Middle Ages
In the middle ages backgammon was still a very popular game among the upper classes of Europe. Robert of Gloucester’s thirteenth-century chronicle portrays knights playing “atte tables”, and there is a similar passage in the Song of Roland.
Game spread from the upper classes throughout all people in Europe. Innkeepers attracted customers by providing them with boards, men, and dice. Apparently the medieval board was twice the size of the usual chessboard, and the men were larger than our modern checkers.
The Catholic Church, of course did not approve of any kind of gambling and started a long and losing war against the popular game. In 1254 Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) forbade the game to his court officials and extended the ban to all his subjects.
One hundred and fifty years later the Archbishop of Tournai was busy prosecuting people caught playing tables. The schools of Bologna decided that ecclesiastical canons did not apply to chess - but tables was still classified with the inhonesti ludi (dishonest, or dishonourable, games), and attempts to suppress it continued until the end of the fifteenth century.
By then, towns in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Holland were exempting tables from municipal censure so long as the stakes were kept small. However, the game remained forbidden to university students and apprentices learning their trade. One scholarly sleuth, H. J. R. Murray, has discovered at least twenty-five different kinds of “tables” played in various parts of Europe during the Middle Ages. In an article on “The Medieval Game of Backgammon”, he wrote:
“In Spain and England the game emperador, or the English game, stands out as the leading variety of tables, in Germany buf, in the Low Countries and Scandinavian countries verkeer or kotra . . . Testa was the game most frequently played in Italy . . . In France trictrac, which has a certain resemblance to the Spanish laquet, came to the front from about 1500.
The most interesting of these games is emperador, because both in Spain and England there were special terms for different ways of winning comparable to the distinctions made in modern backgammon between the win, the gammon, and the backgammon. In Spain, the blocking of six consecutive points gave the winner barata; in England there were two special wins known as limpolding and lurching”.
We suspect that, in mentioning “lurching”, Mr. Murray, may have confused backgammon and cribbage boards. Though cribbage is a card game, the score is kept by moving pegs around the board as points are made. The first man to score 121 wins, and if his opponent’s more advanced peg has not yet reached the home board (the last 30 holes), the loser has been “left in the lurch”, or ‘lurched”, and loses double the stake.
The modern board appears in pictures in Europe as early as the fourteenth century, and after that widely throughout the continent as the game flourished and spread. Very ornate boards survive from this period, and even church decorations - some of Germany’s medieval cathedrals contain depiction’s of backgammon boards. And there were many treatises and illuminated manuscripts to explain the game.
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