From: Adam <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the field.near
the bridge">

Tony Williams wrote:

> Football was banned at our school because it wasn't considered civilised
> enough ...
>

WinCoFo was periodically banned coz we were meant to be practicing our
archery & sword play coz it's quite an old game:

E.g.:

"Just how correct Matthew was in
calling football `lawful' beyond the school is debatable. Elias and Dunning
remind us that there were at least 23 edicts prohibiting football between
1314 and 1615"

"Winchester

The earliest documentary evidence of games that could have been football at
Winchester and Eton appear in the 1519 Vulgaria of William Horman to which
I have already referred. In this Latin text book Horman gives the
translation of one phrase as: `We wyll playe with a ball full of wynde.'24
Some of Horman's phrases reflect the Etonian customs, while others can only
have referred to the Winchester way of life.

Christopher Johnson, the Headmaster of the 1560s, mentions the activities
which he enjoyed when a scholar at Winchester himself, between 1549 and
1553. He says that he: `...cared much more for balls, quoits and tops than
he did for books and school.'25

Sir Henry Wotton was a Commoner at Winchester in the 1560s under
Christopher Johnson. After Oxford he became Ambassador to Venice and then
Provost of Eton. Wotton makes reference to football in one of his poems:

Jone takes her paile, and now

She trips to milk the Sand-red Cow;

Where, for some sturdy foot-balle Swaine,

Jone strokes a sillibub, or twaine.26

The first specific mention of football at Winchester is to be found in the
delightful Latin poem of Robert Matthew, a scholar from 1643 to 1647. He
describes the procession `two by two' to the top of St Catharine's Hill
every Tuesday and Thursday morning, where: `...we may play quoits, or
hand-ball, or bat-and-ball, or football; these games are innocent and
lawful...'27 Just how correct Matthew was in calling football `lawful'
beyond the school is debatable. Elias and Dunning remind us that there were
at least 23 edicts prohibiting football between 1314 and 1615.28

Football at Winchester was certainly one of the regular activities played
on St Catharine's Hill from a very early time. The College Meads
immediately adjacent to the school buildings had only been offered for the
boys' recreations occasionally; when it was too hot to play on Hills. That
Hills was still the venue for some football after Meads is made available
to the boys in 1768 is clear from a complaint to the Warden in the 1860s
that their `long game' was spoiled by a maze being re-cut in the ground.29
There were still important games taking place on St Catharine's Hill in
1818 and 1819, as a detailed diary tells us.30

"

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