About twenty years ago the game was common in some parts of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, where it was sometimes called “Chevy Chase;” and amongst English boys even in Brussels.[1]
Another correspondent to the same periodical (i. v. 204) says that an almost identical game was played at the King’s School, Sherborne, some fifty years ago. It was called “King-sealing” and the pursuing boy was obliged by the rules to retain his hold of the boy seized until he had uttered:
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
You are one of the king-sealer’s men.”
If the latter succeeded in breaking away before the coup saw finished the capture was incomplete.
(ii.)—Marrels.
The ancient game of “nine men’s morris” is yet played by the boys Dorset. The boys of a cottage, near Dorchester, had a while ago carved a “marrel” pound on a block of stone by the house. Some years ago a clergyman of one of the upper counties wrote that in the pulling down of a wall in his church, built in the thirteenth century, the workmen came to a block of stone with a marrel’s pound cut on it. “Merrels” the game was called by a mason. (Barnes’s Additional Glossary.)
I have been unable to find out from any Dorsetshire source how this game was played, but probably it was much in the same way as it is described to have been played in the Midlands in Brand’s Popular Antiquities (ed. 1813, vol. ii. p. 297), where we are told that the shepherds and other boys dig up the turf with their knives to represent a sort of imperfect chess-board. It consisted of a square, sometimes only a foot in diameter, sometimes three or four yards. Within this was another square, every side of which was parallel to the external square; and these squares were joined by lines drawn from each corner
- ↑ See Shropshire Folklore, p. 523, for a very similar game called “Stag-warning.”
