Peter Swain's monograph The Emergence of Football: Sport, Culture and Society in the Nineteenth Century makes an important contribution to one of the major ongoing debates within the historiography of soccer. This centers on the significance afforded to the public schools and their former pupils in the codification of the game, its spread, and the extent to which forms of folk football had died out by the 1830s. The book is structured around ten chapters. Following the introduction, chapter 1 examines the earliest evidence for football in Britain. Swain carefully chronicles its presence from (possibly) the twelfth century onward, mainly through evidence of government legislation and rulers’ attempts to curtail its existence, owing to its sometimes violent nature.
This is a solid opening before the author goes on to discuss the historiography of the Industrial Revolution in chapter 2. Having provided new evidence for the presence of camping or “camp-ball”...
