Strutt’s volume on “The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,” published in 1801, gives an entertaining description of town and country recreations practised “from the earliest period to the present time,” and it also reflects the general interest in such matters at the opening of the nineteenth century. [Illustration: FIG. 48.—Eton College: The Wall Game (From “Football, the American Intercollegiate Game,” by Parke H. Davis).] When we come to the particular forms of active sport or pastime which have been popular in Great Britain at one time or another we are amazed at their number and variety. Activities once practised as a necessary part of daily life survive in the sports of hunting, shooting, falconry or hawking, fishing with rod and line, and archery, and the same is true of walking, mountaineering, rowing and sailing, swimming, skating, and the like. The primeval joy of combat has been furnished by wrestling, boxing, fencing with foil and sabre, single-stick and quarter-staff. Man has matched himself against man in foot-races, broad and high jumping, weight-throwing and putting the stone or shot, the hammer-throwing and caber-tossing of the Scottish highlands, and the pole-vaulting which probably had its origin in contests between messengers whose calling required them to cross ditches and hedges with the help of jumping-poles. The game of bowls has been traced back to the thirteenth century or farther, and curling has been popular in Scotland for three centuries or more. Skittles, quoits, and hockey or shinny (shinty) have been played time out of mind. Golf was a formidable rival of archery in Scotland as far back as the middle of the fifteenth century; but English interest in the sport is comparatively recent. Polo was not introduced from the East until about fifty years ago. Tennis and fives, racquets and squash racquets have long had their devotees, and lawn tennis is now added to the list. Cricket, while it existed in England as long ago as 1600, did not become widely popular until towards the middle of the next century; but football “is undoubtedly the oldest of all English national sports. For at least six centuries the people have loved the rush and struggle of the rude and manly game” (Shearman). [Illustration: FIG. 49.—Football at Rugby School (From H. H. Hardy’s “Rugby.”)]