Football was being played in medieval Scotland, research reveals



Mr McBrearty said, “It is research I have been involved with for about 10 years. We have been looking at the origins in Scotland and how it was played. We have been looking at small closed games that were played and evidence of structure and skill. We found fragments of information which show that there has been an evolution of the game which goes back hundreds of years.”

One important piece of evidence was the diary of nobleman Sir Francis Knollis, who was ordered by Queen Elizabeth I to hold Queen Mary of Scots under house arrest in Carlisle when she fled Scotland after being forced to abdicate. The diary includes an account of a game played for the Scottish monarch in 1568, which involved 20 players and lasted two hours. The game played on a field that was 50 metres long with trees planted at either end used as goal posts.

This helps to explain why in the 1970s workers in Stirling Castle discovered  a round object hidden behind the thick oak-panelled walls of the bedchamber used by Mary, Queen of Scots. The leather ball, which has been dated to 1540, is considered the world’s oldest football.

Another account of early football comes from the diary of Robert Bowes, England’s ambassador to the Scottish court in the early 1580s . He writes, “Some quarrel happened the other day between Bothwell and the Master of Marischal (George keith) upon a stroke given at football on Bothwell’s leg by the Master. After that the master had before received a sore fall by Bothwell.” The ambassador added that it almost led to a duel between to the two men, but that when King James VI heard of the dispute he put a stop to it.

Historians have believed that a football-like game was played throughout the British Isles for hundreds of years, but that it was unorganized and lacking proper rules. The first written set of rules for the game was made in 1848 by professors at the University of Cambridge.

But McBrearty says this new evidence points to a new origins for the game: “The accounts of small football matches in the grounds of castles suggest the game, in its current form, is much older than officially documented. It appears football was more of an evolution than a 19th century revolution. There are enough examples to make a case for the game being invented much earlier.”

Sources: National Library of Scotland, The Daily Mail, The Daily Record, Press Association

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