Richard Mulcaster

Educationist, probably born in Cumbria, NW England, UK. He studied at Cambridge and Oxford, was a brilliant Greek and Oriental scholar, and became first headmaster of Merchant Taylors School. He advocated university training for teachers, and other reforms well in advance of his time. In 1582 he published his famous The First Part of the Elementairie, which included a list of 7000 words in his proposed reformed spellings.

In 1561 he became the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School in London, where he wrote his two treatises on education, Positions (1581) and Elementarie (1582). Merchant Taylors' School was at that time the largest school in the country, and Mulcaster worked to establish a rigorous curriculum which was to set the standard for education in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

Mulcaster was born into the gentry in Carlisle, and began his formal education at Eton College, from where he progressed to King's College, Cambridge. By the time he left Oxford, Mulcaster was known for his intellectual prowess in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which he took to Merchant Taylors' School.

Richard Mulcaster has been described as “the greatest sixteenth Century advocate of football” . Mulcaster confirms that his was a game closer to modern football by differentiating it from games involving other parts of the body, namely "the hand ball" and "the armeball". Mulcaster's discussion on football was the first to refer to teams ("sides" and "parties"), positions ("standings"), the benefits of a referee ("judge over the parties") and a coach "(trayning maister)". Mulcaster describes a game for small teams that is organised under the auspices of a referee (and is therefore the first evidence that the game had evolved from disordered and violent "mob" football): "Some smaller number with such overlooking, sorted into sides and standings, not meeting with their bodies so boisterously to trie their strength: nor shouldring or shuffing one an other so barbarously ... Richard Mulcaster' enthusiasm for "footeball" in an era when it was outlawed and his detailed description of it as an organised team sport has led him to be considered the father of early modern football.