Origins & Folk Football — Why Codification Mattered
The History of Football
Chapter 1 · Origins & Folk Football: Why Codification Mattered
Ball Games Before Football: Independent Origins
FIFA has officially recognised cuju, played in China, as "the very earliest form of the game for which there is scientific evidence." But cuju wasn't the only early ball game, and it isn't a direct, unbroken ancestor of the modern sport — several cultures developed their own kicking or ball-handling games independently, with no contact between them.
Documented from the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), with a Chinese military text from the 3rd-2nd century BC describing it as a training exercise. Players kicked a leather ball, stuffed with feathers or fur, through small openings in silk netting stretched between bamboo poles.
A ball game with real, long-documented ceremonial and courtly roots, in which players cooperated to keep a ball aloft using their feet, rather than competing to score against an opponent.
Ball games played in ancient Greece and Rome, involving a real mix of kicking, throwing, and handling — closer to a rough team contest than a codified sport in the modern sense.
Mob Football & Shrovetide Traditions in England
The tradition that eventually led toward association football took shape in medieval England as "mob football" — chaotic, large-scale village contests with few fixed rules, often played between whole neighbourhoods or parishes. Shrovetide ball games are documented in England from at least the 12th century, during the reign of Henry II.
Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, has held its own Royal Shrovetide Football game since at least 1667, though it's likely older still. The town is divided by the Henmore Brook into two teams — the Up'ards and the Down'ards, depending on which side of the brook a player was born — competing to advance a ball toward goals a genuine three miles apart. The game survives, essentially unchanged in spirit, to this day.
Real Attempts to Ban the Game
Mob football's own real chaos and violence made it a repeated target for royal and civic authorities — in both England and Scotland.
Issued by the Lord Mayor of London, Nicholas de Farndone, on the king's behalf: "there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future." This is thought to be the first recorded use of the word "foot-ball" in English.
The ban had several real, practical motivations at once: genuine concern over the violence and disorder the games caused, King Edward's own ongoing conflict with Robert the Bruce making public order in London a real priority, and a fear that football was distracting men from archery practice — a skill considered militarily essential at the time.
Under King James I of Scotland, Parliament passed a statute banning the game outright: "it is statut and the king forbiddis that na man play at the fut ball under the payne of iiij d." Golf was banned in the same real legislation, for the same real reason — both were seen as distractions from archery. The Act stayed nominally on the books for nearly five centuries, until it was formally repealed by the Statute Law Revision (Scotland) Act 1906.
Why "No Shared Rules" Was a Real, Practical Problem
By the 19th century, football was being played widely — but every town, and especially every English public school, had its own real, genuinely different version of the rules. Some allowed carrying and handling the ball; others didn't. Some allowed "hacking" — deliberately kicking an opponent's shins; others considered it unacceptable. Pitch size, team size, and even what counted as a goal varied from place to place.
None of this mattered much as long as games stayed local. But as railways made travel between towns and schools genuinely practical, a real, concrete problem emerged: two teams that had each grown up playing "football" often couldn't actually agree on what game they were about to play. That practical need for one shared rulebook is exactly what Chapter 2 picks up — and what led, in 1863, to a real, formal split between the sport that kept the name "football" and the one that became rugby.
Questions to Sit With
Several cultures independently developed ball-kicking games with no contact between them. Does that independence suggest something universal about the appeal of the sport itself, or is it simply a coincidence of what a ball and a pair of feet make possible?
Both the 1314 London ban and the 1424 Scottish Act were motivated partly by a fear that football distracted from archery practice. What does that tell you about how directly medieval governments linked ordinary recreation to military readiness?
Mob football survived centuries of real, repeated attempts to ban it, but was eventually reshaped not by a law, but by a practical need for a shared rulebook. What does that suggest about which kinds of pressure actually change a deeply rooted tradition?
Quick Reference — Origins & Folk Football
- Cuju (China, Han Dynasty) is FIFA's own officially recognised earliest scientifically-evidenced form of the game — but not football's single ancestor
- Kemari (Japan) and Episkyros/Harpastum (Greece/Rome) arose independently of cuju and of each other
- Medieval English mob football and Shrovetide traditions are the real, direct antecedent of association football — Ashbourne's own game survives to this day
- Edward II's 1314 London ban and Scotland's 1424 Football Act both targeted football partly to protect archery practice
- Bans went largely unenforced — mob football persisted for centuries regardless
- The real, practical problem that eventually forced change wasn't a law — it was the total lack of one shared rulebook once teams from different towns and schools started meeting
What's Next
Next chapter: The Football Association & the 1863 Split — the real formation of a single, shared rulebook, and the formal divide between the sport that kept the name "football" and the one that became rugby.