LITMIR.BIZ

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"Prohibemus etiam clericis, ne intersint ludis inhonestis, vel choreis, vel ludant ad aleas vel taxillos; nec sustineant ludos fieri de Rege et Regina, nec arietes levari, nec palæstras publicas fieri:" that is, "We also forbid clergymen to join in disreputable games or dancings, or to play at dice; neither shall they allow games of King and Queen to be acted [fieri], nor permit ram-raisings, nor public wrestlings. " [75] Ducange, who quotes the passage in his Latin Glossary, under the word Ludi, is inclined to think that the game de Rege et Regina—King and Queen—might have been the game of cards. There are not, however, any just grounds for entertaining such an opinion. The conjecture seems to have been suggested merely from the circumstance of there being a King and Queen in the cards with which the writer was most familiar; but had he known that no Queen is to be found in the earliest European cards, he probably would not have made so bad a guess. Besides, looking at the context, there can scarcely be a doubt that the games—not game—of King and Queen were a kind of mumming exhibitions which the clergy enjoyed as spectators, not as performers. Payments to minstrels and mummers for their exhibitions for the amusement of the monks, and eke of the lord Abbot himself, are not of unfrequent occurrence in the account books of old monasteries. In the same clause, the clergy are enjoined not to allow of ram-raisings nor public wrestlings—sports in which they were as unlikely to appear as actors as in the games of the King and Queen. What may have been meant by ram-raising—arietes levari—the curious reader is left to find, if he can, in the pages of Strutt and Fosbroke.

      The next passage, supposed to relate to Playing Cards, which demands attention, is that which occurs in the Wardrobe accounts of Edward I, anno 1278, and which has been already quoted in the first chapter. It appears necessary to give it here again, together with the Hon. Daines Barrington's remarks on it, in the chronological order of evidences adduced in favour of the antiquity of Card Playing in Europe. "The earliest mention of cards that I have yet stumbled upon, is in Mr. Anstis's 'History of the Garter' (vol. ii, p. 307), where he cites the following passage from the Wardrobe rolls, in the sixth year of Edward the First: 'Waltero Sturton ad opus regis ad ludendum ad quatuor Reges, viii.s. v.d.'; from which entry Mr. Anstis, with some probability conjectures, that Playing Cards were not unknown at the latter end of the thirteenth century; and perhaps what I shall add, may carry with it some small confirmation of what he supposes."

      The simple fact that the game of cards was known, both in France and England, by the name of the Four Kings, long before we had any special dissertations respecting its origin, is of more weight, in corroboration of Anstis's supposition, than Mr. Barrington's supplemental conjectures. The first question to be determined, is the identity of the game of cards, and that of the Quatuor Reges; but, without adducing the slightest evidence, he assumes the fact, and then proceeds to speculate where Edward might have learnt the game. But even admitting that cards were meant by the term Quatuor Reges, it is just as likely that Edward learned the game from his Queen, Eleanor of Castile, as that he learned it from the Saracens in the Holy Land; for, admitting it to be of Eastern origin, and that Europeans first obtained a knowledge of it from the Saracens, or a people of Arab race, it may be fairly supposed that Spain would be one of the countries in which cards would be earliest introduced. In the cards now in use in England, there are certain peculiarities in the names of two of the suits, as compared with the marks, which seem to intimate that we obtained our first knowledge of the game from Spain, although subsequently we might import our cards from France.

      Seeing that chess was known in the East by a term signifying the Four Kings, and that it was a favorite amusement with the higher classes in Europe in the reign of Edward I, there can scarcely be a doubt that this was the game to which Walter Sturton's entry relates. If cards were indeed known in Europe in the early part of the reign of Edward the First, the silence respecting them, of all contemporary writers, for about a century afterwards, must be admitted as conclusive, though negative, evidence of their not being in common use. Petrarch, though he treats of gaming in one of his dialogues, never mentions them; and though Boccacio and Chaucer notice various games at which both the higher and lower classes of the period were accustomed to play, yet there is not a single passage in the works of either, which can be fairly construed to mean cards.

      From the following passage, which occurs in a work on the 'Government of a Family,' in manuscript, composed by Sandro di Pipozzi, [76] in 1299, it has been concluded by Breitkopf that cards were at that period well known in Italy: "Se giucherà di denaro, o cosi, o alle carte, gli apparecchieria la via, &c." Zani, however, opposes to the authority of the manuscript, the negative evidence of Petrarch, who flourished at a subsequent period, and who, he thinks, would not have failed to have mentioned cards if they had then been known among the various games which he enumerates in the first dialogue of his treatise 'De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ.' [77] Mons. Duchesne also remarks, in his 'Observations sur les Cartes a jouer,' that, as the copy of Sandro di Pipozzi's work, cited by Taraboschi, and examined by Zani, is not of an earlier date than 1400, there is reason to believe that the express mention of cards in it, was the interpolation of a transcriber. That such interpolations were frequently made both by printers and transcribers, will appear evident from the following observations on several works, both printed and manuscript, which have been cited in proof of the antiquity of card-playing in Europe. [78]

      The Abbé Rive, who ascribes the invention of cards to Spain, endeavours to show that they were known there in the early part of the fourteenth century. The evidence of this is, according to his statement, to be found in the Statutes of the military order of the Band, promulgated by Alphonso, King of Castile, where there is a passage expressly forbidding the members to play at cards. Whether cards are expressly mentioned in any old Spanish manuscripts of the Statutes in question, has not been ascertained; but of all the different editions, original and translated, of Guevara's 'Golden Epistles,' the work from which the Abbé Rive obtained his information, the first in which cards are expressly named, is that of the French translation by Gutery, published at Lyons in 1558. [79] As the word is not to be found in the original Spanish editions, nor in the Italian translations made from them, there cannot be a reasonable doubt of its being an interpolation of Gutery, who probably thought that a general prohibition of gaming necessarily included cards; and thus, "par conséquent," the Abbé Rive is furnished with positive evidence that the game of cards was common in Spain in 1332. Another authority, referred to by the Abbé Rive in favour of the antiquity of Spanish cards, is of the same kind. In a collection of the 'Laws of Spain,' printed in 1640, he finds the following passage in an Ordonnance issued by John I, King of Castile, in 1387: "We command and ordain that none of our subjects shall dare to play at dice or at cards (Naypes) either in public or in private, and that whoever shall so play, &c." [80] There can, however, be no doubt that the word cards (Naypes) is an interpolation; for it is not to be found in the same Ordonnance as given in the collection entitled 'Ordenanças Reales de Castilla,' printed at Medina del Campo, 1541. In this earlier edition, playing at dice and tables for money is indeed forbidden—"de jugar juego de dados ni de tables, a dinero"—but cards are not mentioned.

      Jansen, in his 'Essai sur l'Origine de la Gravure en Bois et en Taille-douce,' cites the four following verses from the romance of Renard le Contrefait, pointed out to him by the late Mons. Van Praet, in evidence of cards being known in France at least as early as 1341, the year in which the romance was finished:

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