montgomery's miscellany

Introduction

What does the word “football” mean to you? As I'm sure you're aware, this is a controversial question. To the majority of native-born English speakers, “football” refers to the gridiron variety originating in Canada and most popular now in the United States. However, “native-born” is doing much work here, as the majority of the native Anglophone population – 260 million out of 400 million globally – are born in the United States and Canada, skewing the statistics significantly. When restricted to the regional rather than global level, native born English speakers referring to football are actually referring to the most traditionally popular variant of ball-sports-played-on-foot in that region. Indeed, if you were to travel to every former British colony where English remains the dominant language, you would hear the lone word “football” used to refer to Soccer, American Football, Canadian Football, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Australian Football, and Gaelic Football without qualifier. But why? Why are these sports all called football? Which sport was called “football” first? Who owns the term “football?” Should we even call Gridiron and Rugby football “football” when the “balls” in question are lemon and egg shaped respectively and both games have very little kicking?¹ Why does the Wikipedia article for each of these sports reference something called “Medieval Football?” What even is that? Answering these questions was one of two things motivating this article. The other was Blood Bowl, a board game set in a medieval fantasy world with Orcs, Elves, and other such creatures. Instead of fighting on battlefields, these fantasy creatures resolve their differences in a violent sports competition nominally inspired by American Football.² Playing Blood Bowl made me curious: what were the antecedents of modern football games actually like? Is the lore of Blood Bowl, in fact, real life?

Episkyros and Harpastum

It may (or may not) surprise you, but all the games that Anglophones call football allegedly share one common ancestor. In Sparta starting from at the latest 800 BC, a game possibly meant to train young boys to operate as a unit (as claimed by later sources) was developed. The game was called επίσκυρος (episkyros or episkuros), meaning “upon the stone debris” or ocassionally eπίκοινος (epikoinos), meaning “upon or in the common”.³ The game was played on a rectangular field of unknown size, with 3 lines crossing the field horizontally, one at each end and one through the centre. The centre line was referred to as the eponymous “skyros,” specifically because it was typically marked with chips of limestone. The two teams started an unknown distance off the line, and a ball of unknown construction (probably a stuffed animal bladder) was placed on the line by a neutral party. The two teams would then either fight for the ball or determine who starts with the ball in some other fashion (sources vary). The goal of each team was to throw the ball over the heads of the other team and past the line at the other team's end of the field, at which point the game would end immediately.

How exactly the game worked beyond the very beginning and end is not clear.⁵ As will become a consistent pattern throughout most of western history, Greek intellectuals were seemingly too embarrassed by the existence of team sports (as opposed to the individualistic achievements celebrated in the Olympics) to write meticulous accounts of the game. Nonetheless, the game spread out of Sparta and was so popular that at one point a Macedonian Episkyros player was allegedly granted honorary citizenship of Athens in celebration of his talents. As Athenaeus recounts in Deipnosophistai: “The Athenians made Aristonicus the Carystian, Alexander's ball-player, a citizen of their city on account of his skill, and they erected a statue to him.” Now obviously the Athenians had an ulterior motive: sucking up to Alexander the Great, but it is worth noting that Episkyros was a popular enough sport that the ruling class of Athens used prowess in it as a pretext for extending favour.

The Romans, in their typical fashion, allegedly⁴ copied the Greek Episkyros and adapted it to fit their own sensibilities. In the 2nd century BC, following the Roman Republic's ultimate subjugation of Greece, the story goes, the victorious Roman soldiers brought Episkyros home with them. Unlike the Greeks, who were ashamed of the game's popularity with the lower classes, the writers of Roman records found Harpastum worth describing and on occasion, even encouraged their readers to give the sport a chance. The physician and author of medical texts Claudius Galenus (Galen) recommended Harpastum, stating: “[Harpastum is] greater than wrestling or running because it exercises every part of the body, takes up little time, and costs nothing [...] it is a profitable training in strategy.” and “When, for example, people face each other, vigorously attempting to prevent each other from taking the space between, this exercise is a very heavy, vigorous one, involving much use of the hold by the neck, and many wrestling holds.”

