By CornyQuin
March 21 2006

Let's get one thing absolutely clear to start with: the Cornish invented rugby. We've all heard that the Cornish invented steam locomotion; Trevithick, 30 years before Stephenson. Some of us have heard that the Cornish invented powered flight; Richard Pearse, 8 months before the Wright Brothers.

Now I am telling you that the Cornish were playing the rugby football game for at least 200 years before English public schoolboys tagged their name to it.

So, what is the conventional wisdom regarding the origins of the noble game? According to the Rugby Football Union, the game owes its beginnings to an incident on the playing fields of Rugby Public School. Apparently, during a football match in 1823, William Webb Ellis, a Rugby schoolboy, caught the ball and ran with it, thus single-handedly inventing the game.

Of course, all over Britain and Europe there were already ancient Pagan traditions of whole villages taking each other on in wild, cross-­country scrummages (much like the St Columb hurling of today). What set the Rugby School game apart was that it became codified as a set of rules and some of these early rulebooks survive. It is the existence of these rules that allowed the English public schools to claim the ownership (and control) of the game as it spread across the globe.

Where do the Cornish come into the above scenario? They don't. They didn't need to. They were already playing their own national sport. Let's go back before Webb Ellis and his antics.

In 1602, Richard Carew wrote his ‘Survey of Cornwall’. Carew was writing at a time when Cornwall was very much a foreign country and the Cornish very much a foreign people to the English. He described many features of Cornish life, language and culture. When relating 'pastimes to delight the mind', he gives a full account of hurling alongside Cornish wrestling. He is clear that there are two sorts of hurling; in the west of Cornwall, 'hurling to country' and in the east parts, 'hurling to goals'.

Carew has plenty to tell us about 'hurling to country'; 'a play both rude and rough'. He was clearly describing the sort of wild sport that can still be seen at St Columb and St Ives every year and was once widespread across Cornwall.

Yet it is Carew's account of 'hurling to goals' that is so fascinating that it deserves to be quoted at some length:

“For hurling to goals, there are fifteen, twenty, or thirty players, more or less, chosen out on each side, who strip themselves into their slightest apparel, and then join hands in rank one against another; After this, they pitch two bushes in the ground some eight or ten foot asunder, and directly against them, ten or twelve score off, other twain in like distance, which they term their goals. . .

The residue draw into the midst between both goals, where some indifferent person throweth up a ball, the which whosoever can catch and carry through his adversary's goal hath won the game.. .he that is once possessed of the ball hath his contrary mate waiting at inches, and assaying to lay hold upon him...

If he escape the first, another taketh him in hand, and so a third, neither is he left until he touch the ground with some part of his body.. .Then must he cast the ball (named dealing) to some one of his fellows, who catching the same in his hand, maketh away withal as before...

The hurlers are bound to the observation of many laws, as they must hurl man to man. . .that the hurler against the ball must not butt, nor hand-fast under girdle.. .that he must deal no fore-ball, viz. he may not throw it to any of his mates standing nearer the goal than himself. . .

The least breach of these laws the hurlers take for a just cause of going together by the ears, but with their fists only, neither doth any among them seek revenge for all such wrongs, or hurts, but at the like play again.

These hurling matches are mostly used at weddings, where commonly the guests undertake to encounter all comers.”

The Survey of Cornwall, Richard Carew 1602

 

There is nowhere else in the world that can claim an earlier existence of a code of rules governing a ball game where teams have equal numbers, there is no playing the ball on the ground and the ball must be thrown backwards.

Such was the fame of the Cornish hurlers that on at least two occasions exhibition matches were played in London. In 1645, 50 Cornish gentlemen in red caps played against another 50 Cornish gentlemen in white caps.

(from Cornish World magazine 2005)

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A typical Cornish scene:
an engine house at one of the many disused tin mines.
This one is Wheal Francis near Camborne.