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Research Roman rules? The introduction of board games to Britain and Ireland Ma

Research Roman rules? The introduction of board games to Britain and Ireland Mark A. Hall1 & Katherine Forsyth2 Competitive board games, played on the ground, on the ﬂoor or on wooden boards, provide entertainment, distraction and exercise for the mind — it is hard to believe that north-west Europe was ever without them. But the authors here make a strong case that the introduction of such games was among the fruits of Roman contact, along with literacy and wine. In Britain and Ireland games were soon renamed, but belonged like children’s jokes to a broad underworld of fast- moving cultural transmission, largely unseen till now. Keywords: north-west Europe, Britain, Ireland, ﬁrst millennium AD, Roman, Celtic, board games, ludus latrunculorum, taﬂ, XII scripta / alea Introduction In recent years Antiquity has addressed the subject of Roman and indigenous or native interaction — a wider process than Romanisation — through board games in the context of the Eastern Empire (Mulvin & Sidebotham 2004; de Voogt 2010). With this paper we seek to move the debate to the Western Empire, particularly the frontier zone of Britain and Ireland and explore the question of the Roman introduction of board games and their subsequent development by Celtic-speaking peoples. Literary and archaeological evidence combines to indicate that the playing of board games was a widespread, popular and culturally signiﬁcant phenomenon among the Celtic- speaking peoples of Britain and Ireland in the ﬁrst millennium AD. Yet little attention has been given to the origin of such games in these islands. Previous writers (e.g. Sterckx 1 Perth Museum & Art Gallery, 78 George Street, Perth PH1 5LB, UK (Email: mahall@pkc.gov.uk) 2 Celtic and Gaelic, University of Glasgow, 3 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK Received: 4 March 2011; Accepted: 9 May 2011; Revised: 21 April 2011 ANTIQUITY 85 (2011): 1325–1338 http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/085/ant0851325.htm 1325 Roman rules? The introduction of board games to Britain and Ireland 1970; Sch¨ adler 2007 with circumspection) appear to have taken it for granted or at least allowed that it was possible, that board games were a feature of ancient Celtic society from earliest times. The view presented here, however, is that board games arrived in Britain and Ireland through contact with the Roman world and that they are part of the wider picture of cross-frontier material cultural interaction (Galestin 2010: 64–88). Moving the pieces around: the role of Rome Sterckx (1970) was mistaken in his assumption that the playing of board games is a human universal and that Celtic-speaking peoples are therefore likely to have played them since time immemorial. This idea is rooted in Huizinga’s (1950) proposition that play was a universal human given. We root our proposition here in the ideas of Caillois (1958) and Dumazadier (1968) who argue for a culturally contextualised view of play. Board games then are not universal in origin but appear, as far as their Western history is principally concerned, to have a speciﬁc origin and dissemination from mid-fourth-millennium BC Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, around the Mediterranean and thence to temperate Europe (Murray 1951: 226– 38). Cultural contacts with and within the Roman Empire were a particularly important means of diffusion and it was through contacts with Rome that board games entered the Germanic world, reaching far beyond the limes to Scandinavia (as Murray [1951: 230] long ago suggested). Were this not already clear from the archaeological evidence (Whittaker 2006; Sodberg 2007), it would be obvious from the names for such games in the Germanic languages. As Sch¨ adler explains (2007: 372) the Germanic name taﬂ, board game (hence, Anglo-Saxon tæﬂ, Norse taﬂand later hnefataﬂ), derives from Latin tabula (gaming) board or counter. The name travelled yet further north, into Saami culture where the playing of tablut, ultimately, it seems, an Iron Age loan via Norse, was noted by Linnaeus in 1732 and observed among the Saami as late as 1884 (Murray 1913: 445–46; Helmfrid 2000). The process of dissemination was not one of wholesale borrowing or slavish imitation, but rather a creative indigenous response to stimulus in which games were adapted to local cultural and social contexts. The most recent analysis of taﬂin Scandinavia suggests it was derived from Roman imports or gifts of ludus latrunculorum (Sodberg 2007; Whittaker 2006). The Scandinavian variant hnefataﬂretained ludus latrunculorum’s basic mode of capture — by ﬂanking — but changed