Location: Carved on a windowsill in Finchingfield church, 10 miles south-east of Saffron Walden. (TL 686328)
Nine. Men’s Morris is a game of great antiquity, once very popular in Britain. The square outline was cut in turf, chalked on floors, carved on tables, seats, church windowsills — anywhere where people gathered together. It was also called ‘Siege of T roy and ‘The Troy Game’, and the layout is an elementary labyrinth. The object of this game for two players was for each Sim Men’s Morris.
Player to get three of his nine counters in a row on the intersections of the lines or in the three angles of one corner.
Another name for Nine Men’s Morris was merrils, similar to the old French name for hopscotch, de merelles, and hopscotch itself may have been derived from maze dances. (Jne researcher, h'rederick Hirsch, believes that children’s pavement games like hopscotch are a folk-memory of pre-Christian cosmologies. He says that the game symbolises the course of the sun, and in support of this theory reports that Danish children cry ‘one year old' or ‘I have a year’ after having completed one course of the hopscotch figure according to the children’s rules. Roger Caillois confirms the antiquity of hopscotch when he says: ‘Hopscf)tch indeed symbolized the labyrinth through which the initiate must first wander’ and ‘In antiquity, hopscotch was a labyrinth in which one pushed a stone - i. e. the soul - toward the exit.’ In Cornwall the spiral form of hopscotch was called ‘snail-creep’, reminding us of the spiral dance ‘snails’ creep’ described earlier.
World History
