In 1765, some 2,000 acres of common land were enclosed at West Haddon in Northamptonshire, provoking a determined act of popular resistance by local people opposed to the enclosure laws that allowed wealthy landowners to lay claim to what had previously been public land. To assemble a crowd without alerting the authorities, an advertisement was placed in the county newspaper announcing a football game to be played in the fields of West Haddon. The ruse proved effective: after the kick-off began, the assembled mob turned to destruction, tearing down and burning the newly erected fences.
The damage caused was considerable, amounting to an estimated £1,500 worth of destruction. The event is a notable example of football being used as a deliberate pretext to organise a riot against enclosure, a tactic employed in other parts of England during the same period. At Kettering in 1740, for instance, a match of football had similarly been advertised as a cover for pulling down a local mill, while disturbances in the Deeping Level near Peterborough had required the sheriff of Lincolnshire to raise the posse comitatus to restore order.
At West Haddon in 1765, organisers of the protest against enclosure placed an advertisement in the county newspaper for a football game to be played in the fields, using the sport as a means to assemble a mob; once gathered, the crowd set about tearing down and burning the newly erected fences, causing approximately £1,500 worth of damage to the enclosures that had swallowed up some 2,000 acres of common land.
None recorded in the sources
A mob assembled under the pretence of a football match; no military or law-enforcement force is recorded in the sources
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