The origin of rugby football is reputed to be an incident during a game of English school football at Rugby school in Warwickshire in 1823, when William Webb Ellis is said to have picked up the ball and run with it. Although the story may well be apocryphal , it was immortalised at the school with a commemorative plaque that was unveiled in 1895, and the Rugby World Cup trophy is named after Webb Ellis. Rugby football stems from the form of the game played at Rugby School, which former pupils then introduced to their universities.
Former Rugby school student Albert Pell is credited with having formed the first ” football” team while a student at Cambridge University. Major private schools each used different rules during this early period , with former pupils from Rugby and Eton attempting to carry their preferred rules through to their Universities. A significant event in the early development of rugby football was the production of a written set of rules at Rugby School in 1848.
Formed in 1863, the national governing body The Football Association ( FA) began codifying a set of universal football rules. These new rules specifically banned players from running with the ball in hand and also disallowed hacking( kicking players in the shins) , both of which were legal and common tactics under the Rugby Schools rules of the sport. In protest at the imposition of the new rules , the Blackhealth Club left the FA followed by several other clubs that also favoured the ( Rugby Rules). Although these clubs decided to ban hacking soon afterwards, the split was permanent, and the FA codified rules became known as ” association football” whilst the clubs that had favoured the Rugby Rules formed the Rugby Football Union in 1871, and their code became known as ” rugby football”
In 1895, their was a major schism within rugby football in England in which the numerous clubs from Northern England resigned from RFU over the issue of reimbursing players for time lost from their workplaces. The split highlighted the social and class divisions in the sport in England, and led directly to the creation of the separate code of ” rugby league”. The existing sport thereafter took on the name ” rugby union” to differentiate it from rugby league. but both version of the sport are known simply as “rugby” throughout most of the world.
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