Royal Courts

The backgammon game continued to increase its popularity at royal courts, even in Scotland. James the First is reputed to have spent the last evening of his life, before his murder in 1437, “in reading with his Queen and the nobles and ladies of his Court, and in playing at Chess and Tables”.

The tables were turned, so to speak, in 1479. when the Duke of Albany brother of James III of Scotland, was confined in Edinburgh Castle. One night he invited the captain of the guard to supper, and they spent a jovial evening drinking, singing, and playing at tables. In the morning the royal captive had disappeared, and his jailer was dead.

The game remained one of the most popular sports among the Elizabethans. A generation later King James I of England observed, in A Kinge’s Christian Dutie Towards God, the interminably moralistic guide book he wrote for his eldest son, Henry, the future king: “As for sitting, or house pastimes - since they may at times supply the roome, which, being emptie, would be patent to pernicious idleness - I will not therefore agree with the curiositie of some learned men of our age in forbidding cardes, dice, and such like games of hazard; when it is foule and stormie weather, then I say, may ye lawlully play at cardes or tables”.

And apparently the game continued to flourish among lesser folk, in fair as well as “foule and stormie” weather. Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, gives a general view of seventeenth century sports: “Ordinary recreations we have in winter, as cards, tables, dice, shovelboard, chess-lay . . .”.



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