John Charles Thring: footballer, codifier, advocate, schoolmaster and priest

N. L. Jackson, in his celebrated early history of the game, Association Football (1899), judged that John Charles Thring had laid the ‘the groundwork on which the Association code was built’. Thring’s rules for The Simplest Game, first published in 1862, and his call for a ‘football parliament’, in 1863, are two examples. Thring’s enthusiasm for the game spanned more than thirty years from the 1830s: playing at Winchester College and Shrewsbury School; playing, organizing and codifying at St John’s College, Cambridge; teaching and codifying at Uppingham School; playing in Wiltshire; and advocating or disputing national initiatives through correspondence to newspapers. Thring, the younger brother of Uppingham School’s famous headmaster, Edward, is remembered in many accounts of the early history of football but they are not always accurate. This essay aims to set the record straight.