These figures are taken from a manuscript in the Harleian Library, [419] nearly, if not altogether, coeval in point of antiquity with the former. The balls are unlike each other; that in the engraving No. 20 is the largest, and bears the marking of the seams.
XI.—STOOL-BALL.
Stool-ball is frequently mentioned by the writers of the three last centuries, but without any proper definition of the game. Doctor Johnson tells us, [420] it is a play where balls are driven from stool to stool, but does not say in what manner or to what purpose. I have been informed, that a pastime called stool-ball is practised to this day in the northern parts of England, which consists in simply setting a stool upon the ground, and one of the players takes his place before it, while his antagonist, standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of striking the stool; and this it is the business of the former to prevent by beating it away with the hand, reckoning one to the game for every stroke of the ball; if, on the contrary, it should be missed by the hand and touch the stool, the players change places. I believe the same also happens if the person who threw the ball can catch and retain it when driven back, before it reaches the ground. The conqueror at this game is he who strikes the ball most times before it touches the stool. Again, in other parts of the country a certain number of stools are set up in a circular form, and at a distance from each other, and every one of them is occupied by a single player; when the ball is struck, which is done as before with the hand, every one of them is obliged to alter his situation, running in succession from stool to stool, and if he who threw the ball can regain it in time to strike any one of the players, before he reaches the stool to which he is running, he takes his place, and the person touched must throw the ball, until he can in like manner return to the circle.
Stool-ball seems to have been a game more properly appropriated to the women than to the men, but occasionally it was played by the young persons of both sexes indiscriminately; as the following lines from a song written by D'Urfey for his play of Don Quixote, acted at Dorset Gardens in 1694, [421] sufficiently indicate:
Down in a vale on a summer's day,
All the lads and lasses met to be merry;
A match for kisses at stool-ball to play,
And for cakes, and ale, and sider, and perry.
Chorus. Come all, great small, short tall, away to stool-ball.