It is not our purpose to historically trace the evolution of cards—this is a subject beyond the reach of the present article—but a look farther afield will give us evidence that during the last three centuries there has been a constant adaptation of cards to purposes which take them beyond their intention as the instruments for card playing only. The idea that playing cards had their origin in the later years of Charles VI. of France may be disposed of at once as a popular error, though it is true that the earliest authentic examples which still exist are parts of the two packs of cards which were produced for the amusement of that King, by the hands of Jacques Gringonneur, and of which seventeen are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris.
These are the most early forms of playing cards, and are known as "Tarots" (as distinguished from "Numerals," or cards which have the consecutively marked "suit" signs), and which had evidently a purpose outside the ordinary games of playing cards as known to us. The "Tarot" pack consists variously of seventy-two, seventy-seven, or seventy-eight cards, including the "Tarots," which give them their distinctive name. "Tarot" as a game was familiar three centuries ago in England, but is so no longer, although it has a limited use in other parts of Europe still. One of the "Tarot" cards, of the Bibliothèque Nationale, "La Mort," is shown as the first of our illustrations (Fig. 1).
FIG. 2.
FIG. 3.
Familiar to those who are conversant with the literature of playing cards will be the Knave of Clubs, shown in Fig. 2, which is one of the fragments of a pack of cards found, in 1841, by Mr. Chatto, in the wastepaper used to form the pasteboard covers of a book. These cards are printed in outline from wood blocks and the colour filled in by stencilling, a method employed in the manufacture of cards down to a very few years ago. The date of these cards may safely be taken as not more recent than 1450, and they are most interesting as being coeval with, if not antecedent to, the most early form of printed book illustration as shown in the "Biblia Pauperum."[B] The archaic drawing of the features, with its disregard of facial perspective, and the wondrous cervical anatomy, do not lessen our admiration of the vigour and "go" shown in this early example of the art of the designer and wood engraver.
It is in interesting relation to the knaves of a pack of cards to note the curious conservatism which has belonged to them during the last four centuries and a half. In a MS. in the British Museum, written in the year 1377, the monkish writer, in a moralization on the life of man, suggests its resemblance to a game of cards; and he gives us a description and the attributes of some of the cards. Of those which we now know as knaves, he says two of them hold their halberds or arms downwards and two of them upwards—a distinction which is retained on many of the playing cards still manufactured.
FIG. 4.