The Game of Rugby
The game of Rugby in named after Rugby school in the town of Rugby in Warwickshire, which is where it was invented.
It was during a football match in the autumn of 1823 that one of the players, a boy named William Webb Ellis picked up the ball in his arms and ran with it."
As Ellis and his fellow Rugby School pupils moved on to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge they took thier own version of 'Rugby Football' with them. Many then became teachers in turn and and so spread the new game amongst boys schools across the land and the cycle began again.
By the late 1800s there were firmly entrenched rules, but a breakaway faction of England's Rugby Football Union (RFU) known as the Northern Union split off in 1895 to play a game with slightly different rules. This became known as Rugby League as opposed to Rugby Union which continued as a similar but distinctly separate game.
Read about the Rugby League World Cup
Visit the Rugby Union official website