Scholars of sport have long known that football -- or soccer, for you Americans -- was played in the fifteenth century. However, local historians in easetern England recently discovered an account of a 1320 football game (known as "campyng" or "campball") that may have ended rather nastily. The court document reported . . . four pairs of men involved in bloody assaults (‘traxit sanguinem’) during ‘campyng’. . . . “the men had been involved in one or more ‘Camping’ match(es) and the Leet [Court] had considered it appropriate to penalise them by a fine equivalent to one day’s pay for a labourer.” Interestingly, the court records also revealed that campyng was a working-man's game: aristocrats didn't play, but laborers did. You can read the full account from that fine purveyor of medieval news and trivia, Medievalists.net. Tags: British Isles Sport Everyday folk
