Ground billiards

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Not to be confused with the later game of trucco or lawn billiards.
Ground billiards
Ground billiards in 15th-century France (1480 woodcut, based on the Saint-Lô Tapestry). This version uses a port (arch) and conical king pin, is bounded by a wicker railing, and appears to make use of one ball per player, with more than two players.
First played14th–15th century Europe
Characteristics
ContactNo
Team membersSingle opponents shown in illustrations; doubles or teams mentioned in 1674 indoor rules
Mixed-sexYes
TypeOutdoor and possibly indoor
EquipmentBall, mallet/mace, hoop, king pin
VenueLawn or court
Presence
ObsoleteYes

Ground billiards is a modern term for a family of medieval European lawn games, the original names of which are mostly unknown, played with a long-handled mallet (the mace), wooden balls, a hoop (the pass), and an upright skittle or pin (the king). The game, which cue-sports historians have called "the original game of billiards",[1][2]: 117  developed into a variety of modern outdoor and indoor games and sports such as croquet, pool, snooker, and carom billiards. Its relationship to games played on larger fields, such as hockey, golf, and bat-and-ball games, is more speculative. As a broader classification, the term is sometimes applied to games dating back to classical antiquity that are attested via difficult-to-interpret ancient artworks and rare surviving gaming artifacts.

History

Ground billiards in England, c. 1300s (1801 woodcut reproduction of 14th century image). This variant uses short, crude mallets, the port, and a round-bottomed king pin.

Dating back to at least the 15th century as a tabletop game,

medieval France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, or more than one of these areas. More exotic and earlier origins have also been proposed.[4][5]

five-pins. Some later stick-and-ball games, including cricket, also evolved multiple pin targets over time. Ground and table billiards were played contemporaneously,[1]: 36  and the outdoor version remained known until at least the beginning of the 19th century;[3]: 4  derived lawn games like croquet continue to the present day.[3]

The game's relationships to bowling, golf, hockey, and bat-and-ball games are not entirely certain. It is clear that bowling, in its ancestral form of skittles, shares a common origin with ground billiards, as the two game types share both the basic objective, to direct a rolling ball towards one or more targets, and similar equipment, aside from the mace.[1]: 43  Some contemporary sources depict the same game being played both with the hand and with a mace, and show a distinctive teardrop-shaped king pin design,[1]: 34, 43, 47  with a rounded, wide bottom and a slender top. This pin shape suggests that it may have been the origin of the modern bottom-heavy design of bowling pins and similar skittles of various sizes used in a wide variety of games. A conical king or jack, or sometimes a spherical jack or pallino,[a] as used in modern bowls, boules, bocce, and pétanque, has been employed in lawn-bowling games since at least as early as the 13th century in England; all these games have the same basic objective, to get as close to the jack as possible with one's own ball.[4] Conical king pins are found in depictions and actual surviving game equipment (of carved stone) from Ancient Egypt.[1]: ch. 1  Later equipment was typically made of wood, sometimes also with clay, bone, or ivory pieces.

The

kolf or kolven, uses a tall, flat-bottomed king pin (paal, 'pole, stake').[a]

Engravings dating back to c. 1300[1]: 33  show a game being played that is an early variant of either ground billiards or one-on-one field hockey (assuming there was any significant difference other than game speed and vigour), sometimes within a bounded area. A similar game has survived to modern times, in the form of box hockey (which uses a flat puck in a confined space, and archways or "mouse holes" cut into wooden barriers, rather than stand-alone arches).[6]

An Ancient Greek game, similar to and possibly ancestral to ground billiards and field hockey (c. 600 BCE)[1]

There are hints that ground billiards may be far more ancient than the

Medieval European activity of c. 1300 CE.[1]: 2, 5, 27  An ancient Greek game said (in Leila Dorion's and Julia Shepherd's 1928 History of Bowling and Billiards) to be "analogous to billiards" was reported in Greek writings around 400 BCE, contemporary with the game's play.[4]

Billiards scholars Victor Stein and Paul Rubino conclude in The Billiard Encyclopedia that there is an unbroken chain of game evolution from very widespread prehistoric ball-and-stick games and rituals, through the civilizations of

women's sport) dates to the 1200s there.[11]

Late medieval ground billiards is seen as the precursor of many later, more familiar outdoor and indoor games, including croquet and its variants, and table-based billiards games including snooker, pool (or pocket billiards, including nine-ball, eight-ball, etc.), pocketless carom billiards varieties, and the hybrid pocket–carom English billiards. Ground billiards is described as "the original game of billiards" by Michael Ian Shamos in The Encyclopedia of Billiards,[2]: 117  an assessment echoed word-for-word by Stein and Rubino.[1][page needed]

Games played with crook-footed sticks and a ball have been found throughout history around the world. For example, in Inner Mongolia in modern-day China, the Daur people have been playing beikou, a game similar to modern field hockey, for about 1,000 years.[12]

Stein and Rubino also devote considerable historico-cultural analysis to the Ancient Egyptian lawn/court and board games with equipment similar to medieval European lawn billiards and to bat-and-ball games, and they speculate that for the Egyptians there may have been rich religious symbology involved. They note the resemblance of the games' ball, shooting stick, and king pin to the orb, sceptre or ceremonial mace (which originally had a crook at the top like a gaming mace), and crown of imperial regalia, which later were adopted by the pagan Romans and (in modified form) in turn by medieval rulers of Christendom. It is suggestive that games like ground billiards in the medieval Christian world were for centuries primarily the purview of and preserved by the clergy and the nobility, with peasant game-playing suppressed to the extent possible by many rulers, as unproductive.[1]: ch. 1 

