This was written three hundred years ago, and these are not the words of a modern reporter, "They have sleights to meet one betwixt two, to dash him against the heart with their elbows, to hit him under the short ribs with their griped fists, and with their knees to catch him on the hip and pick him on the neck."
Stubbes may be set down by many as a sour-visaged, sour-voiced Puritan; but a very gracious courtier of his day, an intelligent and thoughtful man, Sir Thomas Elyot, was equally severe on the game. He wrote, in 1537, The Boke named the Gouvernour, full of sensible advice and instruction. In it he says:—
"Foot-ball wherein is nothynge but beastlye furie and exstreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurte; and consequently malice and rancour do remayne with them that be wounded; whereof it is to be putt in perpetuall silence."
The "perpetuall silence" which he put on the game has not fallen even by the end of three centuries and a half.
Some indirect testimony as to the character of the English game comes from travellers in the American colonies, where the American Indians were found playing a game of foot-ball like that of their white brothers. John Dunton, travelling in New England when Boston was half a century old, tells of the Indians' game:—
"There was that day a great game of Foot-ball to be played. There was another Town played against 'em as is sometimes common in England; but they played with their bare feet, which I thought very odd; but it was upon a broad sandy Shoar free from Stones which made it the more easie. Neither were they so apt to trip up one another's heels and quarrel as I have seen 'em in England."
At the same time English boys were kicking the foot-ball around Boston streets, and were getting themselves complained of by game-hating Puritan neighbors, and enjoined by pragmatical magistrates, just as they were in English towns.
Fewer games are played now by both boys and girls than in former times, in England as well as America. In a manuscript list of games played at Eton in 1765 are these titles: cricket, fives, shirking walls, scrambling walls, bally cally, battledore, pegtop, peg in the ring, goals, hop-scotch, heading, conquering cobs, hoops, marbles, trap ball, steal baggage, puss in the corner, cat gallows, kites, cloyster and hyer gigs, tops, humming tops, hunt the hare, hunt the dark lanthorn, chuck, sinks, stare-caps, hurtlecap. No games are now recognized at Eton save cricket, foot-ball, and fives. Racquet and hockey flourished for a time. The playing of marbles was abandoned about 1820, and top-spinning about 1840. Top-time had always opened ten days after the return to school after the summer holidays. Hoops were made of stout ash laths with the bark on, and the hoop-rolling season ended with a class fray with hoopsticks for weapons. At one time marble-playing was prohibited in the English universities. It is not probable that those undergraduates habitually played marble any more than do our Princeton University men, who have a day of marble-playing and one of top-spinning each spring.
