With the breaking up of feudalism, the game of chess seems to have gone to a great extent out of practice, and made way for a comparatively new game,—that of cards, which now became very popular. When Caxton printed his “Boke of Chesse” in 1474, he sought only to publish a moral treatise, and not to furnish his countrymen with a book of instructions in the game. The cut of the chess-player given in this book, copied in our cut [No. 148], shows some modifications in the forms of the chess-men. The knight, the rook, and the pawn, have preserved their old forms; but we are led to suppose, by the number of pieces with the bi-partite head, that the bishop had assumed a shape nearly resembling that of the rook. We have just seen Chaucer alluding to one of the legends relating to the origin of this game. Caxton, after Jean de Vignay and Jacques de Cessoles, gives us a strange story how it was invented under Evylmerodach, king of Babylon, by a philosopher, “whyche was named in Caldee Exerses, or in Greke Philemetor.”
No. 148. Chess in the Fifteenth Century.
No. 149. An Italian Chess-board.
Meanwhile, the game of chess had continued to flourish in Italy, where it appears to have experienced improvements, and where certainly the forms of the men were considerably modified. An Italian version of the work of Jacques de Cessoles was printed at Florence in 1493, under the title of Libro de Giuocho delli Scacchi, among the engravings to which, as in most of the editions of that work, there is a picture of a group of chess-players, who are here seated at a round table. The chess-board is represented in our cut, [No. 149], and it will be seen at a glance that the chess-men present a far greater resemblance to those used at the present day than those given in the older illuminations. Within a few years of the date of this book, a Portuguese, named Damiano, who was perhaps residing in Italy, as his work seems to have appeared there first, drew up a book of directions for chess with a set of eighty-eight games, which display considerable ingenuity. An edition of this book was published at Rome as early as 1524, and perhaps this was not the first. The figures of the chess-men are given in this treatise; that of the king is vase-shaped, not unlike our modern chess-king, but with two crowns; the queen is similar in shape, but has one crown; the delfino (bishop) differs from them in being smaller, and having no crown; the cavallo (knight) has the form of a horse’s head; the rocho, as it is still called, is in the form of a tower, like our modern castle; and the pedona (pawn) resembles a cone, with a knob at the apex. In England, the game of chess seems not to have been much in vogue during the sixteenth century; it is, I believe, only alluded to once in Shakespeare, in a well-known scene in the Tempest, which may have been taken from a foreign story, to which he owed his plot. The name of the game had been corrupted into chests or cheasts. The game of chess was expressly discouraged by our “Solomon,” James I., as “overwise and philosophicke a folly.” An attempt to bring it into more notice appears to have been made early in the reign of Elizabeth, under the patronage of lord Robert Dudley, afterwards the celebrated earl of Leicester, who displayed on many occasions a taste for refinements of this sort. Instructions were again sought from Italy through France; for there was printed and published in London, in the year 1562, a little volume dedicated to lord Robert Dudley, under the title of “The Pleasaunt and wittie Playe of the Cheasts reniewed, with Instructions both to Learn it Easily and to Play it Well; lately translated out of Italian into French, and now set forth in Englishe by James Rowbotham.” Rowbotham gives us some remarks of his own on the character of the game, and on the different forms of the chess-men, which are not uninteresting. He says:—“As for the fashion of the pieces, that is according to the fantasie of the workman, which maketh them after this manner. Some make them lyke men, whereof the kynge is the highest, and the queene (whiche some name amasone or ladye) is the next, bothe two crowned. The bishoppes some name alphins, some fooles, and some name them princes, lyke as also they are next unto the kinge and the queene, other some cal them archers, and thei are fashioned accordinge to the wyll of the workeman. The knights some call horsemen, and thei are men on horse backe. The rookes some cal elephantes, cariyng towres upon their backes, and men within the towres. The paunes some cal fote men, as they are souldiours on fote, cariyng some of them pykes, other some harquebushes, other some halbards, and other some the javelyn and target. Other makers of cheastmen make them of other fashions; but the use thereof wyll cause perfect knowledge.” “Our Englishe cheastmen,” he adds, “are commonly made nothing like unto these foresayde fashions: to wit, the kynge is made the highest or longest; the queene is longest nexte unto him; the bishoppe is made with a sharpe toppe, and cloven in the middest not muche unlyke to a bishop’s myter; the knight hath his top cut asloope, as thoughe beynge dubbed knight; the rooke is made lykest to the kynge and the queene, but that he is not so long; the paunes be made the smalest and least of all, and thereby they may best be knowen.”
