Published: About an hour ago
John Gay, in Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, characterizes football in 1716 as a game quite different from the contemporary version?a game, in fact, that more resembled a riot than an organized form of recreation:
I spy the furies of the foot-ball war:
The ?prentice quits his shop to join the crew,
Encreasing crouds the flying game pursue.
Thus, as you roll the ball o?er snowy ground,
The gath?ring globe augments with ev?ry round.
But whither shall I run? the throng draws nigh,
The ball now skims the street, now soars on high;
The dext?rous glazier strong returns the bound,
And jingling sashes on the pent-house found.
Friends of both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Gay was an influential writer who helped document the daily life of the people living in early-18th-Century England. His description of the game corroborates other accounts that tell of streets filled with soccer balls (plural?as I?ve written before, there weren?t many rules back then), people leaving work to join the action (?the ?prentice quits his shop to join the crew?), and matches being played over miles of territory (?whither shall I run??).
Under the title on the first page of the third edition of Gay?s work is a quote from Virgil: ?quo te Moeri pedes? An, quo via ducit, in urbem?? (Whither afoot, Moeris? Is it, as the path leads, to town?) The path, in the case of early football, went to and through town, as well as the surrounding countryside. How cool is that?
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