Introduction : the development of rugby football as a sociological problem -- 1. The folk-antecedents of modern rugby and their decline -- 2. Football in the early-nineteenth-century public schools -- 3. The preconditions for modernization : embourgeoisement and public school reform -- 4. The incipient modernization of rugby football -- 5. The 'civilizing process' and the formation of the RFU -- 6. The democratization of rugby football -- 7. Professionalization and the amateur response -- 8. The split -- 9. The class structure and the professionalization of British sport -- 10. The professionalization of rugby league -- 11. Rugby union as a modern sport : bureaucracy, gate-taking clubs and the swansong of amateurism -- Conclusion : sociological reflections on the crisis in modern sport.