It is thanks to this unashamed embrace of Harpastum as a harmless hobby that we know so much about it. Based on my review of descriptions of the game by Pollux, Apollinaris, Galen, Antiphones, Sidonious, as well as a reading of Marindin's 1890 collection of notes on Harpastum, I was able to reconstruct the most common rules.⁶ Harpastum was played on a rectangular field, probably between 80 and 120 metres long and 40 to 60 metres wide. As with Episkyros, three important lines were marked: end zone lines at the far ends of the field, and a centre line at the exact midpoint of the field. The objective of the game was to throw the ball on to the ground within the width of the field but past the line indicating the other team's end zone. The two teams could advance the ball and stop the ball's advance however they liked, almost always in hand a la Rugby as opposed to kicking the ball along a la Soccer. Unlike in Episkyros, where a team scoring immediately ended the game, Harpastum was scored in points with the winning team being whichever had more points at the end of play.

The teams would be equally sized, and could have as few as 5 and as many as 15 players on the field at a time. Antiphones and Sidonious describe three positionals: the Standing players (Stantes), Middle Runners (Medicurrens), and Forwards. Each of these positions specialized into one or two specific skills important to succeeding at Harpastum. The Stantes, equivalent to a hybrid of a Safety and pocket passing Quarterback in American Football or a Fullback in Rugby Football, was tasked with standing in defense by their team's endzone. Typically large and strong but not particularly agile, if a Stantes came into possession of the ball somehow, they were expected to be able to throw it back quite far to a friendly Medicurrens. The Medicurrens were midfield players, specialized in quick running, short passes, and juking out defenders. The Medicurrens also acted as the principle ball carriers, and were typically the player expected to score points. It should be no surprise that the Medicurrens was the most exciting and prestigious of the positionals. Antiphanes describes watching a particularly adept Medicurrens: “He seized the ball and passed it to a team-mate while dodging another and laughing. He pushed it out of the way of another. Another fellow player he raised to his feet. All the while the crowd resounded with shouts of Out of bounds, Too far, Right beside him, Over his head, On the ground, Up in the air, Too short, Pass it back in the middle.” Medicurrens, when faced with a prospective tackle were supposed to be able to dump the ball off quick to one of their fellows and had a reputation for wily trickiness. The trickiness of a good Medicurrens was the source of Harpastum's nickname “phaininda” (to deceive), as Pollux recounts: “Phaininda takes its name from Phaenides, who first invented it,⁷ or from phenakizein (“to deceive”), because they show the ball to one man and then throw to another, contrary to expectation.” Fans of Gridiron Football should recognize the play Pollux is describing as a “pump fake”. The final positional was the Forward. Forwards were mobile to a lesser degree than a Medicurrens, but stronger. Somewhere between the lumbering Stantes and agile Medicurrens in build, the Forward's job principally was to brawl and tackle. As the ball was advanced, Forwards on attack were supposed to block down defenders while on defense Forwards were supposed to bring down the ball carrier while ruining passing attempts. The exact mechanism by which the ball would change possession isn't entirely clear, but it appears that the most common cause of turnovers was intercepted passes.

Harpastum was a game of incredible violence. The historical record of the game is replete with injuries not just of the players themselves but bystanders as well. Harpastum related injuries over the centuries included broken legs, arms, and backs. In one incident, a man receiving a hair cut or a shave at a tonstrina (barbershop) was killed when a pickup game of street ball spilled over into the store. The brutality of the game is not surprising if it is indeed based on Episkyros, as the original Greek game was intended to teach young men martial skills.

The Roman Empire was massive and long-lived, and Harpastum retained popularity throughout most of its existence and across most of its territory. However, for whatever reason following the split of the Roman empire into West (based in Italy) and East (based in Greece), Harpastum declined precipitously in popularity in the Eastern half. As the classical era gave way to the medieval in the Eastern Mediterranean, Harpastum died out there. In the west on the other hand, even after the Roman Empire's collapse, the game would survive and eventually evolve into what sports historians call “Medieval Football.”

Knights in Shining Shoulder Pads

If you look at the Wikipedia articles for any game that calls itself Football in the present day, it will list a mysterious game called “Medieval Football” as its direct ancestor, presumably removed by only a couple of generations or even less. What exactly is this? Unlike Harpastum which was in general one game with slight regional variations, Medieval Football was a broad spectrum of independent games that almost certainly branched off of Harpastum and then may have then syncretized with some local indigenous ball games in the former territory of the Western Roman Empire. Trying to pin down what exactly Medieval Football games were is further complicated by the return of the shameful connotation of the ball-playing sports in Western Europe in this time. When reconstructing these games, we can't rely on the same level of in depth description that we have for Harpastum, instead many of these games are referenced by contemporary sources only in passing and often with a dismissive attitude.

