Several minor varieties of bowling are popular in America, the most in vogue being “Cocked Hat,” which is played with three pins, one in the head-pin position and the others on either corner of the back row. The pins are usually a little larger than those used in the regular game, and smaller balls are used. The maximum score is 90, and all balls, even those going into the gutter, are in play. “Cocked hat and Feather” is similar, except that a fourth pin is added, placed in the centre. Other variations of bowling are “Quintet,” in which five pins, set up like an arrow pointed towards the bowler, are used; the “Battle Game,” in which 12 can be scored by knocking down all but the centre, or king, pin; “Head Pin and Four Back,” in which five pins are used, one in the head-pin position and the rest on the back line; “Four Back”; “Five Back”; “Duck Pin”; “Head Pin,” with nine pins set up in the old-fashioned way, and “Candle Pin,” in which thin pins tapering towards the top and bottom are used, the other rules being similar to those of the regular game.
The American bowling game is played to a slight extent in Great Britain and Germany. In the latter country, however, the old-fashioned game of nine-pins (Kegelspiel) with solid balls and the pins set up diamond-fashion, obtains universally. The alleys are made with less care than the American, being of cement, asphalt, slate or marble.
BOWLING GREEN, a city and the county-seat of Warren county, Kentucky, U.S.A., on the Barren river, 113 m. S. by W. of Louisville. Pop. (1890) 7803; (1900) 8226, of whom 2593 were negroes; (1910) 9173. The city is served by the Louisville & Nashville railway (which maintains car shops here), and by steamboats navigating the river. Macadamized or gravel roads also radiate from it to all parts of the surrounding country, a rich agricultural and live-stock raising region, in which there are deposits of coal, iron ore, oil, natural gas, asphalt and building stone. The city is the seat of Potter College (for girls; non-sectarian, opened 1889); of Ogden College (non-sectarian, 1877), a secondary school, endowed by the bequest of Major Robert W. Ogden (1796-1873); of the West Kentucky State Normal School, opened (as the Southern Normal School and Business College) at Glasgow in 1875 and removed to Bowling Green in 1884; and of the Bowling Green Business University, formerly a part of the Southern Normal School and Business College. Bowling Green has two parks, a large horse and mule market, and a trade in other live-stock, tobacco and lumber; among its manufactures are flour, lumber, tobacco and furniture. The municipality owns and operates the water-works and the electric lighting plant. Bowling Green was incorporated in 1812. During the early part of the Civil War Bowling Green was on the right flank of the first line of Confederate defence in the West, and was for some time the headquarters of General Albert Sidney Johnston. It was abandoned, however, after the capture by the Federals of Forts Henry and Donelson.
BOWLING GREEN, a city and the county-seat of Wood county, Ohio, U.S.A., 20 m. S. by W. of Toledo, of which it is a residential suburb. Pop. (1890) 3467; (1900) 5067 (264 foreign-born); (1910) 5222. Bowling Green is served by the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton and the Toledo & Ohio Central railways, and by the Toledo Urban & Interurban and the Lake Erie, Bowling Green & Napoleon electric lines, the former extending from Toledo to Dayton. It is situated in a rich agricultural region which abounds in oil and natural gas. Many of the residences and business places of Bowling Green are heated by a privately owned central hot-water heating plant. Among the manufactures are cut glass, stoves and ranges, kitchen furniture, guns, thread-cutting machines, brooms and agricultural implements. Bowling Green was first settled in 1832, was incorporated as a town in 1855, and became a city in 1904.
BOWLS, the oldest British outdoor pastime, next to archery, still in vogue. It has been traced certainly to the 13th, and conjecturally to the 12th century. William Fitzstephen (d. about 1190), in his biography of Thomas Becket, History. gives a graphic sketch of the London of his day and, writing of the summer amusements of the young men, says that on holidays they were “exercised in Leaping, Shooting. Wrestling, Casting of Stones [in jactu lapidum], and Throwing of Javelins fitted with Loops for the Purpose, which they strive to fling before the Mark; they also use Bucklers, like fighting Men.” It is commonly supposed that by jactus lapidum Fitzstephen meant the game of bowls, but though it is possible that round stones may sometimes have been employed in an early variety of the game-and there is a record of iron bowls being used, though at a much later date, on festive occasions at Nairn,—nevertheless the inference seems unwarranted. The jactus lapidum of which he speaks was probably more akin to the modern “putting the weight,” once even called “putting the stone.” It is beyond dispute, however, that the game, at any rate in a rudimentary form, was played in the 13th century. A MS. of that period in the royal library, Windsor (No. 20, E iv.), contains a drawing representing two players aiming at a small cone instead of an earthenware ball or jack. Another MS. of the same century has a picture—crude, but spirited—which brings us into close touch with the existing game. Three figures are introduced and a jack. The first player’s bowl has come to rest just in front of the jack; the second has delivered his bowl and is following after it with one of those eccentric contortions still not unusual on modern greens, the first player meanwhile making a repressive gesture with his hand, as if to urge the bowl to stop short of his own; the third player is depicted as in the act of delivering his bowl. A 14th-century MS. Book of Prayers in the Francis Douce collection in the Bodleian library at Oxford contains a drawing in which two persons are shown, but they bowl to no mark. Strutt (Sports and Pastimes) suggests that the first player’s bowl may have been regarded by the second player as a species of jack; but in that case it is not clear what was the first player’s target. In these three earliest illustrations of the pastime it is worth noting that each player has one bowl only, and that the attitude in delivering it was as various five or six hundred years ago as it is to-day. In the third he stands almost upright; in the first he kneels; in the second he stoops, halfway between the upright and the kneeling position.