Game play and equipment

The exact rules of game play, and whether these rules were consistent from region to region, are unknown.

pockets in the sides of the table as hazards, with additional scoring opportunities,[13] and some outdoor ground-billiards courts may have used golf-style holes for the same purpose.[6]

An outdoor form of the game that survived until the early 20th century was trucco. Its rules were covered in popular works like the Victorian advice book Enquire Within upon Everything, which also called it simply "lawn billiards" (and which covered the related game croquet separately). Trucco, in this well-documented form, was played in a round area at least 8 yards (7.3 m) in diameter by two players (or more, in two teams). The game used large, heavy balls and iron-headed maces like giant spoons which were used to toss rather than roll one's ball toward the port, by this stage a freely rotating metal ring mounted on a stake and almost flush with the ground. Scoring shots included passing one's ball through the port, and striking an opponent's ball with one's own (a cannon or carom shot, in billiards terms, or in croquet called a roquet). Part of the strategy of this form of the game was using such shots to get close enough to the port for a shot at it to be easier (failing to go dead-center would likely result in not just a miss but rotation of the ring to an unpredictable position, or even in knocking the ring down, which was a foul with a penalty).[14] A prior form, illustrated in an early-17th-century English painting, shows a smaller, rectangular court, and only one ball between two players. Some continental European forms did involve a king pin.[14]

The balls, mace, and other equipment for ground-billiards games were probably most commonly made of wood. The Complete Gamester, covering only the indoor variant favored by the wealthy, recommended hardwood such as

country houses, could be played anywhere the ground was relatively flat (the conventional Victorian rules simply called for at least 4 yards (3.7 m) from the outer edge of the playing area to the ring on every side).[14] Most woodcuts and other illustrations of ground-billiards games show two players. A few show more (typically waiting and observing on the sidelines), but it is unclear if these represent teams, doubles, individual players in a many-player game, or people waiting their turn.[1]

Legacy

A mid-20th-century version of ground billiards (aside from the aforementioned box hockey) has been played on a 30 by 60 ft (approximately 9 by 19 m) clay court.[2]: 117  This may have been an influence from croquet, as roque, an early-20th-century Olympic variant of croquet, used a court of the same dimensions.[16]

The term "king pin" or "kingpin", which today may refer to essential components of any system, from bosses of organized crime syndicates to the main support bolt in the axle assemblies (trucks) of skateboards, appears to derive from its usage as a key component of ground billiards, early skittle bowling, and related games.[17]

The traditional green of billiards, pool, and snooker

Louis XI of France (1461–1483).[18][2][page needed
]

Notes

  1. ^
    false friends", and not etymologically related. Paal, 'stake, stick', is cognate with English pole, both deriving from Latin pālus, 'pole, stake, prop'. Italian pallino, 'little ball, pellet', like the Middle English pall[e] in pall-mall/palle-malle (and the word pellet itself), are from Latin pīla, 'ball', in Late Latin sometimes rendered palla or balla via Frankish (Germanic) influence; cf. etymology of English ball
    .
  2. ^ There are clear depictions of the ancient Greek game in period materials, but the identification of it with the name κερητίζειν is disputed; see, e.g.: http://sarantakos.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/keretizein/ (English summary at http://hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com/2010/03/ancient-greek-field-hockey.html).

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 9780615170923
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 9781558217973
    – via Internet Archive.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-0-85263-730-2
    .
  4. ^ a b c d e Dorion, Leila C.; Shepherd, Julia A. (1928). History of Bowling and Billiards. Kansas City, Missouri: Constable-Hurd Printing Co. pp. 28, 65, 68.
  5. ^ a b Twardy, E. S. (May 1, 1937). "Divot-digging Crime to Scottish Ancients". The Lima News. Lima, Ohio. Associated Press. p. 9.
  6. ^ a b Littell, E. (1869). The Living Age. Boston. Retrieved 4 March 2019.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  7. ^ Aurddeilen-ap-Robet (1 October 2013). "History and Rules for Medieval Ground and Table Billiards" (PDF). rusticadornments. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  8. ^ "The Origins of Golf". Golf-Information.info. 5 October 2015. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
  9. ^ "Paganica (game)". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
  10. ^ Oikonomos, G. (1920–1921). "Κερητίζοντες". Archaiologikon Deltion. 6: 56–59.
  11. ^ "Up for the match: how Leix won the 1915 All-Ireland hurling final". RTE.ie. 24 July 2017. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  12. ^ McGrath, Charles (August 22, 2008). "A Chinese Hinterland, Fertile with Field Hockey". The New York Times. Retrieved August 23, 2008.
  13. ^ a b c d e Cotton, Charles (1970) [1674]. The Compleat Gamester: Or, Instruction How to Play at All Manner of Usual and Most Genteel Games. London: Henry Brome [reprinted Barre, Massachusetts: Imprint Society]. pp. 25–33.
  14. ^ a b c Kemp Philp, Robert, ed. (1884). "2595. Troco or Lawn Billiards". Enquire Within upon Everything (69th ed.). London: Houlston and Sons. p. 365. Retrieved 8 March 2019 – via Internet Archive.. The rules of this and other outdoor games did not appear in editions much older than this.
  15. ^ Strutt, Joseph (1801). The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. Methuen & Company. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
  16. ^ McGowan, B. C.; et al. (2004) [1959]. "Official Rules and Regulations". Roque: The Game of the Century. Dallas, Texas: American Roque League. "The Court and Its Fixtures" section. Retrieved June 2, 2009.
  17. ^ "Origin and meaning of kingpin". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 4 March 2019.
  18. ISBN 1-85225-013-5
    . This is a revised version of The Story of Billiards and Snooker (1979).
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