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 THE DEVIL'S ROUND

A TALE OF FLEMISH GOLF

BY CHARLES DEULIN

[The following story, translated by Miss Isabel Bruce from Le Grand Choleur of M. Charles Deulin (Contes du Roi Gamhrinus), gives a great deal of information about French and Flemish golf. As any reader will see, this ancient game represents a stage of evolution between golf and hockey. The object is to strike a ball, in as few strokes as possible, to a given point; but, after every three strokes, the opponent is allowed to décholer, or make one stroke back, or into a hazard. Here the element of hockey comes in. Get rid of this element, let each man hit his own ball, and, in place of striking to a point—say, the cemetery gate—let men "putt" into holes, and the Flemish game becomes golf. It is of great antiquity. Ducange, in his Lexicon of Low Latin, gives Choulla, French choule = "Globulus ligneus qui clava propellitur"—a wooden ball struck with a club. The head of the club was of iron (cf. crossare). This is borne out by a miniature in a missal of 1504, which represents peasants playing choule with clubs very like niblicks. Ducange quotes various MS. references of 1353, 1357, and other dates older by a century than our earliest Scotch references to golf. At present the game is played in Belgium with a strangely-shaped lofting-iron and a ball of beechwood. M. Zola (Germinal, p. 310) represents his miners playing chole, or choulle, and says that they hit drives of more than 500 yards. Experiments made at Wimbledon with a Bel-

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