DALLYING WITH DICE - a medieval pastime by Elizabeth Chadwick

Two men playing at a dicing table. Detail from the Prodigal Son window at Bourges Cathedral
Note that the chap on the right has no money and is down to his underpants.

Last month I reviewed LOST LETTERS OF MEDIEVAL LIFE by David Crouch and Martha Karlin.  One of the letters in the collection is from a man refusing to help a friend's shiftless kinsman who has fallen into debt.  Part of the letter calling time on the kinsman says in translation:
I do not wish, nor am I able to lend him anything of mine for he is an inveterate dice player and he loses everything that he gambles...  He goes on to say that any money lent to the kinsman will disappear the same way and 'those who were with him in the tavern when he lost (either 10 marks, shillings or pounds)...gained everything, right down to his underpants (braccas).

Plainly gambling away one's wherewithal has been a folly for as long as dice have been around (and probably longer. I hazard that cavemen gambled the odds with bones or stones), but my concern is with the medieval aspect of the the vice.

Gambling with dice seems to have largely been a male folly. Men were mostly the ones with access to the cash and more leeway to go out losing it.  It was a game associated with drinking, and tended to have a rough, macho element to it.  It could lead to rowdiness, violence and - as in the case of the above mentioned young man - nudity!  Men would get drunk, wager all their money followed by their clothes and possessions.  This is alluded to in many works of literature of the period. Wace, writing of a dice game in the Roman de Brut of 1155 describes it in very similar terms to the above. The man who sat down to play clothed, might arise naked at the close of play.' 

Another literary source, the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, completed in 1226,  reveals that dice were used to settle disputes.  The argument below is settled by a simple game called 'Highest Points.'
The poem's hero, William Marshal had won a horse at a tourney but was having trouble obtaining it from its erstwhile owner. In the end, after some discussion, the men agreed to play dice for the animal.  'Let the horse...be the sole property of the man throwing the highest score with three dice.  Isn't that the way? Shall it be so?'
The men agree and 'Three dice were brought which quickly slipped out of the hand as soon as they were thrown.'
Which makes one wonder if there were dice that didn't slip out of the hand so easily and if such dice were fixed.
As it happened, the other man threw a nine and the Marshal threw eleven, so he won the horse, which is as one would expect from a tale lauding our hero!

The main dice games of the Middle Ages were 'Highest Points' (plus poins)  played as above mentioned with three dice thrown onto a dicing board or table - highest score takes all, Then there was ''Raffle' also played with 3 dice.  In the latter the hope was to throw all three dice alike, or failing that, to throw a pair with a higher value than one's opponent.  Hazard was a dice game very popular from the thirteenth century onwards and the ancestor of the modern game of craps. Its name came from the Arabic word 'al-zahr' meaning a die.  It was played like the other with three dice.  There is only one thrower per round who is decided by agreement of the other players, or by all the players throwing the dice to see who goes first. If the player with his first throw scores a 3,4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 17 or 18, then those scores are called 'hazards' and he wins. If he scores them with his second throw, however, he loses.  If neither his first or second score is a 'hazard' it is called a 'chance'  and will be anything between 7 and 14.  He goes on playing until either his first score or second score comes up again. If it's his first score he wins. If it's his second, he loses.

A replica die owned by the author.
Bone with a ring and dot design.

We know from the pipe rolls that King John enjoyed gaming. He gave his illegitimate brother William Longespee money so that he could gamble. and in the summer of 1210 John could be found whiling away the time on his Irish campaign by wagering at dice. He 'Lent to to Robert de Ros for play, when he played with Warine FitzGerold at Carlingford, and the King was his Partner, £1.17s 4d whereof he returned 14s 8d. Also to the same Robert £1. 0s 4d when he played with the same Warine, and the King was again his partner in the game. (Praestita roll, 12th year of King John).
There is a tale from the medieval French Fabliaux in which a minstrel is brought into hell by a demon and left in charge of all the souls there while the devils go out looking for more. St. Peter turns up in their absence and plays dice with the minstrel until he wins all the souls the latter is supposed to be watching for the devils and promptly leads them out of hell and up to heaven.  The minstrel is in dire trouble when the devils return to find the place empty. They decide he's a rotten servant and throw him out.  He runs all the way to heaven and St. Peter lets him in, and that, says the tale is why minstrels, among other rogues and gamblers are refused entry into hell!

