William Webb Ellis is born Posted in Anniversary , Sport on Saturday, 13 November Click on any image for details about licensing for commercial or personal use. The foul that supposedly reinvented the game of football. We would like your permission to use third party cookies. You can read more detail in our cookie policy to help you decide.
Compatible with Horse or Dog. Anglican priest who allegedly invented the sport of rugby. He was a cricketer while studying at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. He went on to play the sport at Brasenose College, Oxford. One of Ellis' Rugby School classmates, Matthew Bloxam an amateur historian and archaeologist , claimed that Ellis had been the originator of the game of rugby.
Like Abner Doubleday , who possibly invented baseball, Ellis was a potential founder of a popular sport. Birth Place: England. Baseball Player.
TV Actress. Football Player. TV Actor. World Music Singer. TV Show Host. A picture of him the only known portrait appeared in the Illustrated London News in , after he gave a particularly stirring sermon on the subject of the Crimean War.
The sole source of the story of Webb Ellis picking up the ball originates with one Matthew Bloxam , a local antiquarian and former pupil of Rugby.
On 10 October , he wrote to The Meteor , the Rugby School magazine, that he had learnt from an unnamed source that the change from a kicking game to a handling game had " On 22 December , in another letter to The Meteor , Bloxam elaborates on the story:.
A boy of the name Ellis — William Webb Ellis — a town boy and a foundationer, This being so, according to the then rules, he ought to have retired back as far as he pleased, without parting with the ball, for the combatants on the opposite side could only advance to the spot where he had caught the ball, and were unable to rush forward till he had either punted it or had placed it for some one else to kick, for it was by means of these placed kicks that most of the goals were in those days kicked, but the moment the ball touched the ground the opposite side might rush on.
Ellis, for the first time, disregarded this rule, and on catching the ball, instead of retiring backwards, rushed forwards with the ball in his hands towards the opposite goal, with what result as to the game I know not, neither do I know how this infringement of a well-known rule was followed up, or when it became, as it is now, a standing rule. Bloxam's first account differed from his second one four years later. In his first letter, in , Bloxham claimed that Webb Ellis committed the act in , a time by which Webb Ellis had left Rugby.
In his second letter, in , Bloxham put the year as The claim that Webb Ellis invented the game did not surface until four years after his death, and doubts have been raised about the story since , when the Old Rugbeian Society first investigated it. The sub-committee conducting the investigation was "unable to procure any first hand evidence of the occurrence". Among those giving evidence, Thomas Harris and his brother John, who had left Rugby in and respectively i. Thomas Harris, who requested that he "not [be] quote[d] as an authority", testified that Webb Ellis had been known as someone to take an "unfair advantage at football".
John Harris, who would have been aged 10 years at the time of the alleged incident, did not claim to have been a witness to it. Additionally, he stated that he had not heard the story of Webb Ellis's creation of the game. Thomas Hughes author of Tom Brown's Schooldays was asked to comment on the game as played when he attended the school — He is quoted as saying "In my first year, , running with the ball to get a try by touching down within goal was not absolutely forbidden, but a jury of Rugby boys of that day would almost certainly have found a verdict of 'justifiable homicide' if a boy had been killed in running in.
It has been suggested by Dunning and Sheard that it was no coincidence that this investigation was conducted in , at a time when divisions within the sport led to the schism : the split into the sports of rugby league and rugby union.
Dunning and Sheard suggest that the endorsement of a "reductionist" origin myth by the Rugbeians was an attempt to assert their school's position and authority over a sport that they were losing control of. An article by Gordon Rayner in The Sunday Telegraph about the origin of Rugby football, says that Thomas Hughes told the investigation that in — a Rugby School boy called Jem Mackie "was the first great runner-in", and that later in or before Jem Mackie was expelled from Rugby School for an unspecified incident; in boys at the school first wrote down an agreed set of rules for the version of football played at Rugby School, which is now rugby football.
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