half-bowl. Mr. Wright says that at this time "the game was looked upon as belonging to the same class as hazard. In a series of metrical counsels to apprentices, compiled in the fifteenth century and printed in the 'Reliquiæ Antiquæ,' ii. 223, they are recommended to

Exchewe allewey eville company,

CAYLYS, carding and haserdy."

The bad repute into which these games fell in England never attached to them in Scotland, though these forms of bowling never could compare there in popularity with the game played on the bowling-greens. However, in April, 1497, we find the Lord High Treasurer paying eighteen shillings for James IV. "to play at the lang bowlis" in St. Andrews, and in the previous year, while Perkin Warbeck was his guest at Stirling, we find James playing at "kilis" in Drummond Castle. On the whole, however, skittles then was looked upon in Scotland as a childish game, unworthy to divide men's leisure hours with tennis or golf or football.

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This game of long-bowls, at which King James played, is thus older than Strutt appears to think. "Bowling alleys, I believe," he writes, were totally abolished before I knew London, but I have seen there a pastime which might originate from them, called long bowling. It was performed in a narrow enclosure, about twenty or thirty yards in length, and at the further end was placed a square frame with nine small pins upon it at these pins the players bowled in succession, and a boy stood by the frame to set up the pins that were beat down by the bowl, called out the number which was placed to the account of the player, and the bowl was returned by the means of a small trough, placed with a gradual descent from the pins to the bowlers, on one side of the enclosure. Some call this game Dutch rubbers." Indeed, many are of opinion, with Mr. R. S. Charnock, in Notes and Queries, that in closh, kayles, &c., "both the name and the game were imported

from Holland. The Dutch," he tells us, "have always had a fondness for skittles and bowls. Even at the present day many of the towns in Holland are surrounded with gardens where the people amuse themselves at these games. Moreover, the Dutch has klos, bobbin, whirl, bowl; klos baan, a place for playing at bowls; klossen, to play at bowls. They, however, now generally make use of kegel baan for a skittle ground, and kegel (whence kail, kayle), for a skittle."

In the sixteenth century we find frequent complaints of the increase in the number of skittle-alleys, and the evil consequences caused by their position in the yards of taverns and other places, where they were convenient haunts for the idle and dissolute. An Act of Henry VIII. prohibited certain classes of the community, such as artificers, husbandmen, and apprentices, from playing at these games except at Christmas, and then only in their masters' premises or presence. The object of the statute was to put down gambling, not to discourage innocent recreation, and licenses could, apparently, be easily enough obtained to allow a man "to kepe in any place within our citie of London and the suburbs of the same, only for ale and bere and no money, the game of closshynge, for the dysport and recreation of honest persons resorting thither: al maner apprentices and vacabundes onely except," and this in spite of any Act to the contrary then existing.

What the condition of things was in those bowling alleys where the stakes were not "for ale and bere and no money," we can easily gather from the condemnation of these nurseries of vice in Stephen Gosson, Stow, and Bishop Earle, already noticed in our last chapter; and it is clear that Henry's enactments, like the many statutes subsequently directed against gambling in skittle-alleys, had very little effect in remedying this evil. "The frequent repetition and enforcement of the statutes in former times," says Strutt in 1801, "proves that they were then, as they are now, inadequate to the suppression of gaming for a long continuance; and when one pastime was

prohibited, another was presently invented to supply its place. I remember, about twenty years back, the magistrates caused all the skittle frames in or about the city of London to be taken up, and prohibited the playing at dutch-pins, nine pins, or in long bowling alleys, when in many places the game of nine-holes was revived as a substitute, with the new name of "Bubble the Justice," because the populace had taken it into their heads to imagine that the power of the magistrates extended only to the prevention of such pastimes as were specified by name in the public Acts and not to any new species of diversion."