A game of dice chess.  The Prodigal Son Window Chartres Cathedral. Again, no money and he's
lost most of his clothes!

Chess at this time was sometimes played with dice too, adding in an element of chance to the game. It  was seen as slightly inferior and less intellectual than unadulterated chess and as a game slightly more fit for ladies' to play than straight dice, the chess element lending it the respectability of a parlour rather than tavern game, although it could be both. A lady who gambled with dice was risking her reputation, although it was considered acceptable to do so in a social context if the company was mixed and the men put up the money for the stakes.  This happened for example in 1260 when Count Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of King Louis IX invited everyone to play dice in his chamber and paid for the ladies' stakes himself so that no one was embarrassed and no reputations called into question.

Dice and shaker. Museum of London.

The dice themselves were generally rather small and usually carved from bone with ring and dot patterns marking out the six sides. They are frequent finds on archaeological dig sites.  The dice were sometimes fraudulent. The set above which can be seen in the Museum of London are all fixed.  Three only have high numbers and three only low. The rest are weighted with mercury to fall the same way every time.  The pewter shaker in which they were found was originally a pot for birdseed.

Although it is often said that the past is a different country, I am often struck by the similarities between then and now. Some things are hard wired.  My personal view is that the past is the same country, but just a few bus stops further back. Crane our necks that little bit further, and we can catch sight of our ancestors in the distance.  Gambling has gone digital in a huge way and TV programmes bombard us with late night adverts to be cool and get down to the online casino. Where presumably some of us, in the grip of too much wine and adrenaline will end up losing our virtual underwear!

Elizabeth Chadwick is the author of several best-selling novels set in the Middle Ages including THE GREATEST KNIGHT about William Marshal and THE SUMMER QUEEN and THE WINTER CROWN about Eleanor of Aquitaine. She is currently working on her third novel in the Eleanor trilogy THE AUTUMN THRONE.

The first gamers: and the end of history - by Manda Scott

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World of Warcraft: the biggest MMORPG in the world

I have a confession to make: I play World of Warcraft.   I have a battleground healer who has in her time, been an undead shadow priest called Kyst, and a night-elf discipline priest called Warfaryn. I have a shaman called Saffyk and when nobody in the player world got it, I created a healer monk called Sapphic. They still don’t get it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is in the community and the competition. 

Arathi Basin battleground

I play, I discover, at what is generally termed semi-hard-core levels, which is to say I give it fair amounts of time (10pm – midnight most nights) but I don’t compete at the super-high levels. I am, though, in a rated battle ground team and the work required to stay there is significant: I have to keep my gear up to scratch which means doing a lot of sub-optimal fighting, but when it’s right, and the team is working well, there’s nothing like it.

Actually, there are a few things like it: climbing was one – that sense of absolute partnership with whoever’s holding the rope and who does, quite literally, hold your life in their hands: if you climb regularly together, you develop the kinds of intense relationships that tend otherwise only to happen in high pressure jobs like surgery or theatrical acting, where people take risks together on a daily (or nightly) basis.   Battle re-enactment had a similar effect: the team work, the practice it took to reach a good standard, that sense of all the pieces coming together when we won a particularly hard battle: and yes, the sense of being able to defend someone’s ‘life’ and of having them defend me.

Scoreboard: a vital part of gaming feedback

Game designers define these bonding experiences as some of the most intense in human emotional evolution.  They have words for the pride we feel when our side wins (Fiero), or the almost equally powerful pride we feel when someone we have coached and helped also wins (Naches).  They name the sense of everything coming together as ‘flow’ and they list the four components of gaming that make it so addictive: games have an attainable goal (that often pushes us to the edges of our competence, where we are most in flow), games have clear, succinct rules, games have voluntary participation, games have a feedback system.

Arena competition 2vs2

By combining all of these, a game – defined as any voluntary activity involving the solving of unnecessary obstacles – has the potential to provide us with massive positive emotion, as opposed to the outside world which often provides less than obvious goals – certainly not goals that are theoretically attainable and for which we are given clear, regularly irregular, obvious feedback.  In short, we have the chance to excel in a social context that matters to us: when I heal the flag carrier in Warsong Gulch and my team caps, there is a moment’s peak experience that is the same whether I have ‘died’ or survived (and in any case, I’ll resurrect fairly soon, so dying is not too much of a problem, it just removes me from the game for a bit, thus depriving me of my chance to throw game changing heals).

