In the first place, there was no such established game as football in those days. Different public schools had been playing games of ball to various different rules, and there certainly wasn’t a ban on handling the ball in the 18th and early 19th centuries, as there would later be. Games were played on unmarked fields between huge teams, often involving hundreds of boys on the same pitch. Rules were in a constant state of flux, and were a matter for negotiation when rival schools met each other.

Rugby School had first provided a playing-field for its pupils to exercise on with some land that it bought in 1750. The game that was played on it allowed handling of the ball, though generally forbade running towards the opposition goal with it. This general idea was in force from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries. At some stage in the 1820s, a variant was introduced at Rugby.

The story credits this innovation to William Webb Ellis. Its evidence rests on a letter written by an OR (Old Rugbeian) to the school newsletter, the Meteor, in December 1880. Matthew Bloxam had attended Rugby between 1813 and 1820, so his recollections are being set down some 60 years after he left. He describes the ball game played in the Close, and specifically recalls that, among its few rules, was the stipulation that “no one was allowed to run with the ball in his grasp towards the opposite goal”. This is Bloxam’s account of the Webb Ellis moment:

“A boy of the name of Ellis, William Webb Ellis, a town boy and a foundationer, who at the age of nine entered the school after the midsummer holidays in 1816, who in the second half year of 1823, was, I believe, a praeposter [prefect or monitor], whilst playing Bigside at football in that half year, caught the ball in his arms. This being so, according to the then rules, he ought to have retired back as far as he pleased, without parting with the ball, for the combatants on the opposite side could only advance to the spot where he had caught the ball, and were unable to rush forward till he had either punted it or had placed it for someone else to kick, for it was by means of these placed kicks that most of the goals were in those days kicked, but the moment the ball touched the ground, the opposite side might rush on. Ellis, for the first time, disregarded this rule, and on catching the ball, instead of retiring backwards, rushed forwards with the ball in his hands towards the opposite goal, with what result as to the game I know not, neither do I know how this infringement of a well known rule was followed up, or when it became as it is now, a standing rule.”

Note that, although Bloxam’s and Webb Ellis’s times at Rugby overlapped, the writer had left the school three years before the celebrated incident. If this is a reliable account, it is a second-hand one, perhaps told to the writer by his own younger brother, who was then still at Rugby. What can certainly be discounted is any idea that the carrying rule immediately passed into usage. It was still expressly forbidden some years after Webb Ellis had left the school.

Fixing the rules

It was only in the school year of 1841-2 that running with the ball was finally permitted. Even then there were strict conditions. A player could only run with the ball if he had caught it on the bounce, only if he was onside, and only if he didn’t immediately pass it. The first full codification of the rules emerged in August 1845, when three senior pupils were charged with the task. Their proposed 37 rules were accepted by the school authorities, and sent to a printer in the town, JS Crossley, to be set up in booklet form.

Rugby and Association football

These rules did not go unchallenged. A convocation of the major public schools in 1848 agreed the so-called Cambridge rules, which were themselves revised in 1863. Among the points at issue were what tackling practices were to be allowed. Hacking (chopping at the shins of an opposing player) and tripping up were outlawed at the latter meeting, to some opposition from traditionalists who feared that the game would become so polite that even the despised French might end up being able to play it. This was the meeting that led to the split between Rugby and Association football, the latter permitting neither hacking nor handling.

The final consensus was arrived at with a meeting at a restaurant on Pall Mall on January 26, 1871, at which the Rugby Football Union was founded. It was noted that there was still a tendency for each rugby club to play to its own particular variant of the basic rules. An interest in the game could never spread into society unless there was one template to which all adhered.

Later that year, the game’s first international fixture was played between England and Scotland in Edinburgh. The teams fielded 20 players a side, and the Scots won by a goal and a try to one goal. Half of the England team were Old Rugbeians. By the end of the 1870s, the respective traditions of the two types of football were firmly established, with Association teams consisting of 11 players and Rugby teams of 15.

William Webb Ellis left Rugby School in 1825, two years after he had reportedly casually invented one of the world’s great contact sports at the age of 16. He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, and later took Holy Orders, becoming eventually rector of St Clement Dane’s in the Strand in London. He died in southern France in 1872, the year after the game of rugby was officially born.

Union v league

All was well until the next landmark date in the sport’s story – 1895. This was when rugby itself split into two separate variants, or codes, hereafter referred to as rugby union and rugby league. The latter was established when a group of northern clubs (mainly from Lancashire and Yorkshire) walked out of the RFU over the issue of payments to players.

Rugby was supposed to be a strictly amateur game. All the players had day-jobs, and none received remuneration for playing. In 1892, it came to light that two Yorkshire clubs – Bradford and Leeds – had made compensation payments to some of their players for the time they had to take off work. The northern clubs, who were in a majority as members of the RFU, put forward a formal proposal to permit what were known as “broken time” payments, but it was voted down at meetings of the RFU in London. The Union then ordered a wave of suspensions of those clubs that were making such payments.

The issue led to a formal schism when, in summer 1895, the northern clubs met in Huddersfield and passed a motion to set up a rival league. Initially known as the Northern Union, it had attracted more members than the official RFU by 1904. In 1922, it changed its name to the Rugby Football League, and has never looked back.

The history of relations between the two rugbies has hardly ever been amicable. For many years, the RFU had a policy of blacklisting any player or club who had anything to do with any of the League clubs. The RFU itself continued to be run on an amateur basis until 1995, when it too turned professional.

Rugby league developed its own specific set of rules, with the result that it looks quite different as a game. There are two fewer players to a side than there are in rugby union, there are no lineouts, and the laws on tackling are quite distinct.

The first World Cup

In 1987, the first-ever Rugby World Cup was played in Australia and New Zealand, with the latter (the All-Blacks) emerging as the first world champions. England’s own period of European ascendancy eventually culminated in a side captained by Martin Johnson lifting the Webb Ellis trophy in a pulsating final in Sydney against the host nation, Australia, in 2003. A last-minute drop goal by Jonny Wilkinson was all that separated the teams in a 20-17 final scoreline.

The 2007 World Cup will be played in France.