It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Football in the form that we recognise today didn't really begin to coalesce until the 16th and 17th centuries, but English references to games of "fote-ball", "fute-ball", "ffootballe", and so on, start in the late medieval period. At this early stage there were few, if any, regulations. There was no set number of players and no clearly …
Continue reading “This murdering play”: the violent origins of English football
Inspired by a recent re-read of Philip Larkin's Jill, the story of a working class northern student in 1940s Oxford, I decided to do some research on early twentieth century student life in Oxford. While I've always known that Oxford a hundred years ago was a heavily male-dominated place, until this week I'd not realised the …
Continue reading Boys will be boys: gender segregation in Edwardian Oxford
To hear church bells ringing continuously for as long as half an hour, several evenings a week, is no surprise if you live in central Oxford as I do, so I was particularly amused at something I read about today. In 1797 a book called Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth was …