At an early period the German tribes, as known to the Romans, were notoriously addicted to gambling. We are informed by Tacitus that a German in his time would risk not only his property, but his own personal liberty, on a throw of the dice; and if he lost, he submitted patiently, as a point of honour, to be bound by his opponent, and carried to the market to be sold into slavery. The Anglo-Saxons appear to have shared largely in this passion, and their habits of gambling are alluded to in different writers. A well-known writer of the first half of the twelfth century, Ordericus Vitalis, tells us that in his time even the prelates of the church were in the habit of playing at dice. A still more celebrated writer, John of Salisbury, who lived a little later in the same century, speaks of dice-playing as being then extremely prevalent, and enumerates no less than ten different games, which he names in Latin, as follows:—tessera, calculus, tabula (tables), urio vel Dardana pugna (Troy fight), tricolus, senio (sice), monarchus, orbiculi, taliorchus, and vulpes (the game of fox).—“De Nugis Curialium,” lib. i. c. 5. The sort of estimation in which the game was then held is curiously illustrated by an anecdote in the Carlovingian romance of “Parise la Duchesse,” where the king of the Hungarians wishes to contrive some means of telling the real character (aristocratic or plebeian) of his foundling, young Hugues, not then known to be the son of the duchess Parise. A party of robbers (which appears not to have been a specially disreputable avocation among the Hungarians of the romance) are employed, first to seduce the youth to “the chess and the dice,” and afterwards to lead him against his will to a thieving expedition, the object of which was to rob the treasury of the king, his godfather. They made a great hole in the wall, and thrust Hugues through it. The youth beheld the heaps of gold and silver with astonishment, but, resolved to touch none of the wealth he saw around him, his eyes fell upon a coffer on which lay three dice, “made and pointed in fine ivory”— Garde for i. escrin, si a veu iij. dez,
Qui sont de fin yvoire et fait et pointuré.
—Parise la Duchesse, p. 94.
Hugues seized the three dice, thrust them into his bosom, and, returning through the breach in the wall, told the robbers that he had carried away “the worth of four cities.” When the robbers heard his explanation, they at once concluded, from the taste he had displayed on this occasion, that he was of gentle blood, and the king formed the same opinion on the result of this trial.
During the period of which we are now speaking—the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the use of dice had spread itself from the highest to the very lowest class of the population. In its simpler form, that of the game of hazard, in which the chance of each player rested on the mere throw of the dice, it was the common game of the low frequenters of the taverns,—that class which lived upon the vices of society, and which was hardly looked upon as belonging to society itself. The practice and results of gambling are frequently referred to in the popular writers of the later middle ages. People could no longer stake their personal liberty on the throw, but they played for everything they had—even for the clothes they carried upon them, on which the tavern-keepers, who seem to have acted also as pawnbrokers, readily lent small sums of money. We often read of men who got into the taverner’s hands, playing as well as drinking themselves naked; and in a well-known manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii. fol. 167 vo) we find an illumination which represents this process very literally (cut No. 150). One, who is evidently the more aged of the two players, is already perfectly naked, whilst the other is reduced to his shirt. The illuminator appears to have intended to represent them as playing against each other till neither had anything left, like the two celebrated cats of Kilkenny, who ate one another up until nothing remained but their tails.
No. 150. Mediæval Gamblers.