In general, however, it appears that the successor games in the former Roman territories branched off into two subsets following Rome's collapse: “carrying” games and “kicking” games (so labeled in Francis Willughby's post-medieval 1660 text Book of Games), differentiated by the principle action through which the ball was advanced down field. From around the 6th century AD until around the 13th century AD, both variants were interchangeably referred to in England as “playing ball” (literally pila ludicra according to the Venerable Bede or pilae ludus by Nennius) and after the 14th century AD as simply “foot ball” or “football.” Little is recorded in primary sources about the rules of these games until the early modern era. What we do know for sure, however, was that these games were both extremely popular and extremely violent.

As with Harpastum, there were typically no or few limits in either version of medieval football on how violent the contest could be. In multiple cases in medieval England, players were charged with murder for killing opponents during the game.⁸ It should be no surprise then, that the legal authorities of the middle ages in Britain and France (where football was most popular) cracked down on the game frequently. In fact the first recorded instance of the word “football” in the English language was a legal edict issued by the mayor of London banning football games in the streets of London.⁹

Despite their violent nature, football games (of the carrying type especially) took on a literally religious significance in England. The carrying game of football acquired the nickname “Shrovetide Football” in medieval England, as large semi-official exhibition games were organized around Christmas, Easter, and Shrove Tuesday. In fact, these games are still practiced in England to this day in certain parts of the country. Shrovetide football has few rules – except for avoiding manslaughter and grievous harm. Instead of being played on a ~100 metre field, the game is played on the entire space between two villages or neighbourhoods. Each participating polity has a traditional stone or marker for the purpose of playing football and the winner of the Shrovetide game is whichever polity touches the ball to the other polity's marker first. Under traditional Shrovetide rules, there are no restrictions on how the ball can be moved. It is and was not uncommon for the ball to be advanced on horseback (or in a motor vehicle today).

The association of the carrying game with religious festivals was significant enough that it led to their suppression under the Cromwell regime in the 1640s and 50s .¹⁰ Both causes for legalistic suppression of football – religious and in the name of public order – failed miserably. In the middle ages, when the state machinery was primitive, such edicts were simply ignored without consequence. Under the republican regime (arguably the first modern state in Europe) the ban was actually enforced to disastrous effect. 13 citizens engaged in a friendly match of the kicking game were arrested by military authorities in the town of Scarborough in January of 1660.¹¹ On the same day in Bristol, military authorities interceded to break up a football game of the carrying variety. Both towns erupted into riots, which spread to other cities where football was popular. By March 30th, restrictions on football where walked back by most regional authorities and football fans had seized the city hall of York “in warlike manner…with halberds, swords, muskets, fowling pieces and other guns and weapons” (according to a paper by Professor Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick) and demanded a nation-wide end to restrictions on ball playing. The republican government revoked all bans, but not before fining the ringleaders of the York rioters £10 each for “instigating publick disorder.”

In order to reconstruct the medieval form of football, we will rely on the early modern writingof Francis Willughby in his Book of Games. Although Willughby was writing as late as the 1660s, his extensive description of football is the first of its kind since the Roman period. He was writing during a renewed embrace of public sport by the British aristocracy following the downfall of the republican dictatorship, when even a sport as low-brow as football was allowed an academic treatment. Willughby refers to the kicking game as “football” and lays out the rules:

They blow a strong bladder and tie the neck of it as fast as they can, and then put it into the skin of a buls cod and sow it fast in. They play in a longe streete, or a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called Gaols, as A B, C D. The ball is thrown up in the middle between the gaols, as about O, the plaiers beeing æqually divided according to their strength and nimblenesse. A plaiers must kick the ball towards C D gaol, C plaiers towards A B gaol, and they that can strike the ball thorough their enemies gaol first win. They usually leave some of their best plaiers to gard the gaol while the rest follow the ball.

