Whether it is in the brute creation or the human race, this struggle for existence has always required the exercise of offensive and defensive powers. The individual has striven to gain his living, and to protect that living when gained; nations have paid armies to increase their territories, and retain those territories when acquired.
The exact form of weapon which first came into use will always be doubtful, but one would think that stones, being hard and handy, as well as plentiful, might have presented irresistible attractions to, say, some antediluvian monster, who wished to intimate to a mammoth or icthyosaurus, a few hundred yards distant, his readiness to engage in mortal combat.
Are there not stories, too, of clever little apes in tropical forests who have pelted unwary travellers with nuts, stones, and any missiles which came handy?
Then, coming nearer home, there is the lady at an Irish fair who hangs on the outskirts of a faction-fight, ready to do execution with a stone in her stocking—a terrible gog-magog sort of brain-scatterer.
When man was developed, no doubt one of his first ideas was to get hold of a really good serviceable stick—not a little modern masher’s crutch—a strong weapon, capable of assisting him in jumping, protecting him from wild beasts, and knocking down his fellow-man.
To obtain such a stick the primitive man probably had to do a good deal of hacking at the bough of a hard oak or tough ash, with no better knife than a bit of sharp flint. Having secured his stick, the next thing was to keep it, and he doubtless had to defend himself against the assaults of envious fellow-creatures possessed of inferior sticks.
Thus we can imagine that the birth of quarter-staff play—not much play about it in those days—was a very simple affair; and we recognize in it the origin and foundation of all the sword exercises, and all the games in which single-stick, lance, and bayonet play a prominent part.
As the question of who picked up the first stone and threw it at his fellow-man, or when the first branch of a tree was brought down on the unsuspecting head of another fellow-man, are questions for learned men to decide, and are of no real importance, I shall not allow myself to go on with any vague speculations, but shall turn at once to an old English sport which, though sometimes practised at assaults-at-arms in the present day, takes us back to Friar Tuck, Robin Hood, and
“Maid Marian, fair as ivory bone,
Scarlet and Much and Little John.”