. For instance, in East Anglia, there was a version called Camping or Camp Ball, which involved much more use of the hands. People would throw, kick, and carry the ball, making it resemble rugby or American football in how it was played. At heart, football was a “contested-ball game” where players fought to possess a ball and (usually) move it toward a goal.
So, the style-of-play is locally dictated. You mentioned the use of cartographic sources – how are you using that to map out these regional similarities or disparities?
On a basic level, I'm creating a database of early football records. If there's locational data linked to a reference, I can map it using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to see patterns across Britain. For example, mapping where people called the game "camp ball" in East Anglia helps identify where that term was used. At a deeper level, we can analyse the spaces and places where games were played—urban vs rural settings—and how that affected the game. We can also calculate how far people travelled to play or watch football.
That raises an interesting question about how developed this field of scholarship is, is this something people have looked at in the past? Is it something people are currently exploring?
There's a whole field of sports history and football has been studied quite extensively. Most of the literature focuses on the modern game and its different rules. Much of the literature focusing on medieval and early modern football is geared towards how we get to the Victorian period and the development of modern rules and whether there's a connection to the folk football tradition.
Traditionally, the argument was that traditional football dies out in the early 1800s and is replaced by association rules and rugby rules. In the last 10 to 20 years, there's been a livelier scholarly debate about the origins of football. It's a vibrant field, and there are multiple scholars working on premodern football right now. It's a good field to be in—you don't want to be the only person working on something.
How do you see your research informing the way we think about football today—not just its historical origins, but its impact on contemporary culture and society?
I think it ties back to what we discussed earlier—I wouldn't be doing this research if modern football (in all its different codes) wasn't such a big deal. The roots of modern football's 19th-century success run deep. Looking at the sport's social value, even in the premodern period, football was more than a diversion and more than senseless violence; it was a way people expressed their identities and sense of community. Football embodied ideas of equality and freedom but also reinforced social distinctions when matches were restricted to certain groups. This shows some of the deeper social values tied to football. Similarly to the present day, it was more than a game.
How are you looking to develop this further, and are there new areas you're interested in exploring as you continue your research?
As mentioned, one part of this project involves creating a comprehensive database with a mapping component. Once that's in place, it will allow for quantitative analysis, and I’d like to make the map available online for people to explore. Building on this, I hope to write a book and academic articles. Additionally, I plan to engage the public through community projects, and hopefully collaborate with football museums in Scotland and England. After completing this project, I intend to use sources like Sabbath-breaking cases for a larger study on how people in the past used and valued their time, balancing work and play. So, while this project stands on its own, it also leads me to exciting next steps.
Photo by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images News / Getty Images Europe
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