FOOTBALL AND ITS TRADITIONS 303 



ladies played the spinsters at football every year, and it is 

 said that the matrons were always victorious. 



For centuries the streets of London were infested with 

 the players at what Stubbes calls " a bloody and murther- 

 ing practice rather than a fellowly sport or pastime." In 

 Elizabeth's time we find complaints about this. Davenant's 

 Frenchman writes, immediately after the Restoration : — 



" I would now make a safe retreat, but that methinks I am 

 stopped by one of your heroic games called football, which 

 I conceive (under your favour) not very conveniently civil 

 in the streets, especially on such irregular and narrow roads 

 as Crooked Lane." Pepys tells us he went " to my Lord 

 Brouncker's, in the Piazza, Covent Garden ; the streets 

 full of footballs, it being a great frost " ; while as late as a 

 century and a half ago, along Cheapside and Covent Garden, 

 or by the Maypole in the Strand, the footballers rushed in 

 disorderly mobs, to the terror of the peaceful pedestrians. 



North of the Border, football was a favourite sport ; and 

 the facilities it gave for making a raid across the Border, 

 or taking some hostile clan by surprise, added a charm to 

 the game in the moss-troopers' eyes. In Border records 

 are found many bloody endings to meetings ostensibly for 

 playing football, as when in i6oo Sir John Carmichael, 

 the Warden of the Middle Marches, was killed by a band 

 of Armstrongs returning from a football match. Sir Robert 

 Carey, in the Memories of Border Transactions, speaks of a 

 great meeting of the Scottish riders to be held at Kelso, 

 for the purpose of playing football, which terminated, how- 

 ever, in an incursion into England. 



The most notable event in the history of Border football 

 was the famous match played on the plain of Carterhaugh, 

 on 4th December 18 15. The opponents were those old 

 rivals, the " Souters ianglice, shoemakers) o' Selkirk " and 

 the Earl of Home with his retainers in the Forest of 

 Yarrow. Lord Home, while at Buccleuch's lodge at 

 Bowhill, challenged Sir Walter Scott, then " Shirra " of 

 Selkirk, to fight out at football the ancient feud alluded 

 to in the old ballad beginning — 



" 'Tis up wi' the Souters o' Selkirk, 

 An' 'tis down wi' the Earl o' Home." 