They often breake one anothers shins when two meete and strike both togather against the ball, & therefore there is a law that they must not strike higher then the ball. Tripping Up of Heels is when one followes one of his enemies & to prevent him from striking the ball strikes that foot as hee runs, that is from the ground, which catching against the other foote makes him fall. All the slight is to hit that foot that is mooving and just taken from the ground, & then a little touch makes him fall. Suppose a foot fixed, b mooving from n to m. If it bee strooke on the outside before it comes to C, just against the fixed foote, it falls crosse behind the fixed foot at L and makes him fall. The harder the ball is blowne, the better it flys. They use to put quicksilver into it sometimes to keep it from lying still. The plaiers must at first stand all at their gaols, the ball lying just in the middle betweene them, & they that can run best get the first kick. In this we can see that the kicking form of football has already become significantly less violent that its ancestor game of Harpastum, even before the Cambridge rules neutered it totally. Even so, it seems that while you could not tackle your opponent outright (“therefore there is a law that they must not strike higher than the ball”), you could still trip them down. Willughby describes the carrying game – which he refers to as hurling – as follows:

Hurling is divided into In-Hurling & Out-Hurling. The first is thus. After 20 men or thereabouts are numbered on either party, one takes a leather ball & tosses it up in the midst betweene both sides. He that catches it endeavours to run away with it to the adverse goale. If one of the opposites stop him, either he wrestles (then the ball is throwne to one on his owne side, but the others may intercept it, & taken by one of his owne party, who runs away with it towards the contrary goale &c.) or throwes it if he can to one of his owne side & refuses to wrestle. Outhurling is playd by one parish against another, or Easterne men against the Westerne, or Cornwall against Devonshire. They play in the same manner as the other, but make churches, townes &c. theire goales. If any of them can hold of a stirrop he is not denyed liberty to run with the ball in his hand as fast as the horse goes. Other horses are engaged against him. They runne through the worst of places, quagmires &c. If he that tosses up the ball at the first be not in the middle, he is then to hurle at the furthest goale. Any one that can procure leave from the next Justice of Peace, goes into a markett towne & holds in his hand a wooden ball covered with a silver plate, & by a proclamation invites all that will come to a Hurling, mentioning the time & place. This fellow that finds the ball gathers mony of those that play.

What interest me about this passage is that it actually divides the carrying game in two: it describes a carrying game obviously very similar to Harpastum (“In-Hurling”) and Shrovetide football (“Out-Hurling”). If these were indeed considered separate games – and we have no reason to suppose otherwise – then it implies that it is the “in-hurling” variety that serves as the one-generation antecedent of Gridiron Football and Rugby rather than the academic consensus ancestor Shrovetide football. It is also worth noting that Willughby only gives the name “football” to the kicking game, which is unusual for the time. This is the earliest example I could find claiming that the kicking game and carrying games were in fact separate families rather than the same amorphous game played by the common mobs.

Modern Football

The word “Modern” in the historiographical sense refers to the period of history following the rapid social changes of the 15th and 16th centuries, but in the study of football “modern” (as distinct from “medieval”) refers to the games played after football transitioned from being a sport played by common people to a game with rigidly defined rules developed by the growing bourgeois upper class in the 19th century. The bourgeoisie – who were born from the urban merchant and business owning classes of medieval Europe – were themselves very recently “common” people, meaning that as they rose to power in the states of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, common athletic pastimes like football rose with them and eclipsed sports with a more aristocratic tinge.

If any singular transition from medieval to modern football can be pinned down, it must be what occurred in 1845 at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. Rugby was a school founded in the 1500s as a “public” school opened to the children of any family able to pay for tuition.¹² By the 19th century, this meant that it was one of the network of prestigious schools that trained generations of British colonial administrators, army officers, and sea captains alongside Eton, Harrow, and Winchester College.¹³ It makes sense then, as a nucleus of bourgeois culture, that Rugby would take a game as diverse and nebulously defined as British football and attempt to constrain it to a consistent and rational ruleset. The bourgeoisie have always prided themselves on doing away with medieval superstition and irrationality in favour of sterile and liberal rationalism.

The ruleset that Rugby developed was based on the carrying game of football rather than the kicking game and was inspired by the rules of medieval football that happened to be most popular in the Warwickshire area. The rules as they were laid out in 1845 were written by the physical education department of the school and you can read them in their original form here if you really want to, although there are some glaring omissions (how many points is a try?). The rules were quite similar to modern rugby (of both kinds). The original game of rugby was played on a 110 yard by 65 yard field with 10 yard endzones. The goal of the game was to touch the ball to the ground in the other team's end zone (worth 5 points) at which point you would be given the opportunity to score more points (2) by kicking the ball through upright poles at the front of each endzone. The ball could only be advanced forward by kicking it or carrying it, but could be thrown laterally or backwards. Tackled ball carriers had to relinquish control of the ball to a teammate and players without the ball could only be tackled by the ball carrier.

