Mr. Roach Smith, F.S.A., describing one found about 1839, says that “it is formed of the bone of some animal, made smooth on one side, with a hole at one extremity for a cord to fasten it to the shoe. At the other end a hole is also drilled horizontally to the depth of three inches, which might have received a plug, with another cord to secure it more effectually.”
There is hardly a greater difference between these old bone skates and the “acmés” and club skates of to-day, than there is between the skating of the middle ages and the artistic and graceful movements of good performers of to-day. Indeed, skating as a fine art is entirely a thing of modern growth. So little thought of was the exercise that up to the Restoration days it appears to have been an amusement confined chiefly to the lower classes, among whom it never reached any very high pitch of art. “It was looked upon,” says a writer in the Saturday Review in 1865, “much with the same view that the boys on the Serpentine even now seem to adopt, as an accomplishment, the acmé of which was reached when the performer could succeed in running along quickly on his skates and finishing off with a long and triumphant slide on two feet in a straight line forward. A gentleman would probably then have no more thought of trying to execute different figures on the ice than he would at the present day of dancing in a drawing-room on the tips of his toes.”
During all this time, when skating was struggling into notice in Britain, in its birth-place it continued to be cultivated as the one great winter amusement. In Holland, too, where it is looked upon less as a pastime than a necessity, nothing has so frequently struck travelers as the wonderful change the advent of ice brings about on the bearing of the inhabitants. “Heavy, massive, stiff creatures during the rest of the year,” says Pilati, in his “Letters on Holland,” “become suddenly active, ready and agile, as soon as the canals are frozen,” and they are able to glide along the frozen surface with the speed and endurance for which their skating has been so long renowned, though these very qualities are bought at the expense of the elegance and grace we nowadays look for in the accomplished skater. Thomson thus graphically describes the enlivening effects of frost on the Dutch:
Now in the Netherlands, and where the Rhine
Branched out in many a long canal, extends,
From every province swarming, void of care,
Batavia rushes forth; and as they sweep,
On sounding skates, a thousand different ways
In circling poise, swift as the winds along,
The then gay land is maddened all to joy.