Six Nations History: From Home Nations to Modern Era
From Raeburn Place in 1871 to a six-team tournament — Six Nations history explained, with France's exclusion, Italy's arrival and England's part in each era.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Six Nations & England18 min read
- First international
- 1871
- First Championship
- 1883
- Five Nations from
- 1910
- Italy admitted
- 2000
Raeburn Place is a cricket ground in Stockbridge, on the north side of Edinburgh, and on 27 March 1871 it staged the first international rugby match ever played. Twenty players a side. Scotland beat England by a goal and a try to a try, which is a scoreline rather than a score, because the game was decided on goals and a try on its own settled nothing except a tie.
Everything the Six Nations became grew out of that fixture and the arrangement behind it: two unions agreeing to play each other regularly, on terms they negotiated between themselves, with nobody above them to appeal to. That is still, in a meaningful sense, how the Championship is run.
Before there was a Championship
The 1871 match happened because Scottish clubs wrote to the English press challenging England to a game. The Rugby Football Union had been founded earlier that year, in January, at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London. Scotland's union followed. Ireland's came next, and Wales's after that, and by the early 1880s each of the four had a national side playing the other three on an ad hoc basis.
There was no competition. There were fixtures — England v Scotland, then England v Ireland, then Wales v somebody — and an informal understanding of who had done well. The Championship in the sense of a recognised title only emerged when the four unions were all playing each other in the same season, which happened for the first time in the 1882-83 season.
- 1871First international
- 1883First Championship
- 4Teams in 1883
- 6Teams today
Fixed constitutional dates and team numbers, not results from any edition.
England won that first Championship. The recognition was retrospective in the sense that no trophy existed and nobody presented anything, but the tournament has been counted continuously from 1883 ever since, which makes it comfortably the oldest international competition in the sport and older than most in any sport.
What is easy to miss from this distance is how contested the laws themselves were. The four unions had different views on the value of a try, on what constituted a fair catch, on the legality of various forms of hacking and collaring, and on how many players a side should have. Matches were played under whichever set of laws the home union used, negotiated in advance, and the players adapted. A game that has an argument about the tackle-height law today is doing nothing its founders would find strange.
The Home Nations and its scoring quirks
Reading an early Championship table requires setting aside almost everything a modern table implies.
Matches were decided on goals. A try did not score; it earned the right to attempt a conversion — a "try at goal", which is where the word comes from — and only the successful kick counted. If a match ended with goals level, tries were counted to break the tie. A side could cross the line four times, miss every conversion, and lose to a single converted score.
The RFU introduced a points system in 1886, and the four unions took some years to align on the values. During that period the same passage of play could be worth different amounts depending on where the match was played, which is exactly as unsatisfactory as it sounds and was one of the pressures behind the creation of a single international authority.
Titles were shared for most of the competition's history when teams finished level. Points difference was not used to separate them until 1994, so a table that today would produce a single champion on scoring difference produced two or three joint winners for more than a century. That change is one of the least discussed and most consequential in the tournament's rules, because it converted the Championship from a competition you could tie into one you almost always win outright. The modern points and tie-break arrangements are covered at Six Nations format explained.
The Wooden Spoon has never been a trophy and has never been awarded by anybody. It is a supporters' invention for finishing bottom, and it has proved more durable than several things that were officially instituted. Its history is at Six Nations wooden spoon.
A disputed try and the birth of an international board
In 1884, England and Scotland played at Blackheath and the match produced a dispute that shaped the sport's governance for a century.
A Scotland player knocked the ball back. England gathered it and scored. Under English interpretation, the knock-back by a Scottish player meant no infringement had occurred that Scotland could benefit from. Under Scottish interpretation, a knock-back was a knock-on and the try should not have stood. There was no independent authority to rule on it, because the home union's interpretation governed, and the home union was England.
Scotland refused to play England the following season. The Championship of 1885 was incomplete as a result. In 1886 Scotland, Ireland and Wales formed the International Rugby Football Board to settle exactly this kind of question, and England declined to join, on the reasonable-sounding and thoroughly self-serving ground that the union with by far the most clubs should not be outvoted by three unions with fewer.
The deadlock ran to 1890, when the dispute went to arbitration and was resolved against England's position on the try, after which England joined the Board — on terms that gave England more votes than the other unions individually, a disparity that took a long time to unwind.
That episode is worth more than its footnote status. It established that the laws of rugby union would be set by an international body rather than by whoever was hosting, it established England's position as both the largest union and the one most resented by the others, and it created a governance culture in which constitutional questions get settled by unions negotiating with each other rather than by any external authority. All three are still recognisable.