Shakespeare mentions only one of our kindred games, and naturally Hamlet's question in the graveyard scene, "Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggats with them?" has given this variety of the game a special prominence, and made the mode of play in it a matter of discussion by the editors of the great dramatist. Sir Thomas Hanmer says it is the same game as "kittle-pins, in which boys often make use of bones instead of wooden pins, throwing at them with another bone instead of bowling." Strutt, who agrees with Hanmer, quotes in corroboration an old Elizabethan play in which a rustic boasts of his skill

At skales and playing with a sheepes joynte.

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This would make loggats exactly the same as the club-kayles we have seen figured in the St. Bartholomew MS. book of "Decretals," but other Shakesperian commentators hold that it was a new and different game. 'Loggating in the fields," says Malone, "is mentioned for the first time among other new and crafty games and plays in 33 Henry VIII., chap ix. Not being mentioned in former Acts against unlawful games, it was probably not practised long before the statute of Henry VIII. was made." Blount tells us "a loggat ground, like a skittle ground, is strewed with ashes, but is more extensive. A bowl much larger than the jack of the game of bowls is thrown first.

The pins, which I believe are called loggats, are much thinner and lighter at one extremity than the other. The bowl being first thrown, the players take the pins up by the thinner and lighter ends and fling them towards the bowl, and in such a manner that the pins may once turn round in the air and slide with the thinner extremity foremost towards the bowl. The pins are about twenty-one or twenty-two inches long."

Stevens adds some interesting details to these descriptions. "This is a game," he says, "played in several parts of England even at this time (1766). A stake is fixed into the ground: those who play throw loggats at it, and he that is nearest the stake wins. I have seen it played in different counties at their sheep-shearing feasts, where the winner was entitled to a black fleece, which he afterwards presented to the farmer's maid to spin for the purpose of making a petticoat, and on condition that she knelt down on the fleece to be kissed by all the rustics present."

Loggats and ten pins occur together in an enumeration of "Auntient Customs in Games used by Boys and Girles, merrily set out in verse," quoted by Strutt in his "Manners and Customs," from Harleian MS. 2057.

To play at loggets, nine holes or ten pinnes,
To try it out at foote-ball by the shinnes.

Though in early days alley-bowling was not much thought of in Scotland, we find, curiously enough, in the century after the Reformation, not infrequent allusions to the pastime of a kind that attest considerable popularity for it. When the Reformers had overthrown the old Church, a great point they set themselves to attain was the observance of Sunday, but their demand for a complete abstinence from work or amusement on this day was not fully granted by the people for long after the Reformation; indeed, many of the local courts seem to have looked upon it as an object impossible of attainment, and were disposed to be satisfied if neither market nor games were held during "the time of the sermons." Fine and imprisonment

were decreed by many town councils and other bodies against those who, instead of going to church, played games, made "mercat merchandise," or walked idly about, and a pretty exhaustive list of the games of the period could be compiled from the ordinances of the various burghs and minutes of Kirk sessions dealing with the contumacious golfers, football players, bowlers, and others who preferred the open air and the customs of the old unthinking days to the long sermons and rigid discipline of the new order of things. It is unnecessary to multiply instances of these proceedings here, but one of those against our pastime may be cited. In June, 1619, the Kirk session of Perth dealt with John Brown, a gardener, of the Fair City, "for as meikle as delation being made that he permits men to play at alye-bowles in my Lord Sanquhar's yard at the time of the sermones on the Sabbath day."

Twenty years after this, Henry Adamson, in his curious poem, "The Muses Threnodie," when enumerating the implements of the games preserved by the old man whose death his verses lament, speaks of

His alley-bowles, his curling stones,
The sacred games to celebrate
Which to the gods are consecrate.

Sir Thomas Urquhart, of Cromarty, would not have taken this metaphor from the game if he had not thought the pastime was one of which the method of play would be well known to his readers. In his curious book, "The Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel, found in the kennel of Worcester Streets the day after the Fight," he says: "Verily I think they make use of kings as we do of card kings in playing at the hundred; anyone whereof, if there be the appearance of a better game without him is by good gamesters without any ceremony discarded. They may likewise be said to use their king as the players at nine pins do the middle kyle, which they call the king, at whose fall alone they aim, the sooner to obtain the gaining of their prize."