Victorian Football: From Mob Rule to Class Rule

You’re a freshman at Harvard in 1827. It’s Bloody Monday. You’re out on the commons field and the upperclassmen bellow a chant: “Football, Freshie—Football, Freshie,” and before you and your fellow first-year classmates know it, you are all standing on a field, pitted against a sea of sophomores amassed at the opposite end of the expanse.

A ball is set down in the middle. Some charge like bores and others like rams while some are skittish and run with hesitant gaits. But all advance to clash at mid-field. At the point of collision, the sport of football is exchanged for the sport of may lay.

You spot a long wiry boy who has spotted you. He charges, lowers his shoulder, and hammers you to the turf. Winded and dazed you roll to your feet. A sophomore is kicking your Boston Latin chum in the shins. He howls and crumbles to the ground. You tackle the assailant and jab his nose until it gushes red.

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Quoted in the Harvard Crimson, J.K. Hosmer (Harvard class of 1855) said this form of football “comprised an artless game without elaborate hard and fast rules” and would likely be unrecognizable to football fans decades later.

In 1860, Harvard faculty and parents insisted Bloody Monday be banned. And it was. To honor their mob football ritual, the students conducted a mock funeral, interning a football while chanting

Beneath this sod we lay you down,

This site of glorious fight

With dismal groans and yells we’ll drown

Your mournful burial rite!

***

Along with guns and rum, British colonists brought mob football and other folk football traditions from Britain to North America. And just like a few Kings of England and the Lord Mayor of London, the colonial authorities regulated the game. Playing football in 1657 on the streets of Boston cost the offender 20 shillings.

It was also recorded in 1762 that “no person shall kick a football in the public places, streets or lanes within Salem, Massachusetts.” Just like their English cousins, American colonists continued to play folk football despite interference from the authorities.

Yale and a few New England high schools play mass forms of football in the 1790s. By the second decade of the 1800s, educated young men on both sides of the pond are playing different versions of football—seemingly increasingly less “mass” but nonetheless 25-30 plus a side. Some schools allow running with the ball in addition to kicking it. Some allow batting, throwing, or passing the ball.

Even though rules and methods vary within England and New England there are transatlantic constancies: one, kicking a ball through goal posts or over a goal line; two, violence. Football was

A test of mettle.

About 25 a side

A feast of fights

Some maimed, a few died

A game of war

A game of guts, a game of pride.

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04/25/2025 12:29 pm GMT

The War of 1812 ends in 1815, Great Britain and America resume trade with each other. British boats sail into Boston Harbor, carrying goods and a smattering of football rules and methods of play. New England schools, academies and universities, select and patch together the British football elements they favor and create their individual versions, which morph over time.

There will be no American rule book until the 1870s. Loose sets of minimal rules are transmitted verbally over time, inevitably transformed again and again over decades. Trial and error and crosspollination also push along the stubborn development of football within New England.

Just as schools in the United Kingdom, the New England schools cherish their unique codes and rank them above those of all other schools. A team might allow handling the ball. If so, can a player catch, carry, bat, or pass it? In what manner can the ball be kicked? Is there place kicking, drop-kicking? What about goal posts? Crossbars?

These distinctions impede interscholastic and intercollegiate play. Matches remain solely intramural until the 1850s for prep schools and 1869 for universities and colleges. Games pitting grades and dorms and even sections of the alphabet against each other seem to be satisfying competition arrangements for players and spectators.

And if you were at Harvard up until 1860, there was always the infamous annual mob football game, Bloody Monday, to look forward to—or maybe to dread for those who have to answer to the chant: “football, freshie—football, freshie.”

Just like armies invade, warrior athletes ultimately want to test themselves against enemies “abroad”. It is highly likely that challenging another campus—prep, collegiate, or club—was a mid-century yearning for New England footballers, but it was definitively a desire in England. We know this due to the preservation of a seminal document: The Rules of Association Football 1863.

On a cold night in a London pub, December 1, 1863, twelve footballers gather in a pub to define and codify shared rules of football—an agreed upon necessity to develop and unify the sport. But the committee members knock heads in a scrum of colliding concepts of football.

Several tavern conferences and many pints later, these young men formally establish the first football league and pen the first uniform football code. As a result, the seeds of soccer, rugby, and American football are planted.