|
Only two pieces of equipment are needed to play the game. A Shuttlecock and a Battledore. A Shuttlecock is a unique substitute for a ball which is familiar to all in this day and age.The name is descriptive in that the "shuttle" part of it describes the backward and forward flight whereas the "cock" refers to the feathers which are inserted into the cork base to give it stability in the air.
A battledore on the other hand, being unfamiliar to most, needs some explanation.
Reference to a dictionary gives the definitions of either a "washing beetle" or a "horn book". Both of these are pieces of ancient equipment which could have been pressed into service as striking implements with which to project the shuttlecock into the air.
In the days before washing machines, "washing beetles" were used by women,who did their washing out of doors, often in rivers, to beat the wet laundry on a stone to get the dirt out, before hanging it out to dry.
"Washing Beetles" come in various shapes and sizes, the largest being shaped like a cricket bat, whereas smaller versions from Ireland are very reminiscent of table tennis bats.
Possibly the oldest known illustration of a "washing beetle" is to be found as a misericord in Carlisle Cathedral. Dated 1401, it depicts a wife hitting her husband over the head with it.
Several old washing beetles exist to this day in museums around the country and a book entitled "A WOMAN'S WORK IS NEVER DONE" by Caroline Davidson [Chatto and Windus 1982] includes several prints showing washing beetles in use.
Originally a "Horn Book" was a piece of board shaped something like a rectangular table tennis bat on which was pasted either the alphabet or numbers or perhaps The Lord's Prayer. They were covered in transparent horn to protect them from rough handling. Their purpose was to teach young children their basic learning skills.
If you like to visit churches old country houses etc., you will no doubt be familiar with individual information boards with handles attached onto which are pasted [say] a description of a room which is being visited or the history of a church for example. These are, in effect, adult horn books.
But there is another ancient piece of equipment which could have been pressed into service as a bat - the butter pat. Butter pats are shaped wooden boards used to pat butter into shape.
The earliest known Battledore and Shuttlecock print referred to in the opening paragraph depicts two medieval serfs holding bats shaped very much like these implements and if you refer to the "Miscellaneous page" reference to the indigenous Japanese game of "Hanetsuki" you will see that this same shape, which originated there in the middle ages, still survives to this day.
Having said all that about the origins of Battledores by the 17th or 18th centuries solid wooden bats were replaced by small strung rackets of various shapes and sizes. Later still in the 18th and 19th centuries drum racquets [hollow racquets faced with parchment or vellum] came into favour. They did not entirely replace strung racquets but more or less existed beside them. Today of course the drum racquet has disappeared and the strung racquet again rules supreme.
|
