From traditional games to modern sports

Soule and real tennis, the English public schools, codification and the first federations: how games became sports in the nineteenth century.

The outline, topic by topic

Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.

Soule: what is it?
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A medieval team ball game between villages or parishes, with local rules and few limits on violence.
Like English folk football, it belongs to the medieval ball games; it was in England that such games became football and rugby.
In 1863, English clubs met and split. What was the disagreement about?
- Running with the ball in hand and kicking opponents' shins (hacking)
- The size of the pitch and the goals
- The number of referees on the pitch
- Paying the players
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Running with the ball in hand and kicking opponents' shins (hacking)
The clubs that kept handling the ball founded the Rugby Football Union in 1871.
Real tennis: what is it?
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A ball game played by hand then with a racket, very popular in France from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.
It is tennis's ancestor; the Tennis Court Oath (1789) took place in one of its halls.
Why is England the cradle of modern sport?
- Parliament made sport compulsory in schools from the early nineteenth century
- Its universities had kept the rules of the ancient Greek Games intact
- Ball games existed nowhere else in Europe at the time
- Industrialisation, public-school elites and a taste for written rules codified games there in the nineteenth century
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Industrialisation, public-school elites and a taste for written rules codified games there in the nineteenth century
Free time, cities, schools and clubs brought together the conditions for sportisation.