Stoolball, Shakespeare, Sex and the Medieval English Origins of Baseball

        

        On the Monday after Easter all work and farming in the Medieval English village comes to a halt.  The town is completely quiet.  Yesterday had been spent in church; in prayerful reflection on the divine mystery of Christ’s sacrifice, but today is being spent in relaxation for the old and on playful flirtatious diversion for the young.

With the early springtime sun shining down, birds twittering in the trees and a gentle breeze blowing in the air about two dozen teenagers, young men and women in the prime of life, gather in an open field.

Four of them are carrying stools.  The four stools are arranged on the field in a circle with each stool being placed, approximately, twenty yards away from the other.  

One young maiden stands in front of one of the stools with a flattened stick, a bat, in her hands.  A young man, possibly a potential suitor, stands in the middle of the circle of stools, and tosses a leather covered ball of cork, underhanded, for the maiden to attempt to strike.

She swings and strikes the ball.  After hitting the underhand toss, the young woman then runs from stool to stool amidst much giggling and frollicking.  She must safely complete running the entire circuit of four stools without having one of the dozen or so fielder’s hit her with the thrown ball in order to safely reach home and score a “run” for her team.

However, as could easily be imagined, the young men arrayed against her in the field are more concerned with delaying her progress towards home by playfully hugging and grabbing her than they are with getting her out by striking her with a thrown ball.  In a few moments she completes the circuit of stools and the girls team leads by a score of 1 to 0.

This is a depiction of a game that was popular in Medieval England for hundreds of years--stoolball.  Stoolball, sometimes referred to in contemporary sources as “Easter Ball” because young people normally kicked off spring by playing it in churchyards each year almost as soon as Easter mass had ended, is played all across the land.

During Medieval times stoolball was played constantly, as a celebration of youthful courtship, in the springtime when both love and hope spring eternal.  It was a coed game, if you will, played by all the young men and women in each and every village.  And although stoolball was most definitely a non-contact sport, all of the teenage young men and maiden’s who played it every Easter, did everything in their power to change that!

The greatest of all English writers, William Shakespeare, uses stoolball as a euphemism for sex in his play The Two Noble Kinsmen.  To make a long story short (and take great liberty with a complex plotline) The Two Noble Kinsmen is partly about a jailer’s daughter scorned in love who goes mad, in the erotic sense, and is then wooed by her lover in disguise.

Anyway, to get a sense of how Shakespeare viewed stoolball, let’s quote from Act V Scene 2 of The Two Noble Kinsmen:

WOOER:  What shall we do then wench?

JAILER’S DAUGHTER: Why play at stoolball.  What is there else to do?

WOOER:  I am content if we shall keep our wedding there.

JAILER’S DAUGHTER: ‘Tis true.  For there, I will assure you, we shall find some blind priest for the purpose that will venture to marry us.

Simply put, in this passage from The Two Noble Kinsmen we have one character (Jailer’s Daughter) who is looking for sex, and another (Wooer) who wants to make their relationship, which obviously has already been consummated, valid through marriage,

It shows us in what low moral esteem Shakespeare held the game of stoolball, and what reputation the game of youthful courtship probably had generally at the time, that he would choose to put a mention of the game in the mouth of a deranged lover in reference to fooling around. 

Stoolball was a Medieval game played by hormone filled adolescent teens.  It was a game played on lazy springtime afternoons in English churchyards and filled with playful flirtations, but it was also the game that ended up giving us Major League Baseball.

Part of the reason for stoolball’s enduring popularity in Medieval England was the game’s many variations.  Though the version initially described above is one being played with a wooden bat, and outside in a field, stoolball could also be played indoors in venues such as barns, or halls, where the batter instead of using a bat would strike the ball with an open palm before completing a more condensed circuit of stools or “bases”.

Many Medieval accounts record stoolball as being played with a circle of four stools being used as bases, but some manuscripts make reference to a game more akin to cricket, where a batter after striking a pitched ball would run back and forth between only two stools as many times as possible before being struck by a thrown ball from one of the fielders.

        Despite its lasting popularity, and its many variations, stoolball was by no means the oldest, nor the only, bat and ball game played in Medieval England.  

One early reference of a bat and ball game comes to us from the proceedings of the law court at Oxford and dates from March 17, 1292:

“(T)here came Geoffrey and John playing in the street with a club and great ball, and with the club and ball they knocked into the mud the goods of Henry and Rose that were in the shop.”

Interestingly, we cannot be certain exactly what sort of game Geoffrey and John were playing with a club and great ball, but it is surprising that whatever damage they caused by striking the aforementioned club and great ball, was serious enough to land them in a sort of small claims court against the shopkeepers Henry and Rose.  This would seem to be a sort of 13th century case of the kid next door breaking his neighbor’s car window with a hardball by playing Homerun Derby in his backyard.

One variation of a Medieval bat and ball game that Geoffrey and John could possibly have been playing in the year 1292 was a game called longball which was a bat and ball game that was also a sort of test of strength.

Longball was a game popular among men and commonly played in monastic communities during the height of the Middle Ages.  Longball typically only required two players although a game of longball could contain a limitless number of players as well.

Longball involved the use of a large bat (club) and a ball of some sort.  The two players would take turns with one being a hitter and the other a pitcher.  The pitcher would softly toss the ball to the batter who would then seek to hit the ball as far as he possibly could, hence the name, longball.  The player who was able to hit the ball the farthest was declared the winner.  Certainly, longball could be considered the simplest of all the Medieval ancestors of modern day baseball.

But like many simple games, playing longball was uncontrollably addictive for both young men and even for monks!  Farming, study and prayer were often neglected in favor of an afternoon spent playing longball and seeing who could hit the ball the farthest.

        

        With coed games like stoolball stirring up lustful passions during the Easter season, and simple fun games like longball causing students and monks to be idle and waste their time at sport, it is no surprise that bat and ball games of all types developed somewhat scandalous reputations in Medieval and Elizabethan England.  

Kings and officials in the 15th and 16th centuries, at first, attempted to ban the playing of bat and ball games altogether, and then later on settled upon banning the playing of bat and ball games on Sundays.  During the puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century, the ancestors of the game of baseball along with anything else even remotely fun as well, would once again be banned.

It is a testament, though, to the popularity of the precursors to modern day baseball that none of these royal edicts would ever be remotely enforceable and the playing of bat and ball games would continue to grow and evolve in England and throughout Europe over time.

Stoolball would evolve into rounders, which would be exported to New England by American colonists and renamed Townball.  Within a hundred years the popular New England based game of townball would evolve, more or less, into the modern day American game of baseball.  

Admittedly, at least, this is one theory for the creation of the American game of baseball.  Unfortunately, a lot about the origins of the game of baseball remains murky because originally bat and ball games were played by ordinary people for fun, for romance or simply to take their mind’s off the harsh realities of their medieval world and no one cared much at all about writing down rules or even about keeping score.

It is hard to tell exactly where baseball comes from.  Perhaps the American pastime is uniquely American in that it comes to us today from a whole bunch of wide and disparate sources exactly like the American population itself, but without a doubt, each time we sit down to watch our favorite team play nine innings on the baseball diamond we should all give a nod of recognition to those hormone filled teenagers from so long ago who gathered in a medieval churchyard on the day after Easter to play a springtime game of stoolball.