Prologue

In Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, R.W. Southern wrote:

Theology, Law, and the liberal Arts were the three props on which European order and civilization were built during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – that is to say, during the period of Europe’s most rapid expansion in population, wealth and world-wide aspirations before the nineteenth century. ²

All three props owed their coherence and influence to the development of schools of European importance. Masters and pupils came from every part of Europe ³ and took the sciences which they had learnt back to their cities, towns and villages, and sometimes to places much further afield, where they applied them to the practical issues of life and death, to the advancement of their own well-being and to making a livelihood. ⁴

A similar development occurred in Europe in the nineteenth century. ⁵ In European, and especially in English, schools in a similar period of rapid expansion in population, wealth and worldwide aspirations, props of gender, moral, social and political order were erected. Educationists used modern sport as a central prop to support a structure of perceived moral superiority. This is no exaggeration. ⁶ Some of these educationalists feature prominently in my Reformers, Sport, Modernizers. ⁷ They helped to change Europe – and the world – ideologically, recreationally and topographically.