2-799-006 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Foot Ball at Rugby, 1845. Schoolboys playing rugby football at the public school where the game was invented in about 1845, although forms of football in which the ball was carried and tossed date back to medieval times. 'This truly English game is played in perfection at the fine Elizabethan school, at Rugby, in Warwickshire. Our artist has sketched a match, at the moment of a "skrummage;" the buildings in the background being the Chapel and part of the School-house...Pepys, in his Memoirs, 1664-5, says, "January 2, to my Lord Brouncker's by appointment in the Piazza, Covent garden: the street full of foot balls, it being a great frost." Foot ball was mostly played by "sturdie plowmen, lustie, strong, and bold..."'. From "Illustrated London News", 1845, Vol VII.