ban football games, particularly the most rowdy and disruptive forms. This was especially the case in England, and in other parts of Europe, during the Middle Ages and early modern period. Between 1324 and 1667, in England alone, football was banned by more than 30 royal and local laws. The need to repeatedly proclaim such laws demonstrated the difficulty in enforcing bans on popular games. King Edward II was so troubled by the unruliness of football in London that, on 13 April 1314, he issued a proclamation banning it: "Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future." In 1531, Sir Thomas Elyot wrote that English "Footeballe is nothinge but beastlie furie and extreme violence". Football games that included ball carrying continued to be played over the century, right up to the time of William Webb Ellis's alleged invention. One form, recorded as early as 1440 and which persisted until the 19th century, was an East Anglian game called variously Camping, Campan, Camp-ball and Campyon which was explicitly based on carrying the ball and tossing it from player to player in order to continue the advance. According to an observer writing in 1823 (coincidentally the year of rugby's "invention"), Each party has two goals, ten or fifteen yards apart. The parties, ten or fifteen on a side, stand in line, facing each other at about ten yards' distance midway between their goals and that of their adversaries. An indifferent spectator throws up a ball the size of a cricket ball midway between the confronted players and makes his escape. The rush is to catch the falling ball. He who first can catch or seize it speeds home, making his way through his opponents and aided by his own sidesmen. If caught and held or rather in danger of being held, for if caught with the ball in possession he loses a snotch, he throws the ball (he must in no case give it) to some less beleaguered friend more free and more in breath than himself, who if it be not arrested in its course or be jostled away by the eager and watchful adversaries, catches it; and he in like