its two equally matched armies into a king protected by his warband from a larger opposing force of attackers, this innovation perhaps resonating better with the indigenous social and political institution of the comitatus. The introduction and diffusion of board-gaming throughout temperate Europe is in many ways analogous to the introduction and spread of literacy throughout the same area at approximately the same time. Both followed similar trajectories, in similar social contexts — of elite emulation — and manifest a similar variety in responses to stimulus (see Woolf 1994; Williams 2002; de Hoz 2007). The Norse runic and Irish ogham alphabets are both scripts developed beyond the limes under the inﬂuence of Latin literacy, clearly based on the Latin alphabet yet visually very different from their model (Moltke 1985; Harvey 1987; McManus 1991). The link between the earliest evidence of board-gaming and writing is seen in mid-ﬁrst-century Britain in the cemetery at Stanway which produced an inkwell and several gaming sets (see below), and at Litton Cheney, Dorset where a stylus and a set 1326 Research Mark A. Hall & Katherine Forsyth Figure 1. The Doctor’s Grave, Stanway, Essex, England. c ⃝Colchester Archaeology Trust (courtesy of Philip Crummy). of board game counters were found (Bailey 1967). The adoption and adaptation of Roman board games and writing are part of a much wider process of cultural response manifest in the archaeological record of pre-conquest Britain (Haselgrove 1984; Creighton 2000) and Scandinavia, where we see the innovative adaptation of Roman material culture and practices to new purposes, including, for instance, the ring-fort of Ismantorp as a hybrid of a Roman fort (Andr´ en 2006) and the reuse of Roman glass vessels in Scandinavian mortuary practices (Ekengren 2006). From Rome to Stanway and Knowth The most important ﬁnd of early gaming equipment in Britain, and the point of departure for the current study, is the so-called Doctor’s Grave from Stanway, Colchester, England (Figure 1). This grave, dated to AD 40–50, contained, in addition to dining equipment, a set of surgical instruments and divining rods, a gaming board with 26 glass counters, apparently laid out on it as if for play. The wood of the board had entirely decayed and all that remained were the metal hinges. From this, and the layout of the pieces, it was possible to reconstruct the size and possible format of the board (Crummy 2007: 352–59; Sch¨ adler 2007: 359–75). While it was not possible to say with certainty whether the board was double-sided, this is suggested by the overall size of the board, which follows the rectangular 1327 Roman rules? The introduction of board games to Britain and Ireland form of a Roman XII scripta / alea board, coupled with a low number of pieces (less than 30) and the absence of dice, which both suggest use in a game other than XII scripta / alea. Following detailed examination of the Doctor’s Grave board, both Crummy (2007: 352–9) and Sch¨ adler (2007: 359–75) concluded that, on balance, the board game represented is perhaps best seen not as a known Roman game but as an unknown Celtic one. In order to explore the question of how Celtic or Roman the earliest insular board games were, it is necessary to survey the earliest material evidence for gaming in Britain and Ireland. The Doctor’s Grave board can be related to other pre-Roman wooden boards in south-east Britain, particularly two similar rectangular examples from Grave 117 at King Harry Lane, Verulamium (Stead & Rigby 1989: 109) and Burial 6 at Baldock (Stead & Rigby 1986: 68–9), giving a total of three such boards from the territory of the Catuvellauni. To these may be added more fragmentary boards of less certain dimensions from the same territory: from Stanway (a further two, from other burials, Crummy et al. 2007: 126, 186–90), from Verulamium (a further one, Stead & Rigby 1989: 109–110) and from Welwyn Garden City (one, Stead 1967: 31–6). All these boards are interpretable as “. . . part of a distinctive British body of artefacts, linked to a speciﬁc game popular among a group of Britons in the south- east of the country and with strong connections with the newly Romanised Continent” (Crummy 2007: 359). As Crummy argues “the fact that Roman counters and boards were in the possession of Romanised Britons provides strong evidence in favour of the playing of a Roman game of some sort” (2007: 359). Nonetheless, Sch¨ adler prefers to suggest that there is a context of ancient Celtic board games that might explain the Stanway example. His crucial piece of evidence is a ﬁnd of gaming pieces from Welwyn Garden City which dates to about the ﬁnal uploads/Litterature/ roman-rules-the-introduction-of-board-ga.pdf