[The following story, translated by Miss Isabel Bruce from Le Grand Choleur of M. Charles Deulin (Contes du Roi Gambrinus), gives a great deal of information about French and Flemish golf. As any reader will see, this ancient game represents a stage of evolution between golf and hockey. The object is to strike a ball, in as few strokes as possible, to a given point; but, after every three strokes, the opponent is allowed to décholer, or make one stroke back, or into a hazard. Here the element of hockey comes in. Get rid of this element, let each man hit his own ball, and, in place of striking to a point—say, the cemetery gate—let men “putt” into holes, and the Flemish game becomes golf. It is of great antiquity. Ducange, in his Lexicon of Low Latin, gives Choulla, French choule = “Globulus ligneus qui clava propellitur”—a wooden ball struck with a club. The head of the club was of iron (cf. crossare). This is borne out by a miniature in a missal of 1504, which represents peasants playing choule with clubs very like niblicks. Ducange quotes various MS. references of 1353, 1357, and other dates older by a century than our earliest Scotch references to golf. At present the game is played in Belgium with a strangely-shaped lofting-iron and a ball of beechwood. M. Zola (Germinal, p. 310) represents his miners playing chole, or choulle, and says that they hit drives of more than 500 yards. Experiments made at Wimbledon with a Belgian club sent over by M. Charles Michel suggest that M. Zola has over-estimated the distance. But M. Zola and M. Deulin agree in making the players run after the ball. M. Henri Gaidoz adds that a similar game, called soule, is played in various departments of France. He refers to Laisnel de la Salle. The name chole may be connected with German Kolbe, and golf may be the form which this word would assume in a Celtic language. All this makes golf very old; but the question arises, Are the “holes” to which golfers play of Scotch or of Dutch origin? There are several old Flemish pictures of golf; do any of them show players in the act of “holing out”? There is said to be such a picture at Neuchâtel.
A. Lang.]
I
Once upon a time there lived at the hamlet of Coq, near Condé-sur-l’Escaut, a wheelwright called Roger. He was a good fellow, untiring both at his sport and at his toil, and as skilful in lofting a ball with a stroke of his club as in putting together a cartwheel. Every one knows that the game of golf consists in driving towards a given point a ball of cherrywood with a club which has for head a sort of little iron shoe without a heel.
For my part, I do not know a more amusing game; and when the country is almost cleared of the harvest, men, women, children, everybody, drives his ball as you please, and there is nothing cheerier than to see them filing on a Sunday like a flight of starlings across potato fields and ploughed lands.
II
Well, one Tuesday, it was a Shrove Tuesday, the wheelwright of Coq laid aside his plane, and was slipping on his blouse to go and drink his can of beer at Condé, when two strangers came in, club in hand.
“Would you put a new shaft to my club, master?” said one of them.
“What are you asking me, friends? A day like this! I wouldn’t give the smallest stroke of the chisel for a brick of gold. Besides, does any one play golf on Shrove Tuesday? You had much better go and see the mummers tumbling in the high street of Condé.”
“We take no interest in the tumbling of mummers,” replied the stranger. “We have challenged each other at golf and we want to play it out. Come, you won’t refuse to help us, you who are said to be one of the finest players of the country?”