ANCIENT CUSTOMS IN GAMES USED BY BOYS AND GIRLS.
MERRILY SET OUT IN VERSE.
"Any they dare challenge for to throw the sledge,
To jump or leap over ditch or hedge;
To wrestle, play at stool-ball, or to run,
To pitch the bar, or to shoot off a gun;
To play at loggats, nine holes, or ten pins,
To try it out at football, by the shins;
At tick-tacke, seize noddy, maw and ruff;
At hot-cockles, leap-frog, or blindman's buff;
To drink the halper-pots, or deal at the whole can;
To play at chess, or pue, and inkhorn;
To dance the morris, play at barley-brake;
At all exploits a man can think or speak:
At shove-groat, venter-point, or crop and pile;
At 'beshrew him that's last at any stile;'
At leaping over a Christmas bonfire.
Or at the drawing dame out of the mire;
At shoot-cock, Gregory, stool-ball, and what-not;
Pick-point, top and scourge, to make him hot."
These lines have been erroneously attributed by Baines, in his "History of Lancashire" (ii. 579), to the second Randle Holme, who merely quoted them as descriptive of Lancashire games and sports in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are from Samuel Rowland's "Letting of Humour's Blood in the Head-Vaine" (1600). Some of these names of games, and indeed the games themselves, having become obsolete, a few brief explanations may be necessary for the general reader:—Stool-ball is a pastime still practised in the North of England. It consists in simply setting a stool on the ground, and one of the players takes his place before it, while his ntagonist, standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of striking the