Immediately the codified game of Rugby became immensely popular with the upper and middle classes of the British Empire. As it spread outwards through the empire, it was tweaked by the settlers who brought it with them to colonial schools. The first of these tweaked versions of football was Australian rules football in 1858, followed shortly after by Canadian football in 1861 (developed right here in Toronto, Ontario). By 1863, Rugby football had escaped the culture of the bourgeois upper-crust and had become popular in England as a general past-time enjoyed by all. Calls went out to further refine a unified code of football and the “Football Association” (FA) was founded by a network of donors interested in the sport and set about writing a new universal code for the game. However, things took a strange turn. The document returned by the FA was not at all like Rugby. It banned hard hits and tackles, ball carrying, and replaced the end-zones with goals. The FA had based their new rules not on the carrying game as many of the organization's initial donors had presumed they would, but instead on the kicking game of football. This result was polarizing, with those donor institutions that were unwilling to accept the new rules leaving the FA in its first year of operation and organizing their own competitor the “Rugby Football Union” by 1871. Eventually, the FA rules would become more popular with the British public, which is why soccer is referred to as “football” in England and “soccer” in the rest of the Anglosphere, where local variants of Rugby had already been established by the time of the FA/RFU split.¹⁴ Rugby is still played at a high level in England despite soccer's much greater popularity, but it has attained a reputation for being a bit of a snobbish sport enjoyed by Eton alumni.

Aside on the history of American Football

If you google “when was the first game of American Football played” or “first game of College Football” you will be served factually incorrect information. This has been my pet peeve and a thorn in my side since before I began writing and researching this article. The false information is the following: “What is considered to be the first American football game was played on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton, two college teams.” This quote is lifted directly from Wikipedia. This is not correct. American Football is a SPECIFIC sport. It is not just any old game of football played on American soil! I have even seen this claim repeated by so called sports ““academics”“.¹⁵

American Football is a Rugby-descended sport played on a gridiron where the ball is moved by carrying it. There are very restrictive rules on when players are and are not allowed to kick the ball intentionally. I ask you this: does this sound like American football to you? “[The game] consisted of 25 players per team and used a round ball that could not be picked up or carried. It could, however, be kicked or batted with the feet, hands, head, or sides, with the objective being to advance it into the opponent's goal. Rutgers won the game 6–4.” This is not American Football! This is the kicking game of football! What Rutgers and Princeton were playing was a more civilized version of American kicking game “mob football” (as medieval football was called at the time). It is basically soccer. It has no relation to American Football in any way other than being a game played in America with a ball on foot.

The first game of American Football, as I explained in my article about Canadian Football, was played in 1874 between McGill and Harvard. American Football is directly descended from Canadian Football and has absolutely no relation at all to the so called “American Football” game played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. It is a genuine disgrace that the NCAA lists the “1869 season” in their College Football archive. The first actual season of College Football was played in 1874 after the McGill-Harvard game with rules inspired by Rugby Football and was won by an undefeated Yale team who went 3-0-0 that year.

The biggest mystery of all is why this is even claimed – and so widely! It is not like this game was the first time a game of medieval (pre-Rugby) football was played in the United States of America. Are Americans just too chauvinistic to admit that their national pastime was not invented in America? They have to claim the 1869 Princeton Rutgers game was American Football because otherwise they would have to admit that the first Gridiron game was played in Toronto? Not only is this unfair to our country, it is also unfair to the Yale football program who should rightly be credited as the first NCAA champions (not Rutgers).

The Football Family Tree

Based on my study on the games pretending to the name “football,” we can roughly organize the history of the sports into a single family tree extending back to Episkyros. This family tree is exhibited in the following diagram:

Extinct antecedents of modern football are shown in red. Games that are played ceremonially but do not have professional infrastructure are shown in yellow. Games with professional leagues are shown in green. Lines show both confirmed and alleged descent. I have left Shrovetide football as the ancestor of Gridiron football and Rugby football rather than differentiating between “In-Hurling” and “Out-Hurling”, as is the scholarly consensus. Calcio Storico Fiorentino¹⁵ and its tenuous connection to carrying game of football is included as a teaser for a future appendix article investigating a dubious claim I found in a late medieval source alleging Italian influence on the development of football in England.

