Football history

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I
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FOOTBALL
. . The passage is interesting, although it is evident that M.
Misson cannot be describing the same game which evoked the
wrath of Stubbes'and the disparagement of James
I.;
for
surely no Frenchman would describe the old rough-and-tumble
game as ` charmant.'
Whether he .saw a real dribbling game, or merely saw men
punting about',a ball for amusement, is, perhaps of little im-
portance, as there is little doubt that the dribbling game arose
out of the practice of kicking about a football without doing
damage to limbs or clothes; but the extract is interesting at any
rate in showing that the ball itself had by this time assumed its
present shape and make.
The same number of the ` Spectator ' from which we have
already quoted in our account of the history of athletics, also
makes mention of a football match. The ` Spectator,' while on
a visit to Sir Roger. de Coverley, visits a country fair, and there
sees, besides athletes and cudgel-players, a game of football.
I was diverted (he says) from a further observation of these
combatants (i.e. the cudgel-players) by a football match which was
on the other side of the green, where Tom Short behaved himself
so well that most people seemed to agree it was impossible that he
should remain a bachelor until the next wake.
Having
j
hlayed
many a match myself, I
could have looked longer on the sport had
I not observed a country girl.
One can hardly fancy the courtly Joseph Addison playing
at football, unless he did so when he was a boy at Charter-
house, but he certainly writes as
-
if gentlemen played the game
as well as rustics, though unluckily he gives no description of
the style of play he saw upon the village green.
Unfortunately also, the great historian of English sports,
Joseph Strutt, gives but a short description of the game of
football, but from what he says it is evident that at the time he
wrote
_(i8oI)
the game was fast decaying.
I
Football,' he says,
is so called because the ball is driven about with the feet
instead of the hands.' It is not likely, however, that he means
that kicking alone was allowed, as his paragraph on football