Croquet – did King Charles II play it?

Sportswindon takes another of those sports you don’t see in the news very often.

You may remember that in January Swindon Croquet obtained a Sport England Grant and a grant from the Croquet Association to enable the club to obtain a new Clubhouse and equipment to maintain its own Lawns.

The club running a Beginners’ Course for anyone interested in taking up croquet, this runs for 6 Fridays from May 3rd, at the Lawns on Moredon Rec, from 10.00 am till noon. The cost is £20, which will be refunded if membership is taken up. All equipment is provided by the club.

Croquet is an ideal game for anyone, it can be played by young or old, men or women, able bodied or those with minor disabilities.

The official game seems to be a product of the Victorian era as is mentioned in this wikipedia discription of the game. But as long ago as the reign of King Charles 11 a game like croquet seems to have been played. It was called Pale-maille and may be how the street in London got its name.

The oldest document to bear the word “croquet” with a description of the modern game is the set of rules registered by Isaac Spratt in November 1856 with the Stationers’ Company in London. This record is now in the English Public Records Office.

In 1868 the first croquet all-comers’ meeting was held at Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire and in the same year the All England Croquet Club was formed at Wimbledon, London.

In the book Queen of Games: The History of Croquet, Nicky Smith presents two theories of the origin of the modern game that took England by storm in the 1860s and then spread overseas.

The first explanation is that the ancestral game was introduced to Britain from France during the reign of Charles II of England, and was played under the name of paille-maille or pall mall, derived ultimately from Latin words for “ball and mallet”. This was the explanation given in the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1877.

In his 1810 book entitled The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, Joseph Strutt describes the way pall mall was played in England in the early 17th century: “Pale-maille is a game wherein a round box ball is struck with a mallet through a high arch of iron, which he that can do at the fewest blows, or at the number agreed upon, wins.

It is to be observed, that there are two of these arches, that is one at either end of the alley. The game of mall was a fashionable amusement in the reign of Charles the Second, and the walk in Saint James’s Park, now called the Mall, received its name from having been appropriated to the purpose of playing at mall, where Charles himself and his courtiers frequently exercised themselves in the practice of this pastime.”

Whilst the name pall mall and various games bearing this name may have been played elsewhere (France and Italy) the description above suggests that the croquet-like games were certainly popular in England as early as 1611. Some early sources refer to pall mall being played over a large distance (as in golf), however an image in Strutt’s 1801 book clearly shows a croquet-like ground billiards game (balls on ground, hoop, bats and peg) being played over a short, garden-sized distance. Interestingly, this image’s caption describes the game as “a curious ancient pastime”, confirming that croquet games were not new in early nineteenth century England.