Guys
Managed to get my hands on a book by David Hamilton called Early Aberdeen Golf . It has some interesting theorys on the early days of Golf , he seems to think it was originally a "Churchyard Game" .
Has this been mentioned before , in any other books etc. ? .
A club and ball game of colf was played in Holland from the thirteenth century onwards but this sport was probably not close to the game of golf as we now know it. Colf was primarily a street game played with a single club. It was popular with children and was not always played towards a hole in the ground, but could be towards a door or post as the target. In Scotland a game of 'golf' is mentioned early (with numerous variations in spelling), and the best known of these references are in the Scottish Ads of Parliament of 1457, 1471 and 1491.
But these brief notices are of little use in revealing the detailed pattern of play. Indeed they hint that early Scottish golf was a confined, churchyard game, possibly played to the kirk door as a target, and early Scottish golf may therefore have resembled 'colf' more closely than has been thought. If Scottish golf at this time was similar to 'colf' then attention shifts from seeking earlier and earlier mentions of the game in Scotland, to asking when the game in Scotland changed into the game we now know.
Some Fragments of information on golf in Aberdeen at this time are already available. Indeed, from Aberdeen in 1538 comes the first known mention of golfers at play in Scotland , in a legal proceedings which describes the plaintiff as 'at the goiff , because thai war partismen [partakers] wyth the said Jhone in wynning and tyinsell...'. A little later golf was included in a list of 'unlawful' games in Aberdeen in 1565, namely 'cartis, dyis, tabilis, goif . . .' . By 1604, gouff was elevated to first on the list of prohibited Sunday sports, suggesting that it had risen to being an important sport in the town.
But there still may have been a churchyard game. In Aberdeen in 1613, a prosecution records that 'Jhone
Allan, cutler, convict, and jhone Allanc buik binder , convict for setting ane goiff ball in the kirk yeard, and striking the same against the kirk'. This brief entry suggests that the churchyard was still the haunt of golfers, and this was perhaps less tolerated than before. When did golf on the town's sandy coastal links emerge? General recreation on these links is mentioned in Aberdeen in 1575, but not until 1661 is golf on the links described. An earlier fascinating mention of holes on the links exists in 1625, when a general muster of the town's men was called for 'in the principall pairt of the linkes betwixt the first hole and the Quenis hole'. Perhaps this refers to other holes such as sand pits, rather than to golf holes, but we can conclude that the game of golf in Aberdeen between 1613 and 1661 was no longer a churchyard game, but was played or beginning to be played over a longer series of holes on the uneven ground nearer the the beach outside of the town.
This evolution of the game seems to have occurred only in Scotland, and not in the Low Countries. It may be that as the Scottish towns grew, the churchyards and other spaces became too cramped for play. Perhaps the golf clubs and balls improved to such an extent that the game required a longer course. But one other factor may have been important. Golf was probably one of the sociable sports played on Sundays when people gathered from afar to attend church. The Reformation in 1558 brought in new, severe attitudes to sport in Scotland and sought to abolish sport on Sundays, at least at the time of the church services. It may be that the players who were denied their game on the flat 'green' round the church moved instead to the remote links outside the town to play their sport, with less chance of public scandal, detection or censure. This evasion may have been necessary only in Scotland: the more liberal Low Countries were perhaps less censorious. Moreover, their game of 'colf' was played in inland towns: there were no adjacent links for year-round recreation. It is not surprising, perhaps, that colf disappeared and evolved into 'kolf', a formal short indoor game, similar to croquet, and played on a court with long mallets and balls.
These factors may explain why it was in Scotland alone that the long golf game of the links emerged from the medieval club and ball game.