France in, France out
France played England in 1906 and began fixtures against the home unions from that point. The Championship became the Five Nations in 1910, when France's fixtures were counted towards the title for the first time.
For two decades the arrangement worked, in the sense that France played and generally lost. Then it stopped working. After the 1931 Championship the four home unions excluded France, and the stated reasons were professionalism in French club rugby and the level of violence in the French domestic game. Both charges had substance. French clubs were paying players, at a time when the home unions treated payment as a form of moral contamination, and the French club championship of the period had a reputation for brutality that its own authorities acknowledged.
France was told the invitation would return when the club competition was reformed. The French federation duly reorganised its domestic game, and France was readmitted for the 1940 Championship — which was not played, because Europe was at war. The effective return came in 1947.
There is a reading of the exclusion that treats it as straightforward amateur snobbery from four unions who did not much want a fifth. There is another that takes the professionalism charge at face value. The honest position is that both were operating, and that the home unions applied a standard to France they were not applying with any rigour to themselves, which is a pattern that recurs throughout the amateur era. The particular edge that developed between England and France in this period is covered at England v France, Le Crunch.
Wars, and the years with no Championship
- 1871Scotland play England at Raeburn Place, the first international rugby match.
- 1883The four home unions all play each other in one season, and the Championship is counted from here.
- 1910France's fixtures count towards the title and the Home Nations becomes the Five Nations.
- 1932France excluded over professionalism in the French club game; the tournament reverts to four teams.
- 1947France return after the war, and the Five Nations resumes.
- 2000Italy admitted, making six teams, fifteen matches and five rounds.
The tournament's structural changes. Years given are the first Championship played under each arrangement.
No Championship was played from 1915 to 1919, or from 1940 to 1946. Both suspensions cost the competition more than the seasons themselves: the generation of players lost in the First World War is commemorated on memorials at every ground in these islands, and several unions took years to rebuild playing numbers afterwards.
The resumptions had different characters. After 1918 the Championship returned quickly to something like its old form, with the same four unions and the same amateur assumptions. After 1945 it returned into a Britain of rationing and rebuilt stadiums, with France restored and with a fixture list that had to be constructed around what travel was possible.
Two later interruptions are worth recording because they show how exposed a tournament of this kind is to events outside it. In 1972 the Championship was left unfinished when Scotland and Wales declined to travel to Dublin during the Troubles, and no title was awarded. In 2001 the foot-and-mouth epidemic forced Ireland's home fixtures to be postponed into the autumn, which stretched a spring tournament across most of a year and made a nonsense of its narrative.
Neither of those was a rule change. Both are reminders that the Championship's continuity since 1883 is a considerable achievement rather than a natural state of affairs.
Unofficial fixtures filled some of the wartime gaps. Services matches were played between representative sides drawn from the armed forces, often at Twickenham, and they drew large crowds at a time when there was little else to watch. They do not count towards the Championship record and no caps were awarded for them, which is the correct treatment and slightly unfair to the players involved, several of whom were internationals playing international-standard rugby in front of forty thousand people.
The postwar rebuilding also changed who played. Clubs that had lost members reconstituted themselves around whoever returned, school and university rugby restarted at different speeds in the four countries, and the balance of the Championship shifted for a decade or more as a result. A national side's strength in the late 1940s says as much about which clubs survived the war intact as about coaching or selection.
Italy, and the argument about the sixth place
Italy was admitted for the 2000 Championship, and the case against admission had been made loudly for years. Italy would be uncompetitive. The tournament would acquire two guaranteed one-sided matches per round. Broadcasters would object. Ticket revenue at the other unions would fall for the Italian fixture.
Italy's first match answered the first objection in the strongest available terms. On 5 February 2000, at the Stadio Flaminio in Rome, Italy beat Scotland 34-20, with Diego Dominguez scoring 29 points. Scotland had won the final Five Nations Championship the previous year.
The years that followed were harder, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Italy have finished bottom of the Championship far more often than any other nation and have endured long sequences without a win. The arguments about their place have recurred at intervals ever since, and the arguments in favour have shifted from competitive to structural: Italian participation gave the sport a professional base in a large country, it created a route for Italian players into professional rugby, and the alternative — a closed four-or-five-team tournament in perpetuity — offers no path for the game to grow anywhere in Europe.
Italy moved their home fixtures from the Stadio Flaminio to the Stadio Olimpico in 2012, which trebled the capacity available and made the Rome weekend one of the best-attended trips in the Championship. The move was commercially obvious and it cost the fixture something: the Flaminio was small, steep and loud, and the Olimpico is not.
