Output details
30 - History
De Montfort University
A social history of English Rugby Union.
The book is the first serious historical study of the sport of rugby in England. It took seven years to research and write. It is 120,000 words in length and covers an extensive period, essentially from 1857 to 2003. It necessitated the use of several major archives, notably the English and Australian Rugby Football Unions, the International Rugby Board, the Rugby Football League, various rugby clubs, Mass-Observation and The National Archives, in addition to hundreds of books, pamphlets and ephemera. The detailed prosopographical analysis underpinning the book’s analysis of class relations in rugby also involved considerable and painstaking statistical research.