While the _Turnverein_, or popular gymnastic society, was spreading over Germany, and systems of school gymnastics were being developed in that country and in Sweden, a variety of sports and organized games had become an established feature of life in the English public schools and universities.[156] As might be expected, these different types or phases of physical training have later begun to react upon each other, and each has been copied in more or less modified form in other countries. Most European states now have societies modelled after the German _Turnverein_, and the gymnastics of Spiess won friends among educational authorities far beyond the bounds of Switzerland and Hesse. We have found the playground movement making headway in Germany and Denmark, but shall also see the Swedish system of school gymnastics gain a foothold in England, as it had already done in Denmark. In the first chapter of his “Athletics and Football” (The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes) Montague Shearman has reviewed the history of athletic sports in England. He attempts to show “that competitions in running, jumping, and hurling of heavy weights are not only indigenous to the land, but have been one of the chief characteristics of both town and country life in England as far back as chronicles will reach; and that athletic sports, though they have had their days of waxing and waning, have always been a feature of life in ‘Merrie England.’” Young Londoners in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189) practised “leaping, wrestling, casting of the stone, and playing with the ball,” together with other exercises, in open spaces set apart for their use near the city. We have seen (p. 55) that Sir Thomas Elyot, in _The Boke_ published in 1531, refers to lifting or throwing the heavy stone or bar, wrestling, running, swimming, handling the sword and the battle-axe, riding, vaulting, and shooting in a long bow. Some idea of the universal prevalence of vigorous forms of recreation in the early part of the seventeenth century we gain from a passage in Robert Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_. Writing of exercise as a cure (Partition 2, section 2, member 4), he first considers hunting and fishing, and then goes on to say that “many other sports and recreations there be, much in use, as ringing, bowling, shooting (archery), which Ascham recommends in a just volume (_Toxophilus_, 1545) ...; keelpins, tronks, quoits, pitching bars, hurling, wrestling, leaping, running, fencing, mustering, swimming, wasters (fencing with wooden swords), foils, football, balloon, quintain, etc., and many such, which are the common recreations of the country folks; riding of great horses, running at rings, tilts and tournaments, horse-races, wild-goose chases, which are the disports of greater men....” The ordinary occasions for the pastimes of the common people were Sundays and church festivals, and the numerous country fairs. Joseph