The competition's structure since 2000 — six teams, five rounds, fifteen matches, no play-off — has been unchanged, and the Six Nations format page sets out how it operates now.
Points, and how they changed the game
Scoring values are the closest thing rugby union has to a policy lever, and the Championship's authorities have pulled it repeatedly in one direction.
The try was worth three points for the first three-quarters of the competition's history. It went to four in 1971 and to five in 1992, and both changes had the same stated purpose: to make scoring tries worth more relative to kicking goals, and so to encourage sides to attack rather than to play for penalties.
Movement in the other direction affected the kicking scores. A drop goal was worth four points until 1948, when it was reduced to three. The goal from a mark, a kick at goal awarded after a clean catch of an opponent's kick, was worth three points and was abolished outright in 1977.
| Scoring act | Earlier value | Current value |
|---|---|---|
| Try | 3, then 4 from 1971 | 5 from 1992 |
| Conversion | 2 | 2 |
| Penalty goal | 3 | 3 |
| Drop goal | 4 until 1948 | 3 |
| Goal from a mark | 3 | Abolished in 1977 |
The effect on typical scorelines has been large, and it compounds with law changes that have nothing to do with points values. A Championship match in the 1950s that finished 9-6 and a match today that finishes 27-20 are not describing different amounts of scoring so much as different currencies, and comparing them directly is a mistake. The full current scoring table is at rugby scoring system explained.
There is a case that the try's rise in value has done less than intended. Penalty goals remain the most reliable points in the game, the penalty count in a modern Test is far higher than in a 1960s one, and a well-drilled side can still win a Championship match without scoring a try. The lever works, but it has not overridden the incentives that make kicking attractive.
The trophy, and the trophies inside it
For most of its existence the Championship had no trophy at all. Winning it meant winning it; there was nothing to lift.
A Championship trophy was introduced in 1993, and a redesigned version was brought in for 2015. Both are recent enough that a photograph of a 1980s Championship-winning captain shows him holding nothing, which is genuinely strange to a modern eye.
What the Championship has always had is its side trophies, several of which are older than the tournament itself and none of which affect the table.
| Trophy | Fixture | From |
|---|---|---|
| Calcutta Cup | England v Scotland | 1879 |
| Millennium Trophy | England v Ireland | 1988 |
| Centenary Quaich | Scotland v Ireland | 1989 |
| Giuseppe Garibaldi Trophy | France v Italy | 2007 |
| Auld Alliance Trophy | France v Scotland | 2018 |
| Doddie Weir Cup | Scotland v Wales | 2018 |
The Calcutta Cup is the oldest and the strangest. Calcutta Football Club disbanded in 1878, withdrew its funds from the bank in silver rupees, had them melted down and made into a cup, and presented it to the RFU. It has been played for by England and Scotland since 1879, it is the only one of these trophies with a genuine claim to global fame, and its history is at Calcutta Cup explained. The Millennium Trophy, played for by England and Ireland since Dublin's millennium celebrations, is covered at Millennium Trophy.
A physical Triple Crown trophy did not exist until 2006. For the preceding century and a quarter the Triple Crown was purely notional — a thing you had done, not a thing you received — which suited the amateur era better than it suits the sponsored one.
Shamateurism, and the end of it
Rugby union was an amateur sport by rule from 1895 until August 1995, and by practice for a considerably shorter period than that.
The 1895 rule mattered because of what preceded it. In August of that year, at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, twenty-two clubs left the RFU over broken-time payments — compensation for working men losing a day's wages to play — and formed what became rugby league. The split is the single most important event in the history of English rugby, and it left rugby union with an amateurism that was not merely a preference but an identity, defended with a rigidity that would be hard to explain otherwise. The full account is at the 1895 split.
By the second half of the twentieth century that identity was substantially fictional in several countries. Players were compensated through jobs that required little work, through boot money, through inflated expenses and through appearance arrangements dressed as something else. The word used for it, without much embarrassment, was shamateurism, and the enforcement of the rule was highly selective — a home union player taking a sponsored car was treated differently from a player who accepted a fee to appear in an advertisement, which is a distinction of etiquette rather than of principle.
The 1995 World Cup broke it. Broadcasters and promoters in the southern hemisphere were assembling professional competitions, players were being offered contracts, and the International Rugby Board faced the choice of legitimising payment or losing control of its own sport. In August 1995 the Board declared the game open.
