THE HISTORY OF GAMES. 22Q 



liege." By the ninth century the game of chugdn had established it- 

 self in the Eastern Empire, where its name appears in the barbarous 

 Greek form T^vKavi^eiv. In the Byzantine descriptions, however, we 

 find not the original mallet, but a long staff ending in a broad bend 

 filled in with a network of gut-strings. Thus there appear in the East, 

 as belonging to the great sport of ball-play on horseback, the first 

 shapes of two implements which remodeled the whole play-life of 

 mediseval and modern Europe, the chugan being the ancestor of the 

 mallets used in pall-mall and croquet, and of an endless variety of 

 other playing clubs and bats, while the bent staff with its network 

 was the primitive racket. The fine old Persian drawing of a match 

 at chugan, which is copied by Ouseley in his " Travels in the East," jus- 

 tifies his opinion that the horseback game is the original. We should 

 not talk of polo as being " hockey on horseback," but rather regard 

 hockey as dismounted polo, and class with it pall-mall, golf, and many 

 another bat-and-ball game. Indeed, when one comes to think of it, 

 one sees that no stick being necessary for the old foot-game of hurl- 

 ing, none was used, but, as soon as the Persian horsemen wanted to 

 play ball on horseback, a proper instrument had to be invented. This 

 came to be used in the foot-game also, so that the Orientals are famil- 

 iar both with the mounted and dismounted kinds. The horseback 

 game seems hardly to have taken hold in Europe till our own day, 

 when the English brought it down from Munniepoor, and it has now 

 under the name of polo become a world-wide sport again. But the 

 foot-game made it way early into Europe, as appears from a curious 

 passage in Joinville's " Life of St. Louis," written at the end of the thir- 

 teenth century. Having seen the game on his crusade, and read about 

 it in the Byzantine historians, he argues that the Greeks must have 

 borrowed their tzy canister ium from the French, for it is, he says, a 

 game played in Languedoc by driving a boxwood ball with a long 

 mallet, and called there chicane. The modern reader has to turn this 

 neat and patriotic argument upside down, the French chicane being 

 only a corruption of the Persian chugdn ; so that what Joinville ac- 

 tually proves is, that before his time the Eastern game had traveled 

 into France, bringing with it its Eastern name. Already, in his day, 

 from the ball-game with its shifts and dodges, the term chicane had 

 come to be applied by metaphor to the shuffles of lawyers to embar- 

 rass the other side, and thence to intrigue and trickery in general. 

 English has borrowed chicane in the sense of trickery, without know- 

 ing it as the name of a game. Metaphors taken from sports may thus 

 outlast their first sense, as when again people say, " Don't bandy words 

 with me," without an idea that they are using another metaphor taken 

 from the game of hockey, which was called bandy from the curved 

 stick or club it was played with. 



In France, the name of crosse, meaning a crutch, or bishop's cro- 

 sier, was used for the mallet, and thence the game of hockey has its 



