Football and Austen documents net six-figure sums
Documents from the archive of the world’s oldest football club, including a football rulebook, are sold at Sotheby’s for £881,250, while a Jane Austen manuscript goes for just under £1m.
The lot included a handwritten draft of the rules from 1858 and a published pamphlet from the following year, entitled The Rules, Regulations, & Laws of the Sheffield Football Club.
The document archive was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder. In addition to the rulebooks, the lot includes match reports from the early 1860s.
As well as the football memorabilia, the auction saw the sale of the earliest surviving manuscript by Jane Austen, a hand-written draft for a book that was never published. It too was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder, for £993,250 which was over three times more than the estimate.
The novel tells of Emma Watson, the youngest of four sisters, who is raised by a wealthy aunt but then forced to return to her family while two of her sisters search for husbands. Although the story is only a quarter complete, it has been described by the author Margaret Drabble as “a tantalising, delightful and highly accomplished fragment, which must surely have proved the equal of her other six novels, had she finished it.”
Rules of the game
For football enthusiasts, the widespread interest in the sale of the Sheffield FC material stems from the fact that many of the rules we associate with the modern game were innovations introduced by that club, including the indirect free kick, the corner kick, and the crossbar.
The rulebook includes the following stipulations –
(Rule 5) “Pushing with the Hands is allowed but no Hacking (or tripping up) is fair under any circumstances whatsoever.”
(Rule 12) “Each player must provide himself with a Red and dark blue flannel Cap – one colour to be worn by each side.”
Although football games in the first half of the 19th century allowed handling, the Sheffield code is forward-thinking in that it allows only for limited use of the hands.
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Gabriel Heaton, manuscript specialist at Sotheby’s, explains how the original rulebook came to be drawn up.
“In 1857 this group of gentlemen in Sheffield came together and decided to form a football club,” he told Channel 4 News. “They sat down and codified the first laws of club football.”
“This is the first time that the game comes out of that rather limited milieu of academia. And Sheffield, of course, was an important city – lively, and actually a wealthy city at the time.
“Within a few years you have what is the world’s first footballing culture, of rival teams, club uniforms, vociferous supporters, cups. All of this happens first in Sheffield following these rules.”
Sheffield FC Chairman Richard Tims said: “We are delighted with the sale of this extraordinary piece of sporting history, the proceeds of which will allow Sheffield Football Club to develop its facilities and secure its future as the home of grass-roots football.”
The Book of Rules of Association Football, published in 1863 by the English Football Association, were nominated for inclusion by author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg in his 2006 book Twelve Books That Changed the World.