Category talk:Bowling

April 2024

The article on Bowling Greens is excellent except that it ignores the importance they played in royal and aristocratic gardens in the seventeenth century. Here is an analysis the numbers of new such bowling greens starting in 1660 from a PhD thesis.

Bowling greens decade no. examples 1660s 3 1670s 12 1680s 16 1690s 16 1700s 19 1710s 13 1720s 11 1730s 11 ALL 101

from an analysis of 600 overlays 1660-1740

I am also including extracts from

David Jacques, Gardens of Court and Country: English Design 1630-1730, New Haven : Yale University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780300222012

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The moist English climate is conducive to good grass. The game of bowls had been popular since the Middle Ages, and became associated with taverns frequented by gamesters and prostitutes. It was seen as diverting yeomen from practising archery and was thus subject to a succession of restrictive statutes: an Act of 1541 banned the playing of bowls outside a person’s own garden or orchard with a penalty of 6s 8d. Accordingly, a yeoman, John Snelson of Croxton, Staffordshire, was fined in 1599 when he was found playing unlawful games, namely ‘English Bowles against the form of the statute in this case published and provided’.47 An exception was made for those with lands of the yearly value of £100, who might obtain licences to play on their own greens.

However, it was a losing battle to enforce the restrictions, as John Stow explained in 1598 in writing about London’s suburbs.48 Any spare ground was likely to be purloined for bowling and gaming, as had formerly happened at Northumberland House in Aldgate, though ‘so many Bowling Alleys, and other houses for unlawful gaming have been raised in other parts of the City &suburbs, that this [place] is left and forsaken by the Gamesters’.

Grub Street was one of these: it had been the area for bowyers, fletchers, and bow-string makers, but was in Stow’s time ‘giving place to a number of bowling-alleys and dicing-houses, which in all places are increased, and too much frequented’.49 It had long been a custom in England that sports and games were played on Sunday afternoons, though the Puritans saw this as a violation of the Fourth Commandment, which prescribed that the Sabbath should be holy and no manner of work should take place on it. Its interpretation had become a point of contention with the gentry, and James I attempted to adjudicate by issuing a proclamation in 1617 called ‘The Book of Sports’, which forbade bowls on Sundays. Many places of public entertainment were already based around greens, and as the craze spread, private greens were made in the gardens of gentleman enthusiasts. William Lawson remarked in 1618 that in his ideal garden ‘it shall be a pleasure to have a Bowling Alley . . . to stretch your armes’.50 Gray’s Inn had already made a green in 1609 immediately outside the garden wall.51 The master of Magdalen College, Oxford, no doubt attempting to divert his charges away from worse temptations, had a bowling green made within the grounds of the college about 1630.52

Around 1610 Prince Henry installed a bowling green in the north-east corner of St James’s Park, called ‘The Spring Garden’, and in 1631 the keeper for both was mentioned in a grant. Members of the Court, and increasingly gentlemen with no connection to it, already walked in the park. As the door into the Spring Garden was just next to the park’s Tiltyard Gate, it had by 1635 become enough of a public resort, serving food and drink, and witnessing scandalous behaviour, for an attempt to close it.53 In 1647 it was closed on Sundays and public fast days. Evelyn found this so in 1654: ‘Cromwell and his partisans having shut up, and seiz’d on Spring Garden, which ’til now had ben the usual rendezvous for the Ladys & Gallants’.54

Instead, Evelyn was entertained at the Mulberry Garden, a four-acre walled garden at the west end of St James’s Park in which James I had attempted to establish silk growing, and which was added to the gardens of Goring House (later Arlington House) in the 1630s. Confiscated and disposed of by Parliament in 1645, it opened shortly after as ‘the onely place of refreshment about the Towne for persons of the best quality’. The Spring Garden itself could not reopen, as it had been divided up for building plots in the 1650s, but the Restoration in 1660 was an opportunity for a ‘New Spring Garden’, a former market garden just across the river at Vauxhall, which became instantly popular.55 The Mulberry Garden served its last mulberry pie in about 1670, when it was reincorporated into the gardens of Goring House, its gambling and whoring having already removed to the New Spring Garden.

Bowling greens continued to be the main attraction for many places of entertainment, especially for the lower orders. Around 1650 the gardens of Marylebone Manor House, including its bowling green, were detached from it and made accessible through the Rose of Normandie tavern, later being known as ‘Marylebone Gardens’. A green on Putney Heath, operated between 1690 and 1750, and became perhaps the most noted in the neighbourhood of London. However, interest in bowling amongst the gentry was to wane by George I’s reign. According to Sir John Cullum, a Suffolk antiquary, ‘Sr Thomas Hanmer, the Speaker, who died in 1746, had a very fine bowling green, contiguous to his house at Mildenhall; and was perhaps one of the last gentlemen of any fashion in the county, that amused themselves with that diversion.’56

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André Mollet, a Frenchman working in England but also familiar with the Low Countries and Sweden, wrote that ‘England excelleth other Countreys . . . in the art of Turffing’.58 He noted that the beautiful effect of English turf depended on frequent mowing. It was well rolled with wooden rollers for removing wormcasts, and beaten down or compacted to an even surface with stone rollers. He also advised a careful selection of turf, such as could be found on sheepwalks, to avoid coarse or tangled grass. London and Wise later added the detail that ‘the Turf-cutters make choice of some part of a fine green Common or Down; such as Black-Heath, Putney-Heath, or Moulsey-Hurst.’59

At mid-century Evelyn, recognising that bowling greens had become an integral part of English gardens, could write that ‘the incomparable divertissement which they afford us, is singular to the English Nation above all others in the World’.60 As new gardens came to be made, bowling greens could be integrated in the layout; for example, at Sir John Danvers’s at Chelsea in the 1620s.61 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Prince Henry had a green in the Spring Garden in St James’s Park, and Charles I contracted with John Tradescant to make one at Oatlands Palace in 1633.62

Several of the private bowling greens were placed outside the garden enclosure, often in the park, as the preserve of the menfolk (fig. 49). For example, that at Hampton Court, made in 1636, was placed at the edge of the park, overlooking the Thames (see fig. 90). When Charles I was confined to Carisbrooke Castle in 1648–9 his gaoler, Colonel Hammond, constructed a green of 350 by 250 feet in the vacant east bailey of the castle to be the King’s chief recreation.63 The greens at Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland (see fig. 38), and Belvoir, Leicestershire (see fig. 112), took advantage of hill-top positions, both maybe in the 1670s, but from about that time most new greens were incorporated into planned walled layouts (fig. 50). At Dawley one was placed to the side of the open grove at the far end of the Great Garden and at Badminton the green was to the side of the forecourt (see fig. 117).

In the early 1630s Best Gardens were for the first time converted to simple grass plats, and the English skills in maintaining bowling greens were transferred to them. Sometimes grass plats were actually referred to as ‘bowling greens’ – for example, as Evelyn did in 1651 when drawing the plats in his forecourt – and the French term ‘boulingrin’ appears to have derived from this usage. This fashion altered the appearance of pleasure gardens, in that fencing was dispensed with and grass introduced, but the old geometry continued, often emphasised by pencil-thin cypress trees, or another evergreen, at corners. It gave a garden restfulness and made it suitable for walking, and was retained throughout Charles II’s reign (fig. 51). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1948dlj (talk • contribs) 09:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)