Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 11.djvu/289

 ON THE GAME OF PALL MALL. To some readers of this Journal it may appear that the obsolete disport, known to them as a fashionable anmsenicnt of no more distant times than the Restoration, is a subject little deserving of admission within the pale of Archaeological researches. I have undertaken, therefore, with some hesita- tion, to offer the following notices of the game of Pall Mall, or Paille-Maille, aware that some antiquaries may fastidiously regard the subject as foreign to the legitimate purpose of this publication. It would indeed be no difficult task to carry back the enquiry to those remoter times which more properly engage the attention of the antiquary ; to treat of the archaic varieties of ball-play, the arenata pila, the hiirpastum of the ancient Greeks, to which also Martial makes allusion, iho piia pmianica or the trigonalis. I might, more- over, cite the authority of the learned Ducange, who accounted the chicane or ball-play of the south of France, a game apparently analogous to that under consideration, to be a subject worthy of detailed investigation. It forms the theme of one of his erudite dissertations appended to the " Life of St. Louis," in which, after mention of ancient games of the Greeks and Romans, Ducange has treated of those in vogue in the East in the times of the crusaders, according to the relation of Anna Comnena and other writers. He states his supposition that these Oriental exercises may even have originated with the French, and gives the following descrip- tion of the chicane in Languedoc, which was played like pall mall with a long-handled mallet and a ball of box-wood. " Pour retourner au jeu de balle a cheval, que les Grecs appellent tzijcanisteriuni, il semble que ces peuples en doivent I'origine a nos Francois, et que d' abord il n'a est^ autre que celui qui est encore en usage dans le Languedoc, que Ton appelle le jeu de la Chicane, et en d'autres Pi'ovinces le jeu de Mail : sauf qu'en Languedoc ce jeu se fait en plaine campagne et dans les grands chemins, ou Ton pousse avec