Rough Draughts

Trying to be authentic can be a pain in the jacksie, especially when trying to carve your own furrow in living history. As far as I am aware I am the only re-creationist who specialises in board games. I'm almost certainly the only recreationist who specialises in early 14C British ludology. Consequently I have to, if not discover the information, certainly compile it for the first time. And that to meet the rigorous standards of authenticity of Samhain.

Sometimes I think it might be nice to not be tied to a specific geography or time period. For example, I cannot have playing cards, for although they have appeared on the continent by now, there is no reference to them in Britain until after Chaucer. There are some other interesting games like Glückhaus or Bocce which never made it to these islands at all.  But then why worry? When there are plenty of games out there which everyone knows were here in medieval times. Lets take a case in point, the authentically medieval game of Draughts.

Can anyone feel a draught?

Draughts is as old as the hills, everyone knows that. It's listed in finds from Ancient Egypt. Many of the books I refer to regularly for my games say it was played in Ancient Egypt and boards and pieces have been found that seem to bear this out. There are images of it being played in medieval manuscripts. We hear tell of "checkers" in contemporary accounts. It is listed and sold as a medieval game by people who make for the living history trade. So where's the problem? Well, in our house we call it Pennant's Disease.

Pennant's Disease

Tommy P. 18C Babe-magnet.

Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) was a naturalist antiquary from our neck of the woods, and in the course of things wrote a number of books including a couple of volumes called Tours in Wales. Although we name it for him, it could in truth be called Antiquary's Disease, Morganwg Disease or perhaps in a more modern idiom, Wiki-disease.
Now I'm sure that Thomas was a decent sort, did his best at school, brushed his teeth regularly and all that, but whether by misunderstanding, misprint, or deliberate colouring of details for artistic purposes, errors were bound to creep into his works.Well this is unfortunate, you may say but completely understandable, what's it got to do with the price of fish? Well what if the price was never corrected, and after a hundred years or so no-one could remember fish being any other price, and Pennant's Fish Index was taken as the Gospel truth it never was? Piscine chaos.

A Healthy Draught

Authentic Medieval Draughts

But draughts is medieval, surely? Everyone knows it is, don't they? There is, after all pictorial evidence like the picture on the right. The image comes from a book called Old England: A Pictorial Museum (1845) (made available thanks to fromoldbooks.org) and is a reproduction of an image from a medieval manuscript, in the book it is even listed as 1145 - Playing at Draughts so that should be conclusive shouldn't it? The pieces are all circular counters and placed only on white squares. However, to take this image on face value is pure Pennant's Disease, and the thought of having our society's fact-checker hovering over your shoulder is enough to turn any one into a right suspicious bastard.

So when presented with these 19thC reproductions I have to ask myself some serious questions such as; If this is draughts, why are the pieces all the same colour? And why is the figure sitting on the left holding a different style of playing piece in his hand?

We are more fortunate these days in that we are, thanks to the Internet, able to trace primary sources more easily than ever. The libraries of the world have gotten tired of us the grubby public running our dirty, acidic fingers over their precious manuscripts, breathing our damp breath on the pages and exposing them to the fading daylight. Their answer has been to put most of their archives online this includes the manuscript from which this picture was copied. The source is given as Harleian 4431 which has been digitised by the British Library, the appropriate page is here, and below is the image of the illuminated page.

Authentic Medieval Dr- what the ...?

The one thing that is immediately obvious is that this is no game of draughts, the listing by the British Library even says Ulysses Playing Chess. And this is what I discover when I chase up any references to medieval draughts, it's another game such as chess or chequers [a gambling games where coins are flipped onto a chequerboard and bets are placed on black or white, like roulette without David Niven. This is not, Not checkers, which is confusingly, the name for Draughts in America and some other countries. Hello, America, by the way, you have a nice day, now.] 

The Naming of the Animals

Adam and Eve are walking in the garden of Eden and Eve sees an animal and asks Adam, "What's that?" (a tradition kept up by women today during films). "It's a Rhinoceros" says Adam, smugly, probably scratching himself inappropriately. "How d'you know it's called a Rhinoceros?" ask Eve, beginning another tradition of questioning everything a man says. Adam thinks for a minute (this did not catch on) and says "Well, it looks like a Rhinoceros, doesn't it?"

So with this break in the draughts fossil record, what are we to make of the Egyptian boards and pieces? These boards are almost never 8x8 chequerboards with 12 pieces a side as chequers. Archaeologists are not often Ludologists as well. It looks like a thing I know, so it is that thing. This kind of misnomer happens across the board from American Buffaloes (really a Bison) to Lutes (cittern, citole, lyre, etc.) and can, as in the case of the American Buffalo become the actual name for the thing. Had the Archaeologists been familiar with the game Latrunculi which was played in Ancient Rome and Greece (contemporaries to Egypt) with a similar layout.

Last Nail in the Coffin?

Strutt, in Sports and Pasttimes of the People of England who is not bad, as authorities go, describes draughts as a modern game although popular and widespread when writing in th early 19thC.
So is that the end of draughts as a medieval game? Perhaps not, but it does look doubtful based on any evidence that I can find. No-one seems to truly know what the origins of this game are and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so there is still hope I will turn a page one day and find something irrefutable.

Am I, then, advocating that all medieval reenactors who have beautiful, hand-made wooden draughts sets shouldn't use them? Of course not, something may yet come to light that removes all doubt as to the game's provenance, but what I am saying is until it does it will not pass the authenticity litmus test of Samhain. That should not detract, however, the simple elegance of what is a real classic. .




Goodnight, Snathe and Kat.