Roman Soldiers: Golf Inventors?

Thanks to reader Chris for the heads up on the response in the British Isles to recent claims that China was the home of golf, not Scotland.

Now it seems Roman soldiers invented a form of golf that the Scots formalized, sending HBO and the BBC back to the storyboards for a revamp to season two of Rome.

Jim McBeth writes:

THEY came, they saw, they played a neat chip shot onto the edge of the green. More than a millennium before golf is said to have been invented in Scotland, Roman soldiers were playing the game, according to experts.

Trumping recent claims that the game was being played in China in AD943, academics have chipped in with a theory that the game was actually imported to Scotland by the foot soldiers of Emperor Severus.

The Roman version of golf was called paganica, and was first recorded in 30BC as a generic ball game. However, by the time of the Roman invasion of Scotland, it was played with a curved stick used to strike a feather-filled leather ball. The ball was hit towards a predetermined target such as a tree, the aim being to strike the “mark” in the fewest strokes.

Michael Whitby, a historian at Warwick University, said: “Legionaries were in Scotland from the AD140s. The Emperor Severus was on the Fife Peninsula and, significantly, there was an important marching camp near St Andrews.

“A legacy of games, such as paganica, would have been left. The roots of golf would have passed through the 8th century to the medieval university folk and aristocrats.”

Malcolm Campbell, a leading golf writer, agreed: “Paganica is the earliest form of a game we could recognise as golf. After the Romans left, it evolved and in the 15th century the Scots uniquely formalised it. The game was truly ‘invented’ in Scotland, with a little help from the Romans.”

Comments

[Michael Flannery]

To see what a red herring Paganica is, please see Golf Through The Ages, 600 Years of Golfing Art, page 252, quoting Adrianus Junius' definition of Pila Paganica in Nomenclator (first edition, Antwerp, 1567), published in London in 1585 '...A bal stuft with soft woull or haire, and used to be tossed from hand to hand: a tossing ball: a garne ball.'

With the exception of polo and the wind ball game, pallone, imported from Italy and first played in Europe in the late 15th century,there is no documentation of any ball game having been imported from the ancient world or the Orient.Here's what Malcolm Campbell wrote about our book:

Michael Flannery and Richard Leech's Golf Through the Ages is much, much more than a remarkable history of the royal and ancient game of golf. It is a giant work of art in its own right; a massive victory of literary research and perseverance that history may one day judge as worthy as a successful assault on Mount Everest.

Perhaps you could purchase a copy and correct your 'history'.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Flannery
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Michael Flannery Golf
Golf Through The Ages