The British Home Championship (also known as the Home International Championship) was an annual football competition contested between the UK's four national teams, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Ireland before 1921-1922), from the 1883-1884 season until the 1983-1984 season.
By the early 1880s, the four national football teams of the UK were playing regular friendlies against each other, with nearly every team playing all the others annually. At the time, the football associations of each country (The Football Association (England), the Scottish Football Association, the Football Association of Wales and the Irish Football Association) had slightly different rules for football, and when matches were played the rules of whoever was the home team were used. While this solution was workable, it was hardly practical. To remedy this, the four associations met in Manchester on December 6th 1882 and agreed on one uniform set of worldwide rules. They also established the International Football Association Board to approve changes to the rules (a task that they still perform to this day).
The new rules meant that formal international competitions could now easily be devised. Thus, at the same meeting, the associations formalised the annual friendlies and the British Home Championship - the world's first international football competition - was born.
The Championship was held every football season, starting with the 1883-1884 season (the first ever match seeing Scotland beat Ireland 5-0 away on January 24th 1884). The dates of the fixtures varied, but they tended to bunch towards the end of the season (sometimes the entire competition was held in a few days at the end of the season). Initially the winner of the competition was seen as the best team in the world, though as football developed around the world this tag was dropped. The rise of other international competitions, especially the World Cup, meant that the British Home Championship lost a lot of its prestige as the years went on.
However, the new international tournaments meant that the Championship took on added importance in certain years. The 1949-1950 and 1953-1954 Championships doubled up as qualifying groups for the 1950 and 1954 World Cups respectively and the results of the 1966-1967 and 1967-1968 Championships were used to determine who qualified for Euro '68.
The competition was discontinued after the 1983-1984 competition. There were a number of reasons for the demise, including falling attendances at all but the England v Scotland games, fixture congestion, the rise of hooliganism to epidemic levels and The Troubles in Northern Ireland (civil unrest led to the 1981-1982 competition being abandoned).
The Championship was replaced by the smaller Rous Cup, which involved just England, Scotland and, in later years, an invited guest team from South America. That competition, however, ended after just five years.
In recent years, there have been many proposals to resurrect the British Home Championship, with advocates pointing to rising attendances and a significant downturn in football-related violence. Many see the qualifying competition for the 2006 World Cup (in which England, Wales and Northern Ireland have been drawn in the same group) as an important test bed to the viability of restarting the competition.
The competition was contested with each team playing the other three once each (making for a total of three matches per team and six matches in total). The teams would play either one or two matches at home and the remainder away, with home advantage between two teams alternating each year (so if England played Scotland at home one year, they would play them away the next).
A team would receive two points for a win, one for a draw and none for a loss. From these points, a league table was constructed and whoever was top at the end of the competition was declared the winner. If two teams were equal on points, that position in the league table was shared (as was the Championship if it occurred between the top teams). From the 1979-1980 Championship onwards, however, goal difference (total goals scored minus total goals conceded) was used to differentiate between two teams on level points.
Winners list courtesy of the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (http://www.rsssf.com/tablesb/bhc.html)