Football history

18 FOOTBALL
in his time at country fairs, the women won their husbands on
the football field; this might account for their always beating
the spinsters, as the married women would be those who had
earned their partners by success in games of football, and every
year their ranks would be recruited by the best spinster players.
However, to return to our history. There is no doubt that
hurling, football, and camp-ball were in their origin the same.
The name hurling was eventually adopted for a kind of hockey
played with sticks, called hurlets. Camp-ball has perished in
name, just as stool-ball is dead or dying, to be recalled, however
;
by the stumps of cricket which originally represented the legs of
the stool at which the ball was thrown and pall-mall is also
gone, leaving as its legacy the green cloth of the billiard table
which represents. the smooth green on which pall-mall was
played. Now that the original game of ` hurling," camp-ball,' or
football' has produced three such excellent and entirely dis
tinct games as hockey, Rugby Union football, and Association
football, it is only natural that it should itself pass away; but as
a matter of fact, it still survives in one or two out-of-the-way
corners of England, as we shall point out afterwards.
To return to the history of football. As far as can be
gathered from extracts, taken in their chronological order, it
appears certain that the triumph of Puritanism considerably re-
duced the popularity of football. The political ascendency of
this ascetic creed was short, but the hold that it took upon
the manners and feelings of the nation not only put a stop in a
great measure to Sunday football, but rendered the game less
acceptable upon other days: We have seen that up to the age
of the Puritans football was a national sport. From the time of
the Restoration and onward for aoo years or thereabouts, until
the athletic revival came in, there was a slow but steady decrease
in the popularity of the game as a sport for men, although there
is also no doubt that during the period football became a
regular and customary school sport. Still, from the slight
number of references made to football by eighteenth-century
writers, it would appear evident that in that century the game