ABSTRACT
Propelling a large ball to a goal with the hand or foot has been a feature of almost every human society. In pre-industrial Britain, football of varying types was played extensively. Yet this was a recreation that was intimately connected to the rhythms and traditions of rural life, and had no substantive continuity with the modern forms of the game that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. It would take the industrial revolution of the Victorian era to give birth to football in its modern guise.
