Was rugby born from a schoolboy breaking the rules?
The famous Webb Ellis story surfaced more than 50 years later, and no solid evidence for it has ever been found.
There is one story you will almost always hear about how rugby began. In 1823, during a game of football at Rugby School, one of England’s best-known boarding schools, a boy named William Webb Ellis ignored the rules, tucked the ball under his arm and ran for the opposing goal. And that, the story goes, was the birth of rugby.
The trophy awarded to the winners of the Rugby World Cup even bears his name. But how much of the tale is actually true?
A story that appeared 50 years later
The story first appeared in print in 1876. In a letter to The Meteor, the Rugby School magazine, a former pupil named Matthew Bloxam wrote that the change in the rules allowing the ball to be picked up and carried had originated with “a town boy or foundationer of the name of Ellis, Webb Ellis.” By then, more than 50 years had passed since 1823.
What is more, Bloxam had attended the school from 1813 to 1821, so he could not have seen it himself. And Webb Ellis had died four years earlier, in 1872, in Menton in the south of France. There was no longer any way to ask him.
No witnesses could be found
In 1895, the Old Rugbeian Society, the school’s alumni association, set out to check the story. It contacted former pupils who remembered those days. A few recalled Webb Ellis as a schoolboy, but not one of them had seen the famous incident of 1823, or even heard it talked about while they were at the school.
Even so, the society’s report in 1897 concluded that running with the ball had “in all probability” started with Webb Ellis. A commemorative stone was set into a wall at the school, praising the boy “who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it.”
Thomas Hughes, on the other hand, who entered the school in 1834 and is best known as the author of the novel Tom Brown’s School Days, testified that when he arrived, running with the ball was still forbidden. The World Rugby Museum at Twickenham, near London, also notes that the society’s inquiry turned up no first-hand evidence. Today, many historians regard the tale as an origin myth.
There was no “soccer” yet
The idea that Webb Ellis broke the rules of soccer needs correcting too. In 1823, soccer did not yet exist as a separate sport. English schools each played “football” by their own rules, and at Rugby School, catching the ball with your hands was already allowed. But a player who caught it was expected to move backward, and running forward with the ball was not permitted.
Over the years that followed, running with the ball gradually won acceptance at Rugby School, and around 1841 it was formally allowed. In 1845, three pupils wrote down and published the school’s football rules, said to be the first set of football laws ever made public in writing.
The fork in the road, 1863
In 1863 the Football Association (FA) was founded in London to create a single set of rules. But members disagreed over whether to allow running with the ball and “hacking,” kicking an opponent in the shins, and Blackheath and some other clubs walked out. The FA’s rules led to modern soccer, while the Rugby Football Union, formed by 21 clubs in 1871, led to the rugby we know today.
So rugby was not born from one boy’s flash of inspiration. It took shape over decades, as a jumble of school football games slowly split into two separate paths.
The Webb Ellis story is still much loved all the same. In 1997, a bronze statue of him running with the ball was put up outside Rugby School. The legend may not be history, but it lives on as a story about the spirit of the game.