ABSTRACT
One way of investigating the growth and acceptance of sport in England in the Victorian period is to assess the degree to which social and cultural support systems both encouraged and stabilized its development. Nationalism, manliness, morality and health were among the major cultural supports underpinning the development of organized sport and, in particular, rugby football. Central to our understanding of the influence of these interrelated support systems is the context in which they directly contacted sport. The public schools and universities played an important part as arenas in which these supports influenced, and were influenced by, the development of sport. As Holt notes, '[a] dramatic enlargement and transformation of private secondary education provides the best way of understanding the peculiar importance attached to the regulation and promotion of sports by Victorian elites. It was public schoolmen who founded ... the Football Association in 1863, [and] the Rugby Union in 1871. 'I And while it appears to have been cricket and rowing which dominated the sporting life of the public schools and Oxbridge in the early years of the nineteenth century,2 by mid-century football was emerging as an educational tool. By 1880 one form of football, rugby football, was the dominant activity in promoting the now fully fledged philosophy of morality (the monk) combined with manliness (the beast) which permeated both institutions.
