Skittles

Skittles, related in many ways to Ten-Pin Bowling, involves throwing a ball at a number of skittles. The British archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie found a ball and skittles in a tomb of an Ancient Egyptian child dating back to 5200 b.c.E. and this illustrates the ancient origins of both skittles and bowling. The origin of the shape of current skittles seems to have been derived from the clubs that German peasants carried with them for protection. Therefore, according to this version, when the club was stood on its end, it represented the temptation to hit somebody, and therefore throwing a stone, or later a ball, at it was praiseworthy. There are stories that revolve around playing skittles in cloisters of abbeys.

By the Middle Ages, the game was popular throughout Europe, and there were edicts against it in England during the reign of Edward III (r. 1327–77) because he felt that archery would suffer. However, it continued to be played, but often in secret, throughout England. King Henry VIII certainly disliked other people playing the game enough to ban Loggats, the version of the game in use at the time—although he himself installed a court for playing skittles at Westminster Palace, and his second wife Anne Boleyn is also known to have played the game. Because the game continued to be played surreptitiously, often in public houses, it became associated with gambling, and this reinforced the view of the authorities about it.

Possibly because of the nature of it being played around England, many regional variations of the game arose. It remained most popular in the west country, especially Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Gloucestershire, and Wilshire, as well as in Worcestershire and even in South Wales.

It then spread to the Netherlands, where the Konin-klijke Nederlandsche Kegelbond operates as the body for 700 clubs in the country. It was from the Netherlands that it was taken to North America, where it becoming the forerunner for Ten-Pin Bowling—often still called “dutch-pins” in the United States. There were also people playing the game in Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and in New Zealand and Australia. In France and Italy, boules and bocee remained more popular than skittles, but the activity gradually spread to Eastern Europe, with children playing it in Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Serbia. However, its popularity [Page 643]has waned with the advent of machines to speed up Ten-Pin Bowling.

As well as regional variations of Skittles, there are also different games such as Seattles, whereby the pins are all numbered. Based on the Finish game Mölkky, it is played in Cornwall, in the southwest of England, and players have to knock down particular pins, taking care not to knock them all over.