and Pastimes) suggests that the first player’s bowl may have been regarded by the second player as a species of jack; but in that case it is not clear what was the first player’s target. In these three earliest illustrations of the pastime it is worth noting that each player has one bowl only, and that the attitude in delivering it was as various five or six hundred years ago as it is to-day. In the third he stands almost upright; in the first he kneels; in the second he stoops, halfway between the upright and the kneeling position.
As the game grew in popularity it came under the ban of king and parliament, both fearing it might jeopardize the practice of archery, then so important in battle; and statutes forbidding it and other sports were enacted in the reigns of Edward III., Richard II. and other monarchs. Even when, on the invention of gunpowder and firearms, the bow had fallen into disuse as a weapon of war, the prohibition was continued. The discredit attaching to bowling alleys, first established in London in 1455, probably encouraged subsequent repressive legislation, for many of the alleys were connected with taverns frequented by the dissolute and gamesters. The word “bowls” occurs for the first time in the statute of 1511 in which Henry VIII. confirmed previous enactments against unlawful games. By a further act of 1541—which was not repealed until 1845—artificers, labourers, apprentices, servants and the like were forbidden to play bowls at any time save Christmas, and then only in their master’s house and presence. It was further enjoined that any one playing bowls outside of his own garden or orchard was liable to a penalty of 6s. 8d., while those possessed of lands of the yearly value of £100 might obtain licences to play on their own private greens. But though the same statute absolutely prohibited bowling alleys, Henry VIII. had them constructed for his own pleasure at Whitehall Palace, and was wont to back himself when he played. In Mary’s reign (1555) the licences were withdrawn, the queen or her advisers deeming the game an excuse for “unlawful assemblies, conventicles, seditions and conspiracies.” The scandals of the bowling alleys grew rampant in Elizabethan London, and Stephen Gosson in his School of Abuse (1579) says, “Common bowling alleys are privy moths that eat up the credit of many idle citizens; whose gains at home are not able to weigh down their losses abroad; whose shops are so far from maintaining their play, that their wives and children cry out for bread, and go to bed supperless often in the year.”
Biased bowls were introduced in the 16th century. “A little altering of the one side,” says Robert Recorde, the mathematician, in his Castle of Knowledge (1556), “maketh the bowl to run biasse waies.” And Shakespeare (Richard II., Act. III. Sc. 4) causes the queen to remonstrate, in reply to her lady’s suggestion of a game at bowls to relieve her ennui, “ ’Twill make me think the world is full of rubs, and that my fortune runs against the bias.” This passage is interesting also as showing that women were accustomed to play the game in those days. It is pleasant to think that there is foundation for the familiar story of Sir Francis Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe as the Armada was beating up Channel, and finishing his game before tackling the Spaniards. Bowls, at that date, was looked upon as a legitimate amusement for Sundays,—as, indeed, were many other sports. When John Knox visited Calvin at Geneva one Sunday, it is said that he discovered him engaged in a game; and John Aylmer (1521–1594), though bishop of London, enjoyed a game of a Sunday afternoon, but used such language “as justly exposed his character to reproach.” The pastime found favour with the Stuarts. In the Book of Sports (1618), James I. recommended a moderate indulgence to his son, Prince Henry, and Charles I. was an enthusiastic bowler, unfortunately encouraging by example wagering and playing for high stakes, habits that ultimately brought the green into as general disrepute as the alley. It is recorded that the king occasionally visited Richard Shute, a Turkey merchant who owned a beautiful green at Barking Hall, and that after one bout his losses were £1000. He was permitted to play his favourite game to beguile the tedium of his captivity. The signboard of a wayside inn near Goring Heath in Oxfordshire long bore a portrait of the king with couplets reciting how his majesty “drank from the bowl, and bowl’d for what he drank.” During his stay at the Northamptonshire village of Holdenby or Holmby—where Sir Thomas Herbert complains the green was not well kept—Charles frequently rode over to Lord Vaux’s place at Harrowden, or to Lord Spencer’s at Althorp, for a game, and, according to one account, was actually playing on the latter green when Cornet Joyce came to Holmby to remove him to other quarters. During this period gambling had become a mania. John Aubrey, the antiquary, chronicles that the sisters of Sir John Suckling, the courtier-poet, once went to the bowling-green in Piccadilly, crying, “for fear he should lose all their portions.” If the Puritans regarded bowls with no friendly eye, as Lord Macaulay asserts, one can hardly wonder at it. But even the Puritans could not suppress betting. So eminently respectable a person as John Evelyn thought no harm in bowling for stakes, and once played at the Durdans, near Epsom, for £10, winning match and money, as he triumphantly notes in his Diary for the 14th of August 1657. Samuel Pepys repeatedly mentions finding great people “at bowles.” But in time the excesses attending the game rendered it unfashionable, and after the Revolution it became practically a pothouse recreation, nearly all the greens, like the alleys, having been constructed in the grounds and gardens attached to taverns.
After a long interval salvation came from Scotland, somewhat unexpectedly, because although, along with its winter analogue of curling, bowls may now be considered, much more than golf, the Scottish national game, it was not until well into the 19th century that the pastime acquired popularity in that country. It had been known in Scotland since the close of the 16th century (the Glasgow kirk session fulminated an edict against Sunday bowls in 1595), but greens were few and far between. There is record of a club in Haddington in 1709, of Tom Bicket’s green in Kilmarnock in 1740, of greens in Candleriggs and Gallowgate, Glasgow, and of one in Lanark in 1750, of greens in the grounds of Heriot’s hospital, Edinburgh, prior to 1768, and of one in Peebles in 1775. These are, of course, mere infants compared with the Southampton Town Bowling Club, founded in 1299, which still uses the green on which it has played for centuries and possesses the quaint custom of describing its master, or president, as “sir,” and are younger even than the Newcastle-on-Tyne club established in 1657. But the earlier clubs did nothing towards organizing the game. In 1848 and 1849, however, when many clubs had come into existence in the west and south of Scotland (the Willowbank, dating from 1816, is the oldest club in Glasgow), meetings were held in Glasgow for the purpose of promoting a national association. This was regarded, by many, as impracticable, but a decision of final importance was reached when a consultative committee was appointed to draft a uniform code of laws to govern the game. This body delegated its functions to its secretary, W. W. Mitchell (1803–1884), who prepared a code that was immediately adopted in Scotland as the standard laws. It was in this sense that Scottish bowlers saved the game. They were, besides, pioneers in laying down level greens of superlative excellence. Not satisfied with seed-sown grass or meadow turf, they experimented with seaside turf and found it answer admirably. The 13th earl of Eglinton also set an example of active interest which many magnates emulated. Himself a keen bowler, he offered for competition, in 1854, a silver bowl and, in 1857, a gold bowl and the Eglinton Cup, all to be played for annually. These trophies excited healthy rivalry in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, and the enthusiasm as well as the skill with which the game was conducted in Scotland at length proved contagious. Clubs in England began to consider the question of legislation, and to improve their greens. Moreover, Scottish emigrants introduced the game wherever they went, and colonists in Australia and New Zealand established many clubs which, in the main, adopted Mitchell’s laws; while clubs were also started in Canada and in the United States, in South Africa, India (Calcutta, Karachi), Japan (Kobe, Yokohama, Kumamoto) and Hong-Kong. In Ireland the game took root very gradually, but in Ulster, owing doubtless to constant
