Do we really need laws at all?

04:02 Wednesday 3rd June 2009

Do we really need laws at all? You’ve thought that, haven’t you. Lawyers are a pox on society, and they just go on making the laws ever more complex to line their own pockets and make your life a misery.

That’s understandable but dead wrong. Lawyers didn’t invent the law. The law came first. Lawyers were invented to interpret, massage, mess with and make money from the law. You invented both law and the lawyers.

If you want to blame anyone (other than yourself) William Webb Ellis is a good choice. The undoubtedly apocryphal story of William Webb Ellis is that he was a student at Rugby School in England in the 1870s, participating one day in a game of football (ie soccer). Without warning, in the middle of the game he just picked up the ball with his hands and ran with it. And so, the game of Rugby was invented.

Now, of course it didn’t just happen like that. You can imagine the real scene. The lads are kicking the ball around like they have done for years, when suddenly Ellis Minor, in a bit of a mood after a good rogering from one of the prefects, looks around and thinks “What’s to stop me picking this bloody ball up and running with it?” And so he does, and he was right. There was nothing to stop him at all.

At the time, in the absence of a Football Federation, there were no Rules of the Game. Football had developed over the centuries, perhaps imported by Sir Walter Raleigh or spice merchants or slave traders or plague-infested rats from the Incas or Mughals or (most likely, they invented everything else) the Chinese, held together by some undefined and ever-adapting convention in the same way that Aboriginal history is handed down entirely by word of mouth and never reduced to writing.

Everyone knew how to play football solely because they’d seen someone else do it that way. Like Chinese whispers, it had naturally changed. Nobody had ever thought to pick up the ball, but it was inevitable that someone would. And that, as fate would have it, fell to Ellis Minor.

As there was no Rule saying he couldn’t, Ellis was within his rights to pick up the ball and run with it. In doing so, he ruined the game of football as everyone then knew it, because it’s really hard to kick a ball out of someone’s hands (especially if he’s tall).

The effect must have been pandemonium. Urgent meetings would have been called in the school hall, because the world order had been turned on its head. We don’t know how it all played out, but we do know how the dilemna was resolved.

The result was that football went one way (with the ball remaining firmly on the foot) and rugby went the other. How this was achieved was simple – they created laws.

Football set about codifying itself to, for starters, prohibit players from repeating Ellis Minor’s trick. Rugby did the same thing and, for starters, provided that what Ellis Minor did was perfectly legal.

And so, for both codes of what had been one game, the lawmakers set out on the eternal course of creating, repealing, amending, interpreting and enforcing a set of laws governing how their game was to be played. And they didn’t stop there. They added laws for how the players were to behave while playing it. And laws for how they were to behave while not playing it. And how the clubs that employed them were to behave, and pay them, and the colours they could wear and which sponsors’ logos they could display. And how the spectators could behave. And how the broadcasters could behave. And whether female journalists could get into the changerooms. And will it ever end, no of course it will not.

You can’t imagine the game of football, or rugby, or rugby league, without the intricate web of rules and laws that govern it today. But it started without any of that. And if William Webb Ellis hadn’t had the imagination and daring to pick up the ball and run with it because there was no law that said he couldn’t, no laws would ever have been needed.

Blame William Webb Ellis. For he is you.