Rugby football
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Rugby football, usually just "rugby", may refer to a number of sports descended from a common form of football developed at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, United Kingdom. Rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules, American football and Canadian football are modern sports that originated from rugby football. However rugby league and rugby union are the only two sports referred to as "rugby" today.
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[edit] History
People in the British Isles, in common with many other countries, have played team games involving the movement of an object into a designated 'goal' area since time immemorial. Such games are often seen as a practice for, or a substitute for war. Classical Greeks and, later, Vikings all had similar games, where an object such as a stone, dead animal or ball would be used. Rules for such games were developed locally and passed by word of mouth, as are children's games today. They would often depend on local geographical features such as trees or hills, making the games only playable in the local vicinity. Teams were usually large and of unspecified numbers, and the opposing goals might be set as far as several miles away thereby creating the opportunity for large-scale brawls between intervening villages.
In Wales such a sport is called cnapan or "criapan," and has medieval roots. The old Irish predecessor of rugby may be caid, not to be confused with Gaelic "hurling" or "hockey" which has the difference that the ball was hit with a stick rather than carried. The Cornish called it "hurling to goales" which dates back to the bronze age, the West country called it "hurling over country", East Anglians "Campball", the French "La Soule" or "Chole" (a rough-and-tumble cross-country game). English villages were certainly playing games of 'fute ball' during the 1100s. English boarding schools would certainly have developed their own variants of this game as soon as they were established - the Eton Wall Game being one example.
The invention of 'Rugby' was therefore not the act of playing early forms of the game at Rugby School or elsewhere but rather the events which led up to its codification.
The game of football as played at Rugby School between 1750 and 1823 permitted handling of the ball, but no-one was allowed to run with it in their hands towards the opposition's goal. There was no fixed limit to the number of players per side and sometimes there were hundreds taking part in a kind of enormous rolling maul. The innovation of running with the ball was introduced some time between 1820 and 1830, traditionally after William Webb Ellis broke the local rules by running forwards with the ball in a game in 1823. Shortly after this the Victorian mind turned to establishing written rules for the sports which had earlier just involved local agreements, and boys from Rugby School produced the first written rules for their version of the sport in 1845.
Around this time the influence of Dr Thomas Arnold, Rugby's greatest headmaster, was beginning to be felt around all the other boarding schools, and his emphasis on sport as part of a balanced education naturally encouraged the general adoption of the Rugby rules across the country, and, ultimately, the world.
