Re: Scottish Highland games in late 1600s?

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chas) wrote:

> MMan37x wrote:
> 
> > I'm reading the biography "Rob Roy MacGregor: His Life and Times" by W. H.
> > Murray.
> >
> > In a section called "Home and Family" the author says that "the games played by
> > the family were dice, cards and draughts."  The section is referring to the
> > childhood of Rob Roy, who was born in 1671 near Loch Katrine.
> >
> > Does anyone know what sort of card games (or dice games) were likely to have
> > been played in that time and place?
> >
> > M Man

> Backgammon (known as "tables" at that time, variations on it go back to ancient
> Rome) is sometimes classified as a dice game and was popular.

Irish was another tables game of this period. I don't know if it was particularly 
played in 
Scotland, but should have thought so.

> The rules for Cribbage seem to have been standardized in the 1600' they are
> credited to a Sir John Suckling.

Would the Scots have played such an obviously English game? Remember their cultural 
connections lay rather with the French than the English.

> I don't recall when Rob Roy died, but the card game Pope Joan (ancestor to modern
> Tripoli, or Michigan Rummy is mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary by the
> 1730's

Pope Joan is an older relative of Newmarket, and the American equivalent of Newmarket 
is 
called Michigan, but Michigan Rummy is something completely different, not earlier 
than the 
20th century.

The most obvious card-game candidate must be Maw (later known as Spoil Five and 
essentially 
the same as modern Irish Twenty-Five). Piquet is a high probability, and probably 
Thirty-One. 
The game of Scotch Whist, or Scotch Honours, also called Catch the Ten, is mentioned 
(by 
Boswell) in 1766 and I would guess it to go back several decades earlier.

David Parlett