in proof, that not only was the exercise manly and salutary, but good also for the pightel, or meadow. In meadow or pasture (to grow the more fine) The ball generally used in Suffolk was about the size of a common cricket ball, which was carried, not kicked; otherwise the game is very like the rough football gatherings noticed above. "Sometimes a large football was used, and the game was then called 'kicking camp,' and if played with the shoes on, 'savage camp." Camp, Moor says, fell into disuse in Suffolk during last century, in consequence of two men having been killed at Easton in their struggles at a grand match. In the North of England, Brand tells us, it was customary among the colliers for a party to watch the bridegroom coming out of church after the marriage ceremony in order to demand money for a football, a claim that admitted of no refusal. Mr. Timbs relates a curious football anecdote that well illustrates the state of political feeling in Ireland just before the Union. "Wogan Browne," he says, "a virulent opponent of the Irish Union, was a magistrate of Kildare, Meath and Dublin, and was highly popular and irreproachable as a magistrate of these three counties. Nevertheless, some time in 1797, he was one Sunday riding past a field where the country people were about to hold a football match. The whole assembly paid their respects to him, and at their request he got off his horse and opened the sports by giving the ball the first kick-a sort of friendly sanctioning of the amusements of their neighbours, which was then not unusual among the gentry in Ireland. The custom, however, was not approved of by the Government, and Lord Chancellor Care, upon being informed of what Wogan Browne had done, at once suspended him in the Commission of the peace. He was soon afterwards restored by Lord Chancellor Ponsonby, upon the accession of the ministry of All the Talents, but was again, without further cause, deprived of his commission for two of the counties by Lord Chancellor Manners. This stupid insult, both to the individual and to the body of magistrates—for if Mr. Browne was unfit to be a justice of the peace for two counties, it was an insult to associate him with the magistrates of a third -was warmly resented by the gentry of Kildare." On the continent the causes that have dealt its death-blow to the old style of football among us have been at work too. The fiercely fought football matches of Friburg, Louvain, and many other cities, "where the contusions would have made some figure in a gazette and where several lives were yearly sacrificed," are as extinct as the similar contests at home. There was till lately one exception to this: the fierce game of the soûle, played in Brittany, of which M. Souvestre, in his "Les derniers Bretons" (Paris, 1836), tells the story as played in the Ponthivy district. He relates how a man whose father had been killed, and his own eye knocked out, by Francois, surnamed le Souleur, lay in wait for that renowned player, and got him down, soûle and all, half way over the boundary stream. This contest was the last vestige of the worship the Celts paid to the sun, whence the name of the enormous ball of leather, filled with bran or hay, which was used in the match. The fury and rancour with which the game was played are almost past belief. The combatants were generally the townsman against the rustic, and many a jealous grudge and little piece of caste feeling rankled in the breasts of the players. M. Souvestre speaks of malicious maimings, of bones broken, and even of murders committed from cherished revenge, but so effected as to appear accidental during the press round the ball when its possession was fought for over the miles that separated the goals. The party that first drove the ball into a township different from that in which the soûle was thrown up, won. It is needless to dwell upon the most rapid extension of football-whether "Rugby" or "Association"-in Great Britain within the last twenty years. Every town and village have now one or more clubs playing under the rules either of the Association (founded in 1863), or the Union (established in 1871), and the old pastime in its new lease of life is preeminently the winter game of the kingdom, fitly taking the place of cricket during the months when bat and wickets are laid aside. 105 CHAPTER IX. THE GAME OF BOWLS. Queen. What sport shall we devise here in this garden, Queen. 'Twill make me think the world is full of rubs, King Richard II. iii. Sc. 4. "THERE is another recreation," writes the author of the "Country Gentleman's Companion," nearly two centuries ago, "which, howsoever unlawful in the Abuse thereof, yet, exercised with moderation, is, even of Physicians themselves, held exceeding wholesome, and hath been prescribed for a Recreation to great Persons." The amusement that thus received the approval of the Faculty was the old English game of bowling, a fine old pastime too much neglected in its old home in these days of violent athletic exercises. Probably this game has as long a pedigree as most other pastimes, but little is known of its early days. Strutt declared himself unable "by any means to ascertain the time of its introduction," though he has traced it back in England to the thirteenth century. A writer in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," however, has gone further back than this, and has pretty conclusively proved that the "in jactu lapidum," which William FitzStephen includes among the amusements practised by the young Londoners of the twelfth century on summer holidays, refers to bowls and not to slinging stones, as has been generally understood. However this may be, it is clear the game has been a British pastime for a very long time, though from the early drawings of players we see that it, like most of our pastimes, has passed through various changes and modifications in its long career. In the earliest of these representations of the game-a drawing in a MS. in the Royal Library, which is reproduced by Strutt-“two small cones are placed upright at a distance from each other; and the business of the players is evidently to bowl at them alternately; the successful candidate being he who could lay his bowl the nearest to this mark." In others of these delineations, in which the attitudes of the bowlers are given with remarkable spirit and effect, we find other varieties of the game-— such as one player being required by the game not to lay his bowl close to a mark, but to strike away from its place the sphere cast by his opponent. In process of time the third ball, or jack, of smaller size than the playing bowls, was introduced to serve as a mark towards which to direct the bowls, and from then the principal changes in the game were probably only in the number of bowls allowed to each player, and in their material and shape. In the old drawings, instead of using two balls, as in the modern game, the player is provided with one only. The bowls were round, and certainly up to 1409, and most probably for long after, were made of stone. As we shall see, stone bowls were used in Scotland pretty commonly till about the end of the seventeenth century; in 1657 Lord Lorn, son of the Marquis of Argyll, was struck senseless by one of these stone bullets" in Edinburgh Castle, and continued in danger of his life for some time. Dr. Daniel Wilson, in his "Prehistoric Annals of Scotland," thinks it by no means improbable that the spherical stone balls found along with ancient relics, and even in tumuli, may have been used in some such game as bowls. It seems clear that this game was originally played on open greens, more or less made smooth and prepared for the pastime. These greens, however, being without cover, neces |