Folk, mass and festival football

The first extended critique of the standard history of football came from the outstanding revisionist historian, Adrian Harvey, in his seminal work, Football: The First Hundred Years. In this chapter his appraisal of the work of Francis Peabody Magoun, the American Medievalist scholar from Harvard, considered by many to have been the most assiduous researcher into the history of football, is severely challenged. Furthermore, Harvey’s five point argument surrounding the impact on folk, mass and festival football of the Industrial Revolution is clearly set out with each point being carefully examined and, in the main, found wanting. Indeed, it is argued a more sensible position to Harvey’s is one of studying variations in differing localities acknowledging the complexity, contingency and intricacy of impacts from a fluctuating number of causes as an emerging, and yet divergent Industrial Revolution, increasingly impacted on the cultural and sporting practices of first rural, and then urban, working class Britain.