As the game grew in popularity it came under the ban of king and parliament, both fearing it might jeopardize the practice of archery, then so important in battle; and statutes forbidding it and other sports were enacted in the reigns of Edward III., Richard II. and other monarchs. Even when, on the invention of gunpowder and firearms, the bow had fallen into disuse as a weapon of war, the prohibition was continued. The discredit attaching to bowling alleys, first established in London in 1455, probably encouraged subsequent repressive legislation, for many of the alleys were connected with taverns frequented by the dissolute and gamesters. The word “bowls” occurs for the first time in the statute of 1511 in which Henry VIII. confirmed previous enactments against unlawful games. By a further act of 1541—which was not repealed until 1845—artificers, labourers, apprentices, servants and the like were forbidden to play bowls at any time save Christmas, and then only in their master’s house and presence. It was further enjoined that any one playing bowls outside of his own garden or orchard was liable to a penalty of 6s. 8d., while those possessed of lands of the yearly value of £100 might obtain licences to play on their own private greens. But though the same statute absolutely prohibited bowling alleys, Henry VIII. had them constructed for his own pleasure at Whitehall Palace, and was wont to back himself when he played. In Mary’s reign (1555) the licences were withdrawn, the queen or her advisers deeming the game an excuse for “unlawful assemblies, conventicles, seditions and conspiracies.” The scandals of the bowling alleys grew rampant in Elizabethan London, and Stephen Gosson in his School of Abuse (1579) says, “Common bowling alleys are privy moths that eat up the credit of many idle citizens; whose gains at home are not able to weigh down their losses abroad; whose shops are so far from maintaining their play, that their wives and children cry out for bread, and go to bed supperless often in the year.”
Biased bowls were introduced in the 16th century. “A little altering of the one side,” says Robert Recorde, the mathematician, in his Castle of Knowledge (1556), “maketh the bowl to run biasse waies.” And Shakespeare (Richard II., Act. III. Sc. 4) causes the queen to remonstrate, in reply to her lady’s suggestion of a game at bowls to relieve her ennui, “’Twill make me think the world is full of rubs, and that my fortune runs against the bias.” This passage is interesting also as showing that women were accustomed to play the game in those days. It is pleasant to think that there is foundation for the familiar story of Sir Francis Drake playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe as the Armada was beating up Channel, and finishing his game before tackling the Spaniards. Bowls, at that date, was looked upon as a legitimate amusement for Sundays,—as, indeed, were many other sports. When John Knox visited Calvin at Geneva one Sunday, it is said that he discovered him engaged in a game; and John Aylmer (1521-1594), though bishop of London, enjoyed a game of a Sunday afternoon, but used such language “as justly exposed his character to reproach.” The pastime found favour with the Stuarts. In the Book of Sports (1618), James I. recommended a moderate indulgence to his son, Prince Henry, and Charles I. was an enthusiastic bowler, unfortunately encouraging by example wagering and playing for high stakes, habits that ultimately brought the green into as general disrepute as the alley. It is recorded that the king occasionally visited Richard Shute, a Turkey merchant who owned a beautiful green at Barking Hall, and that after one bout his losses were £1000. He was permitted to play his favourite game to beguile the tedium of his captivity. The signboard of a wayside inn near Goring Heath in Oxfordshire long bore a portrait of the king with couplets reciting how his majesty “drank from the bowl, and bowl’d for what he drank.” During his stay at the Northamptonshire village of Holdenby or Holmby—where Sir Thomas Herbert complains the green was not well kept—Charles frequently rode over to Lord Vaux’s place at Harrowden, or to Lord Spencer’s at Althorp, for a game, and, according to one account, was actually playing on the latter green when Cornet Joyce came to Holmby to remove him to other quarters. During this period gambling had become a mania. John Aubrey, the antiquary, chronicles that the sisters of Sir John Suckling, the courtier-poet, once went to the bowling-green in Piccadilly, crying, “for fear he should lose all their portions.” If the Puritans regarded bowls with no friendly eye, as Lord Macaulay asserts, one can hardly wonder at it. But even the Puritans could not suppress betting. So eminently respectable a person as John Evelyn thought no harm in bowling for stakes, and once played at the Durdans, near Epsom, for £10, winning match and money, as he triumphantly notes in his Diary for the 14th of August 1657. Samuel Pepys repeatedly mentions finding great people “at bowles.” But in time the excesses attending the game rendered it unfashionable, and after the Revolution it became practically a pothouse recreation, nearly all the greens, like the alleys, having been constructed in the grounds and gardens attached to taverns.