‘This stone remembers the exploit of William Webb Ellis who with a fine disregard for the guidelines of soccer, as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the special feature of the Rugby game A.D. 1823′
The game of Rugby has a superb history that is steeped in customs of the ages. Rough and tumble games involving multiple players on each side fighting to get possession of a ball made from a pig’s bladder stuffed with air and transport it to a marker at one end of a patch of ground can be traced into the middle ages. Frequently these games have Celtic and Viking origins. Otherwise, they can be traced back to the Romans. However , these games came to be, we do know that the folks of Britain had a passion for playing them.
There wasn’t any formal set of rules to regularize these games. Instead, the local players were known to make up there own rules on the spot. Because these games were so coarse and people were so regularly hurt, maimed or even rubbed out in the playing of them, the law began taking measures to outlaw the playing of such games.
The laws went as far as to make it illegal to play on public roads or public lands. The laws did not discourage people from collaborating in sporting events. It just meant that the games were moved from public lands to personal lands. College became popular venues for such sports events because they had massive enough tracts of land for playing, and because giant numbers of boys and younger guys were picked up there.
The classic story that has been passed down through generations is that in the year 1823 at a Brit college in the town of Rugby, a young man named William Webb Ellis was engaged in playing a game with his school pals. At a critical moment in the game, he showed utter disregard for the guidelines and picked the ball up and ran with it across the field, scoring a point for his team.
This story, though very hip, is most probably not completely true. There isn’t any real evidence to support the story, but Rugby players love the story and so it has lived on. In fact, there’s an en-graven stone at Rugby which carries the message located at the start of this article. What’s fact is that William Webb Ellis did attend Rugby college at roughly the time Rugby turned into a distinguishable game. And the origins of the game can be traced to the school in Rugby, thus the name Rugby was given to the game.
By the 1840′s the game had gained renown, and Rugby clubs began to spring up across the land. However , there were still no standardised rules, and each club played by their own rules. In January of 1871, a meeting was held in which delegates from all 22 Rugby clubs were in attendance. In this meeting the Rugby soccer Union was set up and a delegation was selected to create a standard set of rules. The guidelines were introduced by June 1871, and the official sport of Rugby was born.
In the 1890′s the division between commercial classes split the Rugby union in 2. This break slowed the progression of Rugby Football for nearly a century. In that time Rugby continued to be played in clubs around Europe, Australia and New Zealand, but other games which also sprang from the seeds of those medieval sports played with an inflated pig’s bladder,eg American football and soccer moved into the forefront. Today, Rugby is making a comeback. Latterly, members of the world Olympic council voted to include Rugby Sevens as an official sport in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
