cted as in the
act of delivering his bowl. A 14th-century MS. _Book of Prayers_ in the
Francis Douce collection in the Bodleian library at Oxford contains a
drawing in which two persons are shown, but they bowl to no mark. Strutt
(_Sports and Pastimes_) suggests that the first player's bowl may have
been regarded by the second player as a species of jack; but in that
case it is not clear what was the first player's target. In these three
earliest illustrations of the pastime it is worth noting that each
player has one bowl only, and that the attitude in delivering it was as
various five or six hundred years ago as it is to-day. In the third he
stands almost upright; in the first he kneels; in the second he stoops,
halfway between the upright and the kneeling position.

As the game grew in popularity it came under the ban of king and
parliament, both fearing it might jeopardize the practice of archery,
then so important in battle; and statutes forbidding it and other sports
were enacted in the reigns of Edward III., Richard II. and other
monarchs. Even when, on the invention of gunpowder and firearms, the bow
had fallen into disuse as a weapon of war, the prohibition was
continued. The discredit attaching to bowling alleys, first established
in London in 1455, probably encouraged subsequent repressive
legislation, for many of the alleys were connected with taverns
frequented by the dissolute and gamesters. The word "bowls" occurs for
the first time in the statute of 1511 in which Henry VIII. confirmed
previous enactments against unlawful games. By a further act of
1541--which was not repealed until 1845--artificers, labourers,
apprentices, servants and the like were forbidden to play bowls at any
time save Christmas, and then only in their master's house and presence.
It was further enjoined that any one playing bowls outside of his own
garden or orchard was liable to a penalty of 6s. 8d., while those
possessed of lands of the yearly value of L100 might obtain licences to
play on their own private greens. But though the same statute absolutely
prohibited bowling alleys, Henry VIII. had them constructed for his own
pleasure at Whitehall Palace, and was wont to back himself when he
played. In Mary's reign (1555) the licences were withdrawn, the queen or
her advisers deeming the game an excuse for "unlawful assemblies,
conventicles, seditions and conspiracies." The scandals of the bowling
alleys grew rampant in Elizabethan