Conclusion

So who owns the name “football” then? Well, nobody, really. The name itself is an invention of the middle ages and the original game or games that it describes no longer exist. Whatever game is called “football” in a specific part of the Anglosphere is more dependent on what variation of modern football was more popular in that region in the 19th century than on any sort of logic about the name's etymology. I will however contend the following: any game that does not allow full contact or violence of some sort should not be calling itself “football” for historical and traditional reasons. Therefore, until soccer allows full on tackling and/or fighting, FIFA should drop the name “football” from its acronym. They can take it back up when I see Messi break somebody's nose. Blood Bowl was real, and we can make it real again.

I ran out of time while writing this article, and had to stay up past my bedtime on November 30th to get it done in time. In the near future, I will go back over this article and correct any spelling or grammar errors as well as add an organized bibliography with my sources. I will also be writing an appendix article covering stuff I didn't have time for in this article, mainly about medieval football in Italy.

Footnotes

1. Despite Europeans online smugly referring to Girdiron Football as “Handegg”, the ball used in American and Canadian Football is in fact officially called a “lemon” according to the Football Canada rulebook. Perhaps calling it Footlemon would satisfy the complainers. The NFL instead refers to this shape as a “prolate spheroid,” but Footprolatespheroid simply does not roll off the tongue.
2. Blood Bowl's tagline is “the real game of fantasy football” and officially claims to be inspired by American Football, but Blood Bowl actually bears little resemblance beyond the superficial to the real life sport. Indeed, with the lack of play stoppage and inherently limited substitutions, the game is more like rugby with no onsides rule and legal forward passing.
3. Whether or not κοινος refers to “[upon the] common land” or “[in] common” as in “in a team” is apparently not unambiguous. I found more sources supporting the latter interpretation, however in his article Epikoinos: The Ball Game Episkuros and Illiad, David Elmer summarizes the common counterargument: “Episkuros was not the only ancient game (ball or otherwise) played in teams or groups, so that, on this view, the name would not refer to a particularly distinctive feature. “
4. Whether or not Harpastum was copied directly from Episkyros or in fact the Romans simply retroactively claimed that it was is not entirely clear. It's hard to directly compare the two games, as we have much more documentation on the procedures of Harpastum than we do on the specifics of Episkyros.
5. This hasn't stopped FIFA from claiming Episkyros as the original game of Soccer. Technically, they are correct, in the sense that English medieval football descends from Episkyros by way of Harpastum, but one of the few things we know about Episkyros is that very little kicking of the ball was involved.
6. I say most common rules because like all pre-modern sports games, there was not necessarily a universally agreed upon set. The Roman empire was massive, and Harpastum was played from Scotland to Egypt, with presumably many tweaks to rules from region to region.
7. Almost certainly not.
8. As the English version of the edict reads: “forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over footballs in the fields of the public from which many evils might 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.” The edict was also issued in French, wherein the football is referred to as “pelote de pee” (lol).
9. This was especially common in university towns, frequently with both the perpetrator and the victim being a young student. In the most famous incident, a group of unnamed Irish students murdered an English student named Adam of Salisbury during the course of a game played on the streets of Oxford.
10. Cromwell was England's head of state during the country's brief republican period. Despite the radically progressive nature of his regime, he and his core supporters were devout puritans. Puritans were egalitarian minded (based) but also opposed all public displays of fun and all religious holidays (cringe).
11. Although the republican era is usually associated with the austere character of Oliver Cromwell, this was actually during the reign of the republic's 3rd and final head of state: Committee of Safety Commander-in-Chief Charles Fleetwood.
12. This is why in Britain a “public” school actually refers to a school that rich kids go to (what we would call a private school). They are not “public” in the sense of public ownership but public in the sens that anyone of sufficient net worth may attend.
13. The influence of these schools was so great on the new British upper class of the 18th and 19th centuries that the Duke of Wellington himself once claimed “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
14. The word “soccer” itself comes from a 19th century fad in English slang. At the time, it was common to add the syllable “er” to the end or replace the final syllable of words as a joke. As a result, “Association Football” (as FA rules football was called) was shortened to “Assoccer” and finally “soccer”.
15. John Eisenberg – you better PRAY I don't see you in the streets of North York. This is a threat. I am putting this in the footnotes because it's less likely your lawyer will find it.