Rugby

Rugby football (commonly referred to as rugby) is a contact team sport, which originated in England in the 19th century and is played worldwide nowadays. The name rugby comes from Rugby School, a boarding school in Rugby, Warwickshire, where the game was first played.

History

According to a legend, rugby football was invented by William Webb Ellis, "who with a fine disregard of the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game. AD 1823"[1] Although Webb Ellis certainly existed, there is no evidence that the incident described above really took place. During the early and mid-19th century no set rules for neither football nor rugby existed. Many public schools, where the games were mainly played, had there own set of rules, which was passed on orally. The first written set of rules was compiled in 1845 at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire. Rugby rules allowed handling the ball and types of tackling, which were outlawed at other schools. The pupils of the different schools brought widely differing rules to university, which caused discord and led to the evolvement of two different codes of football, rugby football and association football. The Football Association (FA), which used the rules played at Cambridge University, was formed in 1863. Eight years later, on 26 January 1871, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) was founded by 21 clubs which disagreed with the rules of association football. Since then, several new codes such as American Football, Canadian Football, Australian Football, Gaelic Football and Rugby League have evolved.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/sport_01.shtml

Sources

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/sport_01.shtml

Richards, Huw. A Game for Hooligans: The History of Rugby Union. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2006