The Folklore of Discworld

necessary, and ritually ‘beaten’ with rods. Sometimes boys were upended and beaten too, to make sure the next generation remembered everything quite clearly.
    The custom does not often survive in towns, but in Oxford on Ascension Day two parishes still provide a spectacle remarkably similar to what can be seen in Ankh-Morpork (but without the ferrets, alas). In the words of folklorist Steve Roud:
    The boundary markers in Oxford can be set into walls, high or low, or even into the floor, and can be down narrow alleyways, in basements, and behind or inside buildings. The routes take in the college buildings within the parish as well as shops and pubs, much to the surprise of people they meet on the way. They stop for refreshments at various locations, and at one point students throw coins and sweets for the choristers to scramble for. [ The English Year (2006)]
    In Ankh-Morpork there are also traditional student activities, notably the dreaded Rag Week, which has all the normal perils of student humour with the additional seasoning of magic. Prudent citizens take evasive action, but the event is welcomed by the landlords of the Mended Drum, the Bunch of Grapes, and other hostelries, since much alcohol is traditionally consumed.
    The even more dreaded mass football match is now discontinued. This used to involve teams of fifty students apiece fromthe University itself and from each of the Guild Colleges attempting to kick or carry a football from the outskirts of the Shades to the Tower of Art. Goals were scored by kicking the ball through the door (or more often the window) of landmarks along the way, most of them having names like the Mended Drum, the Bunch of Grapes, etc. The scoring team had then to be bought drinks by the other teams. Much alcohol was traditionally consumed. There were occasions when the match went on for a month.
    Something very similar used to happen on Earth, and in some cases still does. For, just as there is a whole area of folklore that concerns singing very loudly until being given money to stop, or at least to go away and infest some other street, so there is an area chock-full of folk games that consist of two sides trying to get a ball (or similar token) into an opposing goal by means of, apparently, a bout of allin wrestling.
    In many towns of Britain, some five or six hundred years ago, the streets would periodically be jammed tight with a heaving mass of young men shoving, kicking and head-butting one another. If you watched long enough, you would probably work out that it was not a fight after all, but some kind of game played between two teams. Somewhere down out of sight there would be a ball being kicked or carried, for this was the true, the original, form of British football. No rules worth mentioning, no limit on the number of men crazy enough to play for one team or the other. No goal posts either; the ‘goals’ would be at opposite ends of the town, at least a mile apart, and might just as likely be ponds or streams as buildings. It was a wild, violent type of game, and might very well last all day. In Derby in 1829 a writer explained how it was done:
    The game commences in the market-place, where the partisans of each parish are drawn up on each side, and about noon, a large ball is tossed up in the midst of them. This is seized on by some of the strongest and most active men. The rest of the players immediately close in upon them, and a solid mass isformed. It then becomes the object of each party to impel the crowd towards their own particular goal. The struggle to obtain the ball, which is carried in the arms of those who have possessed themselves of it, is violent … It would be difficult to give an adequate idea of this ruthless sport. A Frenchman passing through Derby remarked that if Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they called fighting.
    If you asked the players what the point was, they’d probably tell you it celebrated the defeat of some Scotsmen (or Englishmen, or Vikings, according to taste), whose heads were then kicked round the battlefield.
    The tough young fellows who played it absolutely loved it. Others were less enthusiastic. People got injured, as the respectable citizens of Chester complained in the 1530s, ‘some having their bodies bruised or crushed, some their arms, heads or legs broken, and some otherwise maimed or in peril of their lives’. Worse still, windows got broken, which was expensive. The town