Elizabethan Sports

Like us, people in the Elizabethan Era enjoyed participating in a wide variety of sports.

Mob Football 

Mob football was played with teams of unlimited players. The objective was to get the ball into a goal. This could be done by any means as long as it did not involve manslaughter or murder. Games of mob football were usually played between teams from connecting villages as an annual festival at public holidays and were prone to get out of hand and riotous. Mob football was the forerunner of rugby and modern football. A form of mob football is still played at Christmas and New Year in the Orkney Islands. There is a rumour that Mob Football was first played with the cut off head of a Danish ruler who had been killed!

Skittles

In skittles, players rolled a wooden ball towards nine wooden pins to try and knock as many as possible down.

Quoits

Quoits was played on a lawn, it consisted of throwing a hoop and attempting to land it on a wooden pole. Nowadays, quoits can be played with rubber hoops as oppose to wooden ones. Also, the box on which the pins stand are often slate nowadays where as in the Elizabethan era they would have been made out of clay so that the hoops would stick more easily.

Troco

Troco (or lawn billiards) is a forerunner of Croquet and perhaps cue sports such as snooker and billiards. A more common name for it is 'Truck' or 'Trucks', from the Spanish 'Troco' and 'Italian' Trucco meaning billiards. The game could be played by any number of people in a field or open space. In the game, spoon-like wooden cues were used to pick up a wooden ball and attempt to throw it through a ring.

Cudgels

In Cudgels, which was popular among young men, participants fought against eachother using wooden sticks. These sticks were either wooden wasters or simple clubs. This sport was in effect training for real sword fighting.

Other games and sports that were popular were archery, hammer-throwing, cards, dice and wrestling.

 On a personal note, Cricket was reported to have been played at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford in 1598, during the Elizabethan era!

Picture on banner above is of a game of Mob Football