Since the mid-19th century, England has been widely accepted as the birthplace of modern soccer. The sport’s lineage is commonly traced back to mob football, a violent and chaotic game popular in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Hundreds of players from neighboring hamlets would separate into two teams, lock themselves into an enormous scrum and struggle blindly for control of a circular object, often an inflated pig’s bladder. The drunken pushing, kicking and pummeling could last for hours, even days, and had no time limit. The only set rule: weapons were prohibited.
In a 1583 broadside, “The Anatomie of Abuses,” the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs raged against the brutality of the pastime, which he called a “bloody and murdering practice.” In 1863, to reduce the mayhem and regulate gameplay, a young English solicitor drafted the first comprehensive rule book, which was adopted in London by the newly formed Football Association established by erstwhile boarding school lads from the likes of Eton and Harrow. Hence England’s claim to have pioneered today’s game.
“Unfortunately, that narrative is utterly without merit,” said Ged O’Brien, a retired schoolteacher and a founder of the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow. “The fact is that for centuries, football has been played in every town and village in Scotland. Not mob football, but proper football.”
Last month Mr. O’Brien and a team of archaeologists identified what they believe is the world’s oldest known soccer playing field, or pitch, on a former 17th-century farm in the town of Anwoth in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. The find offers rare physical proof of an organized playing field, in an era when written accounts of working-class recreations were scarce.
“Our discovery has serious implications for sports historians,” Mr. O’Brien said. “They will have to rewrite everything they think they know about the origins of the so-called beautiful game.”
The first clues emerged in a letter written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford, a Presbyterian cleric who was pastor at Anwoth Old Kirk (Church) from 1627 to 1638 and later a professor of divinity at St. Andrews University. In the document, he expressed dismay about parishioners who played “Foot-Ball” on Sabbath afternoons at a place called Mossrobin Farm.
“As the Anwoth minister, Rutherford was dedicated to ensuring that the locals attended services,” Mr. O’Brien said. “Any time spent in leisure was time not spent in God’s service.” To put a stop to this sacrilege, Rutherford instructed members of his congregation to erect a barrier of stones across the pitch. “It was basically a primitive ‘No Ball Games’ sign, designed to hinder play,” Mr. O’Brien said.
He and the archaeologists surveyed the hillside farmland — now a deer forage — that once comprised Mossrobin and uncovered a line of 14 large rocks cutting across a flat expanse that was 280 feet long and 147 feet wide, slightly smaller than a regulation American football field. Kieran Manchip, a project officer at Archaeology Scotland, a nonprofit organization, and who worked on the effort, said the stone row has neither the form nor the nature of a medieval or post-medieval agricultural feature, nor does it appear on historical mapping as having any of those attributes.
To determine the stratigraphy of the site, the order and relative positions of the rock layers, Archaeology Scotland opened two test pits. “These small interventions showed that the stones were loosely set on an older ground surface and not in cut slots,” Mr. Manchip said. The researchers concluded that the rocks were not intended to mark a boundary, or croplands, or to help pen in livestock. Soil analysis suggested that the arrangement dated back some 400 years, to about when Rutherford voiced his objections.
“The traditions and accounts of Rutherford’s interaction with the footballers and local community at Mossrobin fit with what is visible in the landscape,” Mr. Manchip said. “We do not have any reason to doubt the validity of these traditions and the story of regular organized football being played there.”
That interpretation is hotly contested, and not just by English football fans. Steve Wood, a trustee at the English charity Sheffield Home of Football, said there is no way to know what kind of “foot-ball” was played at Mossrobin. (Founded in 1857, Sheffield FC is recognized by FIFA, the global governing body for association football, or soccer, as the oldest football club in the world.) “If Ged makes it clearer what may or may not have taken place in terms of a game with a ball, and then explains that the game has no known connection to modern association football, then we are likely to come closer to an agreement regarding any actual historical significance the field has,” he said.
Mr. O’Brien does not lack for theories. “Because soccer matches were held every Sunday, the game could not be too rough, as the participants had to work on Monday,” he said. “No work? You starved.”
In Mr. O’Brien’s opinion, Mr. Wood’s brushoff is yet one more example of English chauvinism. “If you are trying to gaslight an entire nation into believing its people are too poor, too wee and too stupid, you need those people to know nothing about the great things that their ancestors accomplished,” he said, firmly. “The game played at Mossrobin was the grandfather of modern football. And it was Scottish.”
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