The outdoor games practised when household curios were being fashioned necessitated fewer accessories than such games do to-day, and many of them were crude and obviously the work of amateurs. Yet the same games were being played and possibly enjoyed as much, although the sport was rougher!
When we think of winter amusements in the past somehow we conjure up pictures of hard frosts and crisp snow, although rain, damp, and fog were probably frequent visitors in Old England. Some of the games can be traced back to very early days—such, for instance, as skating, many ancient skates having been found. There is a remarkable contrast between the beautifully made skates now used on the comparatively rare occasions when the ice bears and the roller skates used all the year round, to those curious bone skates, so very primitive in their construction, examples of which are to be found in several local museums. In the Hull Museum, among the Market Weighton antiquities, there is a choice collection from East Yorkshire; one, made from the cannon bone of a horse, is smooth and well polished, having seen some active use, evidently belonging to some skater in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
The bone skates were fastened on to the feet much the same as metal skates, but they had no cutting edges, and consequently the skater carried a stick shod with an iron point, and by its aid propelled himself forward. Fitzstephen, writing in the time of Edward II, describes the ponds at Moorfields where the citizens of London skated. The ponds have long been dried up and built over; it is there, however, where, during excavations, some very fine examples of the old bone skates have been found.
Relics of Old Sport.
Among the relics of old sport met with are the curious and often beautifully embroidered hoods of white leather used in the days of hawking. These pretty little hoods, which were placed over the head of the hawk when carried on the wrist to the hunting field, were often embroidered in panels and furnished with braces for tying round the hawk's head. In the British Museum there is a curious silver lock-ring for a hawk engraved with arms and owner's name, apparently of seventeenth-century workmanship. No doubt the real purport of such curios is often overlooked, for not infrequently hawks' hoods have been found amongst old dolls' clothing, having been given to children in later years as playthings.
Guns, Pistols, and Flasks.
Eastern weapons have been brought over to this country in large numbers, some of them very ancient. It is said that among some of the Arab tribes it is no uncommon thing to meet with swords and daggers of antique form, richly damascened, and sometimes with jewelled hilts, made a thousand years or more ago, and a few years ago Crusaders' relics could be met with in the East. Many of these knives have silica blades, some of the handles being of jade. Those of grey jade are often piqué with gold, others, of ivory, being inlaid with jewels.
There is not very much to interest in old guns of English make, for few found in houses date back beyond the commencement of the nineteenth century. Among them, however, are flint-locks and here and there an old wheel-lock. The pistols met with among household curios are often handsome and have been preserved in leather cases, carefully stowed away. Some of them record the days of duelling, others the dangers of the road, when highway robbers lurked in every wood, and many a family coach was waylaid and its occupants robbed of their jewels and their purses of gold. To those interested in sporting, and familiar with the breech-loading guns of the present day, much interest attaches to the old powder flasks which were once necessary accompaniments of sportsmen. There are many beautifully engraved, embossed, and decorated flasks in museums, some of the early seventeenth-century specimens being made of boxwood, others of ivory, frequently ornamented with hunting scenes. In Fig. [92] is shown a curious flint-lock powder tester, then also regarded as one of the essential accessories of the sportsman's outfit. The copper powder flask illustrated in Fig. [93] is now in the Hull Museum. It is specially interesting in that the plain copper work is engraved in the centre with its original owner's monogram—"W R" in script. This flask, made about the year 1750, was evidently a keepsake, for engraved round the circular disc is the legend "Keep this for Joseph's sake."
In the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington there are some more elaborate specimens, two of which are illustrated in Fig. [94]. They are magnificent examples of metal repoussé work—a favourite decoration in the eighteenth century, copied in more inexpensive forms in the nineteenth century by makers of sporting accessories, who stamped them from dies and reproduced some of the old hunting scenes.
A review of the outdoor sports and relics of former days would scarcely be complete without some mention of swords and rapiers, which were once commonly worn, along with pistols, alas! too frequently in use when a hasty word called forth a challenge to a duel. Many of these old swords are rusty, but they frequently show marks of former use. They are needed no longer by civilians in this country, and take their places in trophies of arms, forming important features in the decorative curios of the household.