Field Hockey 1:
Early History
The origins of field hockey have been traced to ancient Egypt and Persia and even to the Aztec Indians. Certainly, stick-and-ball games that resemble field hockey have been played by many peoples all over the world, but there's no way to draw up a family tree incorporating all, or even most, of them.
Modern field hockey may conceivably have Egyptian or Persian roots, but it can't definitely be traced farther back than a 1527 reference. The Irish "Galway Statutes" of that year prohibited "(...) the horlinge of the litill balle with hockie stickes or staves." It's interesting to note, first, that the reference is to an early form of the Irish sport known as hurling or hurley; and, second, that the casual use of the word "hockie" indicates that it was already in common use.
Hurling was the Irish version of hockey. The Scots had their own version, called shinny, shindy or shinty; in Wales, it was bandy or banty, which later became an ice sport that was probably the immediate ancestor of ice hockey.
Of course, the various names and games weren't strictly confined by geographical boundaries. Bandy was played in Norfolk and Suffolk, England, and a similar game in Cheshire was called "baddin," most likely a local corruption of "bandy." A kind of hockey variously called shinty, shenty, shindy, shinham, shinnins, shinnock, shinnop, shinnup, chinnup, shinny, shinney, and shinny-ball was played in many areas of England. In Gloucestershire, the game was called "not" because the ball was actually a knot of wood. Elsewhere, similar sports were called camp, crabsowl, clubby and humney.
Oddly, the name "hockey" doesn't appear very often; after that 1527 reference, it wasn't recorded again until 1838, from West Sussex. The origin of the word is uncertain, but it's certainly a cognate of "hook," from the shape of the stick, and it may well have entered English from the Medieval French hoquet, which means a shepherd's staff. That fact has led to the suggestion that the sport was imported to England from France, as were tennis, lawn bowls, and possibly croquet.
It's very likely that a hockey-like game crossed the Channel at some time, but only to join other similar games that were already being played in the British Isles. (France's best-known game of this sort was known as "jeu de la crosse," which, of course, lent its name to the game that the Iroquois Indians called baggataway.)
It should be noted that, by whatever name hockey was played before the mid-19th century, it wasn't played under strict rules on a field neatly marked with white lines. Like early football, or the Algonquian baggataway for that matter, teams were often made up of all the able-bodied men of neighboring villages, up to 100 or more, the goal might be the opposing village's common, and a game might last several days.
Modern field hockey began with the Club of True Highlanders, an organization of Scottish emigres living in and near London in the early 19th century. Led by a piper, club members marched to Blackheath Common in southeast London to play a game of shinty on Christmas Day of 1821. That became a fairly regular occurrence.
Blackheath was a popular playing field for several sports and gave its name to some early clubs: The Royal Blackheath Golf Club was founded about 1745, the Blackheath Harriers in 1859. Next came the Blackheath Hockey Club, in 1849. That was followed in 1862 by the Blackheath Football Club, which plays Rugby Union, not soccer.
In the meantime, hockey had become an organized sport at some public schools. Harrow's sportsmaster decreed in 1852 that a hockey team should have no more than 30 players on the field at a time and the first formal rules for the sport were drawn up at Eton in 1868.
The London Hockey Club, founded in 1871, revised Eton's rules in 1875. Also in 1875, the first English Hockey Association was organized, adopting those revised rules, which called for 15-man teams playing on a field 200 yards long. Playing the ball with the hands and lifting the stick above shoulder height were forbidden, and a spherical rubber ball was specified; believe it or not, Blackheath and some other clubs had been playing with a cubical ball up until then.
That association evidently didn't last long, because in 1886 the Wimbledon Hockey Club and Teddington Cricket Club led a movement to form a new Hockey Association, which adopted a new set of rules, basically those had been drawn up by the Wimbledon club three years earlier. The size of the field was cut in half, the number of players per team was reduced to 11, and the striking circle was added.
The first women's hockey club was founded in East Mosley, England, in 1889, and the sport quickly became popular among women. The All-England Women's Hockey Association was organized in 1895.