WHAT’S IN A NAME? (CONTINUED)
(in one case, in nearby Nimes, involving 40 players) resulting from damage, e.g. to vineyards, caused by mis- hit balls. Le Jeu de Mail was thus very much alive just when families like the
in and around Montpellier in the first half of the nineteenth century. A rustic form, possibly with more than two hoops, must have evolved in rural areas in the region and there witnessed by Anglo-Irish travellers who nurtured the game back home into a form more readily recognised by us today. NOT CROQUET What about the word roquet? We have seen that neither Prior nor Ross and Thomson (R&T) provided a satisfactory derivation of the word. (N.B: the OED entry for Roquet is more up-to-date and based on R&T.) Interestingly R&T suggested an alternative: that croquet lost its “c” in, say, the phrase “to take croquet”, thus becoming “to take roquet”. Ross, however, dismissed this immediately, as it “will at once be rejected by all Croquet players, the two fundamental strokes, the croquet and roquet, are so entirely different in kind that they could not possibly be confused.” But some early rules did precisely that, which may have been a confusion of Spratt’s Rules where, rather oddly, the croquet stroke is not given a name, but roquet is mentioned (with its modern meaning) thus: Players strike their balls alternately; but when a player sends his ball through an arch he is entitled to another stroke, and also when he "roquets" his adversary he gets another stroke. “Roquet" is produced when a player strikes his opponent's ball with his own; he should then put his own ball quite close to his opponent’s, placing his foot firmly on his own ball, strike his opponent’s ball, and send it as far as possible in an unfavourable direction; his opponent has to play from that point, and his own ball remains steady, then he also gets another stroke. The inverted commas around roquet most probably indicate that roquet was a newly created word. It is therefore very likely that Miss Macnaghten's teenage brother, Fergus, who is credited with drafting Spratt’s Rules, simply invented it.
Macnaghtens were travelling around the continent.
Sudre’s book contains an elaborate set of 77 rules. The verb croquer and noun croque appear numerous times. They are associated with an extra stroke which the player can take during a turn. The close similarity with the croquet stroke, unfortunately, ends there. It can only be taken if there is
The stance advised for addressing the ball.
some sort of obstacle which prevents the player from making a clean shot. The purpose of the stroke was to get rid of the obstacle whilst not moving the player’s ball, seemingly by hitting the obstacle directly. Perhaps the best meaning of croquer here is “to smash or break” – a common usage of the word at that time. (We even use it nowadays in e.g. croquette potatoes.) But it could naturally be extended to mean “get rid of”. Thus, if the obstacle was another (opponent’s) ball it would chime closely with getting rid of it. This is what Spratt advocates in his Rules, and it became a favourite manoeuvre in the early days of “tight croquet”, where the player put his foot on the striker’s ball to prevent it from moving.
The popular forms of Mail were more like golf, and involved distances of a kilometre or more, so interaction between balls would have been a relatively rare event. However, in the village where Miss Macnaghten witnessed a “primitive rustic game”, the ground
(Image right) Le jeu de mail was played well into the 20th century
Negotiating a corner
would be just a small patch, like boules, and a version of the game “like Billiards” could easily have developed where interplay between balls came to the fore. It therefore seems most likely that Croquet, the name of the game, is derived from the croquet stroke which, in turn, stems from the “croque” stroke in le Jeu du Mail as practised
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