The evolution of games is one of the most interesting historical stories – this is, after all, an historical blog, so this is the history:   It is widely held that the Lydians were the first to engage in serious gaming as a culture.  Herodotus tells us that in the reign of king Atys, there was such a famine as the Lydian people were in danger of starvation.  So he set up a law, by which the entire population would eat one day and on the next day, they would play games that were so immersive, they wouldn’t notice they weren’t eating, They played dice, knucklebones, ball games and ‘in this way,’ Herodotus said, ‘they invented all the games that are common.’ 

They passed the time this way for eighteen years and at the end of it, when the famine still gripped the land, they played one last, ‘epic’ game, in which the ‘winners’ – half the population – took to boats and sailed off to find a land free of famine, while the remaining half stayed behind and had enough food to sustain them.  Current archaeological theory, backed by DNA evidence, suggests that the Lydians were the fore-runners to the Etruscans who were in turn, the biological ancestors of those who founded Rome: and went on to make the public slow death of other people the most gripping set of games their culture could imagine. 

All of which leads us to examine games rather hard, because the current generation of children is the first to grow up with immediate access to all that digital games can offer.

I was very struck reading an original Grimm Brothers fairy tale recently, which described the young princess ‘amusing herself by playing with a golden ball: she threw it up and caught it and in this way kept herself happy for days on end’. Until the ball fell into the well and was found by a frog and we slide into psychosexual allusion rather fast.

But I am trying to imagine any of the children of my acquaintance finding amusement in throwing a ball of any colour at all into the air for hours on end and catching it, when they could be playing Warcraft. Or Halo4. Or Angry Birds. Or on-line Scrabble. Or Chore Wars (yes, you can turn your household chores into a game. It works.  Details here: http://www.chorewars.com/)

Modern kids spend roughly 20 hours per week at school – and another 24 hours per week playing games.  That will rise as games available on mobile phones become more immersive and more multi-player.   So the children of today know that ‘work’ can be fun, can provide flow, can provide tangible evidence of success and social bonding. Or it can be dull, repetitive, with high stress levels and no obviously attainable goals.

Our educators are only lately catching onto this. I have read of one school in the US where the entire school experience is structured as a game: a pupil might discover a ‘secret code’ hidden in the library which takes quite advanced mathematical skills to solve, and she’ll get extra points if she solves it ahead of her team mates (aka class mates). She might have to bring in two or three of them to help, because some have higher maths-scores than she does, but they will discover ‘fiero’ and ‘naches’ in the success of the ‘secrete mission’ and in the helping of others.  At other times in the day, our hypothetical student will spend time teaching a computer how to do some more basic maths – because teaching others is the best way to learn, at other times, she’ll be powering up her language skills in order to help others find their way out of a labyrinth.  She’ll come home full of self-created projects she wants to get done before the next day and, because the whole of school is one big, epic game, she won’t need or want to spend time on Warcraft or Halo or Call of Duty.

So: history is useful when it teaches us how we can be, if it shows us mistakes we can avoid (we never do, but that’s a different post), if it helps us to understand ourselves.  But we are on the brink of the singularity and games are becoming an increasing part of the world we inhabit.  We as writers and readers are the last generation who will have grown in a world where we created our own games.  We, as readers and writers, need to understand the realities of the world that is evolving, and step into it.

One way to do that is to create games of the world around us: Chore Wars is one.  SuperBetter is another (https://www.superbetter.com/)  which helps people recover from acute or chronic illness.

We can work out how to survive without oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org/metaabout.htm), or we can generate our own games based around, perhaps, discovering the folding of proteins that may one day help biologists to understand the causes of cancer.  (http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/foldit/)

The possibilities are without end and probably beyond our current imagination. Which is why we are at the threshold of ‘beyond history’ .  Never, not even in ancient Lydia, have we had an entire generation that understood games as a way of life.  How that will shape our future is also beyond our imagining.  But very probably not beyond theirs.