Jeu de mail

Jeu de mail, in Anglo-Saxon literature called ‘pall mall’, was a one target game, played with a wooden club with a cylindrical wooden head and a spherical wooden ball.

The game was originally played in the South of France and it is said that the game came into France from Italy around the 15th century.The essence of the game was to reach a target in the fewest number of strokes. It was an individual game, not a team game. In the South of France the game was played ‘à la chicane’, in the fosses, on the ramparts and on the sandy tracks around the towns. The game attracted the interest of kings and nobles, who played the game on specially laid out narrow playing alleys (boulevards) of up to a thousand meters in length in many French towns, soon followed by the main towns of Western Europe and of Britain. The ‘noble’ game ceased to be played by the end of the 18th century. The game à la chicane continued to be played in the South of France until 1939, when the last mail player in Montpellier stowed away his mail equipment in the attic of his house.

Publication	Author	Published in
La Bernarde : boule de mail pour s'assurer la victoire ?		2012 La France pittoresque, N° 41
Le Noble Jeu de Mail de la ville de Montpellier	Philippe Estang	2009 February www.apgf.fr
Jeu de Mail Part 2	Henri Jakubowicz	2003 March Through The Green (Magazine of the British Golf Collectors Society)
Jeu de Mail Part 1	Henri Jakubowicz	2002 December Through The Green (Magazine of the British Golf Collectors Society)
The Sister of Golf	Andrew Lang	1909 Octobre Article in Blackwood’s Magazine Reprint in Golf Illustrated, Vol. 4, Number 4, January 1916