de over to Lord Vaux's place at Harrowden, or to Lord
Spencer's at Althorp, for a game, and, according to one account, was
actually playing on the latter green when Cornet Joyce came to Holmby to
remove him to other quarters. During this period gambling had become a
mania. John Aubrey, the antiquary, chronicles that the sisters of Sir
John Suckling, the courtier-poet, once went to the bowling-green in
Piccadilly, crying, "for fear he should lose all their portions." If the
Puritans regarded bowls with no friendly eye, as Lord Macaulay asserts,
one can hardly wonder at it. But even the Puritans could not suppress
betting. So eminently respectable a person as John Evelyn thought no
harm in bowling for stakes, and once played at the Durdans, near Epsom,
for L10, winning match and money, as he triumphantly notes in his
_Diary_ for the 14th of August 1657. Samuel Pepys repeatedly mentions
finding great people "at bowles." But in time the excesses attending the
game rendered it unfashionable, and after the Revolution it became
practically a pothouse recreation, nearly all the greens, like the
alleys, having been constructed in the grounds and gardens attached to
taverns.

After a long interval salvation came from Scotland, somewhat
unexpectedly, because although, along with its winter analogue of
curling, bowls may now be considered, much more than golf, the Scottish
national game, it was not until well into the 19th century that the
pastime acquired popularity in that country. It had been known in
Scotland since the close of the 16th century (the Glasgow kirk session
fulminated an edict against Sunday bowls in 1595), but greens were few
and far between. There is record of a club in Haddington in 1709, of Tom
Bicket's green in Kilmarnock in 1740, of greens in Candleriggs and
Gallowgate, Glasgow, and of one in Lanark in 1750, of greens in the
grounds of Heriot's hospital, Edinburgh, prior to 1768, and of one in
Peebles in 1775. These are, of course, mere infants compared with the
Southampton Town Bowling Club, founded in 1299, which still uses the
green on which it has played for centuries and possesses the quaint
custom of describing its master, or president, as "sir," and are younger
even than the Newcastle-on-Tyne club established in 1657. But the
earlier clubs did nothing towards organizing the game. In 1848 and 1849,
however, when many clubs had come into existence in the west and south
of Scotland (the Willowbank, dating