147 CHAPTER XII. SKATING AND SKATERS. THOUGH it appears to be impossible to fix on the time when skating first took root in this country, there can be no doubt that it was introduced to us from more northern climates, where it originated more from the necessities of the inhabitants than as a pastime. When snow covered their land, and ice bound up their rivers, imperious necessity would soon suggest to the Scands or the Germans some ready means of winter locomotion. This first took the form of snow-shoes, with two long runners of wood, like those still used by the inhabitants of the northerly parts of Norway and Sweden in their journeys over the immense snow-fields. These seem originally to have been used by the Finns, "for which reason," says a Swedish writer, "they were called 'Skrid Finnai' (sliding Finns), a common name for the most ancient inhabitants of Sweden, both in the North Saga and by foreign authors." When used on ice, one runner would soon have been found more convenient than the widely separated two, and harder materials used than wood: first bone was substituted; then it, in turn, gave place to iron; and thus the present form of skate was developed in the North at a period set down by Scandinavian archeologists as about A.D. 200. Frequent allusions occur in the old Northern poetry which prove that proficiency in skating was one of the most highly esteemed accomplishments of the Northern heroes. One of them, named Kolson, boasts that he is master of nine accom plishments, skating being one; while the hero Harold bitterly complains that though he could fight, ride, swim, glide along the ice on skates, dart the lance, and row, "yet a Russian maid disdains me." Eight arts are mine: to wield the steel, To curb the warlike horse, To swim the lake, or skate on heel To urge my rapid course. To hurl, well aimed, the martial spear, To brush with oar the main All these are mine, though doomed to bear In the "Edda" this accomplishment is singled out for special praise: "Then the king asked what that young man could do who accompanied Thor. Thialfe answered, that in running upon skates he would dispute the prize with any of the countries. The king owned that the talent he spoke of was a very fine one." Olaus Magnus, the author of the famous chapter on the Snakes of Iceland, tells us that skates were made "of polished iron, or of the shank-bone of a deer or sheep, about a foot long, filed down on one side, and greased with hog's lard to repel the wet." These rough-and-ready bone skates were the kind first adopted by the English; for Fitzstephen, in his description of the amusements of the Londoners in his day (temp. Henry II.), tells us that "when that great fen that washes Moorfields at the north wall of the city is frozen over, great companies of young men go to sport upon the ice. Some striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; some, better practised to the ice, bind to their shoes bones, as the legs of some beasts, and hold stakes in their hands, headed with sharp iron, which sometimes they strike against the ice; these men go as swiftly as doth a bird in the air or a bolt from a cross-bow." Then he goes on to say that some, imitating the fashion of the tournament, would start in full career against one another, armed with poles: "they meet, elevate their poles, attack and strike each other, when one or both of them fall, and not without some bodily hurt." Specimens of these old bone skates are occasionally dug up in fenny parts of the country. There are some in the British Museum, in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, and probably in other collections; though perhaps some of the "finds" are not nearly as old as Fitzstephen's day, for there seems to be good evidence that even in London the primitive bone skate was not entirely superseded by implements of steel at the latter part of last century. Mr. Roach Smith, F.S.A., describing one found about 1839 in Moorfields, near Finsbury Circus, in the boggy soil peculiar to that district, says that "it is formed of the bone of some animal, made smooth on one side, with a hole at one extremity for a cord to fasten it to the shoe. At the other end a hole is also drilled horizontally to the depth of three inches, which might have received a plug, with another cord to secure it more effectually." There is hardly a greater difference between these old bone skates and the "acmés " and club skates of to-day than there is between the skating of the middle ages and the artistic and graceful movements of good performers of to-day. Indeed, skating as a fine art is entirely a thing of modern growth in Britain. So little thought of was the exercise that for long after Fitzstephen's day we find few or no allusions to it, and up to the Restoration days it appears to have been an amusement confined chiefly to the lower classes, among whom it never reached any very high pitch of art. "It was looked upon," says a writer in the Saturday Review in 1865, "much with the same view that the boys on the Serpentine even now seem to adopt, as an accomplishment, the acme of which was reached when the performer could succeed in running along quickly on his skates and finishing off with a long and triumphant slide on two feet in a straight line forward. A gen tleman would probably then have no more thought of trying to execute different figures on the ice than he would at the present day of dancing in a drawing-room on the tips of his toes." Even as an amusement of the common people it is not alluded to in any of the usual catalogues of sports so often referred to. Among the many games which Holinshed tells us were played on the Thames ice during the great frost of December, 1564, he does not include skating; but when the exiled Court returned to Britain at the Restoration, we find that many of King Charles's suite must have profited by their sojourn in the Low Countries, and had attained to considerable proficiency in swift, straightforward skating. Evelyn, under date December 1, 1662, notes "having seen the strange and wonderful dexterity of the sliders on the canal in St. James's Park, performed before their Majesties by divers gentlemen and others with skates, after the manner of the Hollanders, with what swiftness they pass, how suddenly they stop in full career upon the ice. I went home by water, but not without exceeding difficulty, the Thames being frozen, great flakes of ice encompassing our boat." Then a fortnight afterwards his brother diarist, Pepys, records that he went to the Duke of York, "and followed him into the Parke, where, though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would slide upon his skates, which I did not like, but he slides very well." From this time, then, we may consider skating firmly established as a British pastime. In Evelyn's description of the great Frost Fair on the Thames in January, 1684, when the river " was planted with booths in formal streets; coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple and from other stairs, to and fro, as in the streets," he tells us the people amused themselves with "sliding on skates, bull-baiting, horse and coach races, &c." In the illustrations of the next great Frost Fairs on the Thames, in 1716 and 1740, we see figures on skates wheeling round the oxen roasted whole, the puppet shows, and all "the fun of the fair" provided for the regale ment of the crowds that disported themselves on the ice. Addison sang its praises in a Latin poem-the "Cursus Glacialis;" Strype and Maitland give it a place among the pastimes of the Londoners; Thomson has a spirited description of a skating scene in his "Winter;" so that the exercise can complain of no want of notice during the eighteenth century. During all this time, when skating was struggling into notice in Britain, in its birthplace it continued to be cultivated as the one great winter amusement. In Holland, too, where it is looked upon less as a pastime than a necessity, nothing has so frequently struck travellers as the wonderful change the advent of ice brings about on the bearing of the inhabitants. Heavy, massive, stiff creatures during the rest of the year," says Pilati, in his "Letters on Holland," "become suddenly active, ready and agile, as soon as the canals are frozen," and they are able to glide along the frozen surface with the speed and endurance for which their skating has been so long renowned, though these very qualities are bought at the expense of the elegance and grace we nowadays look for in the accomplished skater. Thomson thus graphically describes the enlivening effects of frost on the Dutch : Now in the Netherlands, and where the Rhine Though the poet of the "Seasons" speaks of Russia here, it is curious to note that skating is not a national amusement |