The Origins of Golf

The origins of golf are lost in the mists of time, and the first few hundred years of its history are uncertain, but the steady rise in its popularity from the 1700s onwards is indisputable.

It answers to a simple rustic pastime of the Romans in which they played with a ball of leather stuffed with feathers, called Paganica, and the golf-ball is composed of the same materials to this day. In the reign of Edward the Third (AD 1327-77) the Latin name, Cambuca, was applied to this pastime, and it derived the denomination, no doubt, from the crooked club or bat with which it was played.

There is heated debate over where golf was invented, when it first came to be played and how it was first played. Some claim that the game originated in England, and they point to the Crecy window in Gloucester Cathedral which shows a faceless golfer swinging a club, as if playing a short approach shot. The window was designed and built between 1340 and 1350 and it is certainly the earliest pictorial record of such an activity. Other researches have discovered illustrations of Japanese ladies playing a game indoors with clubs, and there have been claims from Italy and France.

The main claims come from Holland and Scotland. The Dutch historian van Hengel has claimed that golf started in Holland, where it originated from a game called spel metten halve. This was later shortened to het halve and then half. This game was first played on a four-hole course, each hole measuring a thousand yards, to commemorate the relief of Kronenburg Castle in 1297. The "holes" were on doors, a windmill, a kitchen, an outhouse and the castle itself. There is ample evidence that a game of this type was played frequently in Holland, on the ice in winter, in the towns (where it was banned because of the damage caused by the participants) and in the countryside. Van Hengel's theory is that half was played by the Dutch seamen who brought their clubs with them to Leith when they traded with Scotland during the fourteenth century. They were the people who introduced the game to Scotland and this theory is supported by the large numbers of "featheries", the first golf balls made of leather stuffed with boiled feathers, which were exported from Holland to Scotland during the sixteenth century. While it is true that there may be a link between "golfe" as played in Scotland and "kolf" as played in Holland, there are as many differences as there are simi­larities. The Dutch golfers were still hitting balls at posts three centuries after Scottish golfers were hitting their balls into holes and most people prefer to believe that golf started in Scotland on the stretch of land on the south coast of the Firth of Forth from Leith to Dunbar. The written evidence to support this claim is sparse. There is a record of a golf ball being sold for ten Scottish shillings in 1452 and on 6th March 1457 came the first hard evidence that golf was frequently played in Scotland when it was banned by decree in the Fourteenth Parliament of King James II: "And that the fute-bal and golfe be utterly cryed downe, and not to be used." The decree was repeated in 1491 in the reign of King James IV when it was declared that "It is statute and ordained that in a place of the Realme there be usyt Fute-baw, Golfe, or other sik unprof­fitable sportis contrary to the good of the Realme and defense thereof." Football and golf were interfering with the archery practice necessary to defend the country from invasion by England, although for how long either sport had been played and by how many people will probably always remain a mystery.

Ten years later King James IV had taken up the game himself. There are records in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of the purchase of clubs in 1502, and also of a match played between the King and the Earl of Bothwell in 1504. Intermarriage between royal families spread the game to England and France. Mary, Queen of Scots, daughter of James V, had played the game in France when she was married to the dauphin Francis, and had had her clubs carried by young cadets, which is probably where the name and occupation of caddies came from. She was charged with being seen playing golf and pall-mall in the field beside Seton, shortly after the murder of her husband Lord Darnley in 1567.

The most attractive theory of the origin of the game was put forward in 1886 by Sir Walter Simpson. He claimed that a shepherd was looking after his flock of sheep grazing on the links, that part of the coast lying behind the sand dunes, when one day he started hitting small pebbles with his crook and saw one of them disappear down a rabbit hole. He was able to repeat this shot and the other shep­herds followed his example, and so the game of golf was born. Fanciful or not, it is possible that there is some truth in this story. There is an instinctive pleasure in hitting stones and balls with sticks. The shepherd's crook developed into a club, the feathery ball came into use as being more reliable and less hard than a pebble or solid wooden ball. Golf gradually evolved.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, golf had spread rapidly throughout Scotland. The first courses were at Leith, on the Firth of Forth just outside Edinburgh, and Bruntsfield in the centre of the city. Other courses recorded in the sixteenth century include St Andrews, Perth, Montrose, Domoch, Banff, North Inch and Aberdeen. Along with football, it became the national game. When James VI, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, became king of England in 1603 as James I, he and his courtiers started playing at Blackheath, just outside London, which became the first golf course in England. The Royal Blackheath Golf Club, though not founded until 1766, became the first English golf club.