On Atherstone high street last Shrove Tuesday a large man lay on top of a deflated football while hundreds of townsfolk fought to wrestle it away from him. Footage on YouTube shows commitment of an alarming intensity. As men bodysurf over the crowd, one chap sits on an elevated ledge of Lewis Pointon Estate Agents and lashes out with punches and kicks.
This is the Atherstone Ball Game, one of the 15 ancient contests that still take place in Britain and which, according to the landlord of the Market Tavern, can still get “right lively” even in this age of health and safety regulations. “I’ve seen plenty of black eyes as well as teeth flying.”
Played without goalposts or even a goal, the winner at Atherstone is the man, or woman, in possession of the ball when the klaxon sounds at 5pm. Hence the mêl?e. Last year the tattooed champion had forearms like Popeye and a chest like a barrel of beer.
When one French visitor saw the Derby version of the Shrove Tuesday games in the early 19th century, he is said to have commented: “If the Englishmen call this playing, it would be impossible to say what they call fighting.” A couple of hundred years later the English vice on the football field remains a rough technique.
Perhaps these Uppies and Downies, the forerunners of our national sport, have something to do with it, although Hugh Hornby, author of a new study, is eager to emphasise that the ancient matches are not just legalised punch-ups (although that is surely the attraction for some).
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Hornby prefers to regard them as part of a grand British tradition and proof of a rich regional diversity. It is a heritage we should cherish more than ever, he says, at a time when the football fan is being alienated by overpaid stars and expensive tickets.
For Uppies and Downies - so called because the games would pit the two ends of a town against each other - Hornby visited every one of the 15 surviving contests, from Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands to St Ives in the western tip of Cornwall. He saw games played on boarded-up high streets and others across miles of fields and rivers. He spent time standing on the fringes enjoying the ceremony. At others, he was sucked into the thick of things.
“I’ve been knocked flat on my back in Workington. They just ran over me,” he said. “I’ve had the ball in my pocket in Jedburgh. That was probably the most exciting football moment I’ve had in quite a few years. You have to work out your strategy, how you can get it to the goal without being rumbled. I failed miserably. I was frisked within five minutes. You have to throw the ball over your head and on it goes.”
Hornby’s take on the history of football is that too many books are preoccupied by the rules and, as a result, start in the Freemason’s Tavern in London in 1863 when the Football Association held its inaugural meeting. He concludes that we should trace the game back farther - to King John and the 12th century in Atherstone’s case - and see football as not just a sport but as an important communal festival.
“The great unanswered question in a lot of books, including some very good historical studies, is why did the people of Britain so enthusiastically take to soccer and rugby,” he says. “It doesn’t really follow that because a group of a few men in London and the Home Counties sat down and agreed some rules you quickly have literally tens of thousands in Lancashire, Yorkshire, the West Midlands becoming quite so fervent when the FA Cup starts (in 1871).
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“The thread that should be traced, and hasn’t been, is the notion of the big match as an occasion over and above the game itself. The gathering together of people, the drinking certainly, the singing, the dressing up in some cases. This has a very long tradition in Britain through Uppies and Downies.”
There used to be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such games played in small towns across Britain. Their extinction came before the development of modern football, with its leagues and common rules. The process of eradication had already been started by local councils that either banned the events altogether or banished them from the high street.
The goodwill of the police, councils and local shopkeepers keeps just 15 alive, although some of them, such as Alnwick in Northumberland, can rely on only a few dozen enthusiasts. At Hobkirk, in the Scottish Borders, there are so few players that anyone walking past on February 11 (most games are played this month) might think that a gang of lads are fighting over a dropped 50 pence piece.
In Workington, a proposed Tesco superstore in the middle of the playing field may provide an obstacle, although not an insurmountable one. “The players will just have to adapt, as they have done since before 1775,” Hornby said. “That was the year of the first published match report but there are references in literature to various Uppies and Downies going back centuries.” Hornby’s book is an historical study, a modern-day guide to the games and also a plea that the remaining fixtures are allowed to survive with all their quirks and idiosyncrasies. In Haxey, Lincolnshire, the “ball” is a leather cylinder. At Hallaton, in Leicestershire, it is a small wooden barrel. There is not much kicking.
At Ashbourne, where the game can attract a crowd of several thousand, the contest can last for seven or eight hours, long into the evening. A goal requires the scorer to stand in the River Henmore and touch the ball against a wall. In Atherstone, the leather ball is deliberately slashed to make it easier to hold. It is not unknown for out-of-towners to kidnap it.
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In the circumstances, injuries are inevitable but Hornby is eager to play up the communal spirit and make less of the rough and tumble. “I am anxious throughout the book to puncture the balloon of violence that is attributed to the games,” he said. “It is undoubtedly an outlet for younger males to be physical, to bond, and there are the scars of battle. But many writers have talked about multiple deaths, homicides, through the centuries and it is not correct. The vast majority of fatalities are drownings, heart attacks, hypothermia if a player falls in a river and has to walk home on a cold February night.”
The thread from such a game to modern football, with its wages of £130,000 a week and the players driving home in Bentleys, may seem tenuous. But it is not too difficult to imagine Wayne Rooney scrapping over possession. I am betting that he would quite enjoy himself in the midst of the scrum, wrestling for the ball and defending it with his fist, if necessary.
Uppies and Downies: The Extraordinary Football Games of Britain by Hugh Hornby
English Heritage, £16.99; 180pp
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Where to watch
The following towns and villages will be holding traditional Uppies and Downies this year:
St Ives, Cornwall Monday Feb 4, am
Ashbourne, Derbyshire Tuesday Feb 5 and Feb 6, pm
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Atherstone, Warwickshire Tuesday Feb 5, pm
Alnwick, Northumberland Tuesday Feb 5, pm
Sedgefield, Co Durham Tuesday Feb 5, pm
St Columb Major, Cornwall Tuesday Feb 5 and Sat Feb 16, pm
Hobkirk, Roxburghshire Monday Feb 11, pm
Jedburgh, Roxburghshire Thursday Feb 14, pm
Ancrum, Roxburghshire Saturday Feb 16, am/pm
Denholm, Roxburghshire Monday Feb 18, pm
Workington, Cumbria Friday March 21, 25 and 29, pm
Hallaton, Leicestershire Monday Mar 24, am/pm
Duns, Roxburghshire Friday July 11, pm