Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/177

---

with them?" Nine-holes was a boyish game played at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Nine holes are made in a square board, in three rows, three holes in each row, at equal distances, twelve to fourteen inches apart. The holes are numbered one to nine, so placed as to form fifteen as the total of each row. The board is fixed horizontally on the ground, and surrounded on three sides with a gentle acclivity. Every player being furnished with a certain number of small metal balls, stands in his turn by a mark on the ground, about five or six feet from the board; at which he bowls the balls. According to the value of the figures belonging to the holes into which the balls roll, his game is reckoned; and he who obtains the highest number is the winner. Another game, having the same name, was more recently played by schoolboys. A board was set upright resembling a bridge, with nine small arches, numbered one to nine; at this the boys bowled marbles. If the marble struck against the side or piers of the arches, it became the property of the boy owning the board; if it went through any arch, the bowler claimed a number of marbles equal to the number upon the arch it passed through. Ten-pins was in reality nine-pins. Moor, in his "Suffolk Words," says, "We have, like others, nine-pins, which we rather unaccountably call ten-pins, or rather tempins, although I never saw more than nine used in the game." Probably the game was once played with ten pins, as an evasion of the statute which made nine pins an unlawful game. The most ancient form of nine-pins was "cayles" or "kayles" (from the French quilles), which was played with pins, but all ranged in one row, and thrown at with a stick. These kayle-pins were afterwards called kettle or kittle-pins, and hence, by an easy corruption, skittle-pins. The game of skittles, how-