There are many games played with the ball that require the assistance of a club or bat, and probably the most ancient among them is the pastime now distinguished by the name of goff. In the northern parts of the kingdom goff is much practised. It requires much room to perform this game with propriety, and therefore I presume it is rarely seen at present in the vicinity of the metropolis. It answers to a rustic pastime of the Romans which they played with a ball of leather stuffed with feathers, called paganica, because it was used by the common people: the goff-ball is composed of the same materials to this day: I have been told it is sometimes, though rarely, stuffed with cotton. In the reign of Edward III. the Latin name cambuca [431] was applied to this pastime, and it derived the denomination, no doubt, from the crooked club or bat with which it was played; the bat was also called a bandy, from its being bent, and hence the game itself is frequently written in English bandy-ball. Below are two figures engaged at bandy-ball, and the form of the bandy, as it was used early in the fourteenth century, from a MS. book of prayers beautifully illuminated and written about that time, in the possession of Francis Douce Esq.
23. Bandy-Ball.—XIV. Century.
Goff, according to the present modification of the game, is performed with a bat, not much unlike the bandy: the handle of this instrument is straight, and usually made of ash, about four feet and a half in length; the curvature is affixed to the bottom, faced with horn and backed with lead; the ball is a little one, but exceedingly hard, being made with leather, and, as before observed, stuffed with feathers. There are generally two players, who have each of them his bat and ball. The game consists in driving the ball into certain holes made in the ground; he who achieves it the soonest, or in the fewest number of strokes, obtains the victory. The goff-lengths, or the spaces between the first and last holes, are sometimes extended to the distance of two or three miles; the number of intervening holes appears to be optional, but the balls must be struck into the holes, and not beyond them; when four persons play, two of them are sometimes partners, and have but one ball, which they strike alternately, but every man has his own bandy.
It should seem that goff was a fashionable game among the nobility at the commencement of the seventeenth century, and it was one of the exercises with which prince Henry, eldest son to James I., occasionally amused himself, as we learn from the following anecdote recorded by a person who was present: [432] "At another time playing at goff, a play not unlike to pale-maille, whilst his schoolmaster stood talking with another, and marked not his highness warning him to stand farther off, the prince thinking he had gone aside, lifted up his goff-club to strike the ball; mean tyme one standing by said to him, 'beware that you hit not master Newton:' wherewith he drawing back his hand, said, 'Had I done so, I had but paid my debts.'"
XV.—STOW-BALL.
A pastime called stow-ball is frequently mentioned by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, I presume, was a species of goff, at least it appears to have been played with the same kind of ball. In Littleton's Latin and English Dictionary, under the word paganica, the goff-ball and the stow-ball are the same.
XVI.—PALL-MALL.
According to the author, in the reign of James I., quoted above, pall-mall was a pastime not unlike goff, but if the definition of the former given by Cotgrave be correct, it will be found to differ materially from the latter, at least as it was played in modern times. "Pale-maille," says he, "is a game wherein a round box ball is struck with a mallet through a high arch of iron, which he that can do at the fewest blows, or at the number agreed upon, wins." It is to be observed, that there are two of these arches, that is, "one at either end of the alley." The game of mall was a fashionable amusement in the reign of Charles II., and the walk in St. James's Park, now called the Mall, received its name from having been appropriated to the purpose of playing at mall, where Charles himself and his courtiers frequently exercised themselves in the practice of this pastime. The denomination mall given to the game, is evidently derived from the mallet or wooden hammer used by the players to strike the ball.