Skittles, a fabulous old game popular in Medieval times
One of the most fun things I had when writing Warrior’s Surrender was discovering how much fun people had in Medieval England!
Games and sports were just as much a part of people’s lives as they are now and one which has endured is skittles – a very traditional pub game which has become the international favourite ten-pin bowling.
Certainly the sport is very similar:
The rules and methods of scoring varied from place to place, but the basic principle of bowling a wooden or rubber ball (weighing about 10 pounds [4.5 kilograms]) at nine large oval-headed pins, set in diamond formation 21 feet (about 6.5 metres) away, remained the same. The player who knocked down all the pins (scored as “chalks”) in the fewest throws was the winner.
There are a number of skittle games across England and there have been many more in the past. It could be that the game came from Germany as one of the earliest references is to from Germany, in the 3rd or 4th century monks played a game with a kegel which was a club carried for self defence. In the game, the kegel represented a sin or temptation and the monks would throw stones at it until they knocked it over. The modern German term for skittles is Kegelen.
In Warrior’s Surrender, my cast of characters spend winter evenings in the Great Hall, playing games of various sorts including skittles, drafts, engaging in sing-a-longs and play acting – all the fun things that many of us wiled away the day with before television and the internet consumed so much of our time and attention.
I know I’m a dreadful one to talk – I really have to schedule my time away from the computer…
Anyway, I’ve managed to find a video here of someone playing the traditional Medieval skittles!
Would you survive the Middle Ages?
Buzzfeed has a cute quiz right here – http://www.playbuzz.com/charlotteb11/would-you-survive-the-middle-ages