For the Championship, professionalism changed the club-country relationship more than it changed the tournament. National unions now compete for the time of players who are employed by clubs, and the negotiation over release, rest periods and insurance has been a source of friction in England ever since — a friction that does not exist in the same form in Ireland, where the provinces are centrally contracted.
Sponsors, broadcasters and the money
Title sponsorship arrived at the end of the 1990s, and the tournament has carried a sponsor's name in front of its own ever since, through a sequence of banks and then a brewer. Its official identity now includes the sponsor; its actual name, in the mouths of everyone who watches it, does not.
Broadcasting has shaped the Championship more than sponsorship has. The move to fixed weekends, the staggering of kick-off times so that three matches do not clash, the Friday night fixture, and the arrangement of the final round so that every match kicks off at a different hour on the same Saturday — all of these are television's doing, and all of them have improved the tournament as a spectacle. The final round is now the best day in the competition's calendar, and it exists in that form because it makes better television. Super Saturday covers how that round is built and why the sequencing matters.
The rights themselves have remained free-to-air in the United Kingdom, shared between broadcasters rather than held by one. That position is not permanently protected. The Championship's status under UK listed-events rules covers secondary coverage rather than guaranteeing live free-to-air rights, so the arrangement is renegotiated each cycle, and the question of whether a pay broadcaster will eventually outbid the free-to-air ones is live every time it comes round.
The most significant recent change is ownership. Six Nations Rugby, the company that runs the tournament on behalf of the unions, sold a minority stake to a private equity investor, giving an outside shareholder an interest in the commercial performance of a competition owned by national governing bodies. The reported purpose was to fund investment; the structural consequence is that decisions about scheduling, format and rights now have a shareholder in the room. Whether that proves good for the Championship is not yet answerable, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.
Promotion, relegation and the case for expanding
The Championship is closed. There is no promotion into it and no relegation from it, and the argument about whether that should change has run for as long as Italy have been in it.
Georgia is the case usually made. Georgian rugby has a strong domestic base, a national side that has dominated the European second tier for years, and a record against tier-one opposition that has occasionally been startling. The counter-arguments are commercial rather than sporting: the Championship's value rests on six national markets with established broadcast audiences, and swapping one of them for a smaller market would reduce the tournament's revenue at the expense of every union in it, including the one relegated.
That is a real argument and not an entirely creditable one. A competition that cannot be entered on merit is a cartel with fixtures, however good the fixtures are.
World Rugby has approached the problem from outside, agreeing a global Nations Championship that connects the Six Nations and the Rugby Championship into a biennial competition with a second division beneath it and promotion and relegation between the two on a later timetable. Details have moved more than once, so anything specific written here would age badly, but the direction is that the route in for a nation like Georgia will run through a global structure rather than through the Six Nations opening its own door.
The Championship itself, meanwhile, remains six teams playing five rounds, and there is no serious proposal on the table to change that.
England's place, era by era
England have been the largest union in the Championship since it began, and their record has been considerably less dominant than that suggests.
The early decades were shaped as much by the Board dispute as by rugby: England were strong, isolated, and absent from the competition in some seasons because of the constitutional row. Grand Slams came in 1913 and 1914, immediately before the war took the tournament away, and four more followed across the 1920s.
Then a long drought. England won the Grand Slam in 1957 and did not win another until 1980, twenty-three years later. That gap is the central fact of English rugby in the postwar period, and it happened in a country with more clubs and more players than any of its rivals. The explanations offered at the time — selection by committee, a domestic structure with no competitive league, an amateurism enforced more strictly in England than elsewhere — are all partly right and none of them is sufficient on its own.
The 1980 Grand Slam under Bill Beaumont ended it. What followed was another decade of inconsistency, and then the sustained period that defines modern English rugby: back-to-back Grand Slams in 1991 and 1992, a third in 1995, and a forward pack that dominated the Championship for most of the decade.
The 2003 Grand Slam preceded the World Cup won later that year, and the years after it were poor by the standards England had just set. A further Grand Slam came in 2016. The full sequence, season by season, is at England Grand Slam winning seasons, and the tournament record more broadly at England Six Nations title history.
One point of usage is worth making, because it is misunderstood constantly. The phrase "Grand Slam" was applied to rugby retrospectively; it was not the term used when the earliest of those seasons were played, having been borrowed from card games and adopted into rugby's vocabulary well after 1913. The achievement is older than the name for it, which is true of a good deal in this tournament.
More on English rugby across both codes sits in the rugby section, and the rest of the guides written for a British readership are on the England hub.