Pall Mall
Pall Mall, Pell Mell, Paille Maille, Palle-malle, Pelemele, Jeu de Mail
In
seventeenth and eighteenth century France, mallet and ball games were
quite popular and one of them, "Paille Maille", was introduced
to London where it was played in open ground near St. James's Palace.
A 1661 entry in Samuel Pepys diary says 'To St. James's Park, where I
saw the Duke of York playing at Pelemele, the first time that I over saw
the sport.' The pitch became known as "The Mall" which is the
famous London street that leads up to Buckingham Palace and this whole
area became known as Pall Mall which is how that other well trodden thoroughfare
obtained its name.
The game was played on a huge strip of land, in this case about 1000 yards long and so was more like golf than Croquet - players took great swings at the balls in an effort to hoof them as far along the pitch as possible. The object was to finish by hoicking the ball through a raised hoop using a different spoon-like tool which was adapted more for accuracy and less for power like a putter in the game of Golf. Although there were different variations knocking around across Europe, the earliest printed rules are from Lauthier in 1717.
This is a picture from "Chambers Book of Days" which was published in 1869. It portrays King Charles II attempting to knock the ball through the hoop. He was apparently very good at the game.
It appears that Pall Mall originally referred to the mallet itself and the earliest English documented evidence in English for this has been found at a much earlier date - from the 1568 Cal. Scot. Papers - [Mary was playing at Seton] "richt oppinlie at the feildis with the palmall and goif".
Many (most) books on Croquet state blithely that Croquet is the modern descendent of Pall Mall. There is no evidence of this being true at all - the only things that the games have in common are mallets and balls. It's rather more likely that Pall Mall is the ancestor of Golf. However, while there's no direct evidence, it seems entirely plausible that Pall Mall and Croquet are cousins.
In the 1700s, a miniature version of Pall Mall appeared called 'Kolf' in Holland. Kolf is just a version of the game played on a 22 yard court and it is still popular today, the sport being organised by the Netherlands Kolf Union. One might take the view that the word 'Kolf' is too similar to the word 'Golf' to be a coincidence...
Links
Ancient Golf by Geert & Sara Nijs in Holland
jm at tradgames.org.uk