A Social History of English Rugby Union

"Well, before we do that, it’s important to say that this list is a rugby union list, so these are essential books for rugby union. There would be a different five books for rugby league, which has a different literature. Aha! Well, if you really want to know about the difference, you need to read Tony Collins’s Social History of English Rugby Union, which brings a lot of different sources together for the first time. One of the things Collins explains is how rugby broke off into the two different sections. Well, the main difference is that rugby league is a professional game. Originally, rugby was an amateur sport, and in the late 1800s there were questions about broken time payments – people taking time off work, especially in the North, to play rugby; they wanted to be remunerated for that. The people playing rugby in London were mainly from private schools, with private incomes, and therefore they didn’t think anyone should be paid and that the amateurism was very important. In the North they said, ‘Blow to that, we are going to pay our players,’ and they became rugby league, a game for 13 players (whereas there are 15 in rugby union). Rugby union went professional about a hundred years later. They are, yes. Well, there are whole books about it! I would need to go and write an MA before I could explain the difference. I mean, yes, they are slightly different. But the Social History of English Rugby Union describes how rugby league broke off from rugby union. Anyone looking for an essential book about rugby should read this book. It’s about where the game started – did it start at Rugby…? Almost certainly not. It’s been a creation myth for the game which has been very useful, but really, it’s very unlikely that it started there, although it evolved out of the football games of the 18th century in the same way that Association football evolved out of the same original games. Rugby was a slight variation, but the game was codified through the public schools, and this book tells you about the influence of the public schools and later on how the game changed as it spread around the world. It’s a very good one-stop shop for all these questions, if you want to know how the game started, and how it got to where it is now."