On The Anarchist Origins of Golf

Joseph Winogrond
Fall/Winter 2014
Languages:
SKT = Sanskrit
OE = Old English
ME = Middle English
ON = Old Norse
OHG = Old High German
MLG = Middle Low German
MSW = Middle Swedish
DA = Danish
SW = Swedish
No one is certain where the game of golf originally came from, nor where the English word golf
came from. Perhaps this mystery will never be solved with any certainty; but its intriguing to look at
the prehistory of the world from which golf came. By prehistory is meant not hunters and gatherers,
but any evidence that precedes urbanization and literacy, which is when we began making written
records of our activities. Such evidence comes from prehistoric agriculture, herding and foraging.
There are a few golf-like words in the older languages of Europe that have to do with farming or
weapons, and the evidence of these words from the primitive northern countryside for some reason
is a place no one has yet looked for clues regarding the mystery of golfs origins.
Although golfs popularity has waned in recent years, losing millions of players, its abuse of land,
water-use and chemicals continues on a world-wide scale according to the World Anti-Golf Movement.
The multi-billion dollar industry has introduced an insignificant number of organic courses to address
the criticism of golfs impact on the environment, and one can note a degree of panic when larger
pizza-sized holes on the greens are being considered to increase its appeal.
Professional golfs corporate-sized tournament purses and exorbitant greens fees, its feigned air of
exclusivity and aristocracy, are ignored by most people. Corporations always seem to patch things
up, as they probably will until twenty billion consumers are living in glass bubbles, eating geneticallyenhanced foods, breathing purified air and lusting after ever fresher spectacles.
The usual etymology of the word golf is not really relevant to our search for golfs origins. We
actually know very little about the word. The earliest use of the word in English literature is from
1457. Early spelling rules were lax and loose and in its early uses the word was spelled in myriad ways.
Literacy and urbanization arrive on the scene together. Before commercial printing began in the 1500s
literacy had little purpose beyond churches, courts and commerce. Golf was spelled golf, goff, gouff,
gowff, goiff, gowff, this last, says the venerable 1929 Britannica, the genuine old pronunciation.
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The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue has gouf, golfe, golf, gould, goufe, gouff(e), gowf, gowff(e),
gofe, goofe, goif(f), and states, as do most authorities, that the words origin is probably Dutch kolf,
the club used in a game similar to golf.
The ultimate sources of the word golf remain a mystery. Scholars say that it is a word of obscure
origin. They have looked at two angles. The first, previously mentioned, is Dutch kolf, club, cognate
with Danish kolbe, butt, and German kolbe, rifle butt, words that also used to mean club (Old Norse
klfr, club), but the games played with such clubs have not been directly related to the game of golf,
even though the games Dutch connection is supported by many pictures and other witnesses but,
states the Oxford English Dictionary, none of the Dutch games have been convincingly identified with
golf, nor is it certain that kolf was ever used to denote the game as well as the implement. Additional
difficulty is caused by the absence of any Scottish forms of the word with an initial C or K as found on
the Continent, and by the fact that golf is mentioned much earlier in Scotland than any of the Dutch
sports that resemble it.
The second angle looked at relates to a word found in some modern Scandinavian dialects: gowf,
a blow with the open hand, also its verb, to strike. Gowf also meant blow or hit in the Scottish
Lowlands, mutating in theory from gouff or gowf to goff and finally golf. Alas we have no proof in
literature, no actual literary references, and therefore an etymological dead end for golf, or so we are
told.
What we know about golfs history can be put into a few bullets:
One: Early games like golf were played in the lowlands of present day Holland, Saxony, Scandinavia,
Scotland and the like. (There was regular commerce between these areas by sea and they shared
Germanic languages.)
Two: An old Roman game called paganica may have been played in Britain, Holland, Belgium and
France with a bent stick and a ball stuffed with wool. It may have contributed to the Gaelic games of
hurling and shinny which became modern field hockey.
Three: The Belgians and French also played a golf-like game in the fields called choulla or chole with
clubs with iron heads and egg-shaped balls carved from beechwood. The game featured gambling and
its object was to use the fewest strokes to hit a target.
Four: The English played a game called cambuca with a club and wooden ball as early as the 1300s.
The word cambuca may derive from cambrel or gambrel, a word of Celtic origin referring to a bent
stick; or may somehow be related to the gambo of Monmouthshire dialect, a wheel-less sled used to
bring in hay at harvest time. The French also struck wooden and feather-stuffed balls toward targetstumps or posts, scoring with the fewest strokes: Jeu de mail was played on a small field similar to
croquet. There is also evidence of a Chinese game from more than twelve centuries ago that was very
much like golf; such golf-like games may be found world-wide.
Five: The historians Peter Dobereiner and Steven Van Hengel both describe the Dutch game kolf
being played on a 25 X 60 ice court, and write that kolf was preceded by a game called colf, which
was played on the ice in winter and on the land in summer. Colf was much older than kolf, being
played between the 1200s and the 1600s with a course at the village of Loenenann de Vecht having
four golf-type holes as early before 1300.
Six: The early Dutch phrase spel metten colve [game played with a club] may be evidence of
the word colf later becoming kolf [club], but this is uncertain. What we know for sure is that golf
became the subject of paintings and of illustrations in valuable books. The Dutch game het kolven is
probably what we see as three golfers putting at a hole in the turf using clubs with metal heads in
the illuminated Book of Hours, which was made at Bruges in the 1500s and today can be seen at the
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British Museum. This illustration is said to be the oldest rendering of modern golf being played into a
cup in the turf. Nothing about this interesting evidence, however, helps us to know where golf comes
from.
By the 1400s golf was already popular among Scotlands upper classes, but it was played by common
people as well, as it still is in Scotland today. The three clubs playing today over the ancient Kings
Links golf course in Aberdeen, for instance, all entertain the membership of ordinary working-class
Aberdonians: the Bon Accord (founded 1872), the Northern (1897) and the Caledonian (1899). All three
have clubhouses with cozy kitchens across the street from Kings Links. But there are also exclusive
clubs in Aberdeen which cater to the better-heeled, the Royal Aberdeen Golf Club, the site of this
years Open (which played initially on Kings Links before moving in 1888 to its own private venue
north of the River Don), Murcar Links Golf Club, one of Scotlands highest-ranked courses, and the
ultra-expensive Trump International Golf Links, built recently by Donald Trump in spite of popular
local opposition.
Kings Links, incidentally, makes a strong case for being the worlds earliest-documented golf
course. It lies between the University of Aberdeen campus in Old Aberdeen and the North Sea beaches.
In the Aberdeen Council records of 1565 is found the earliest dated reference anywhere in the world
to a golf hole. Also in 1625 a local Aberdeen record discusses some military exercises in the principal parts of the links betwixt the first hole and the Quenis hole. Some think Quenis hole may
be a reference to a quarry pit, but other believe it would have been disrespectful of Queen Elizabeth
(who died in 1603) to name a quarry pit after her, and the words the first hole really admits of no
other interpretation than the first hole of a golf course. All this squabbling is about events which are
relatively recent when compared with the great reaches of prehistoric time in which golf must have
had its true origins.
The commoners of the late Middle Ages were the backbone of the local army, common farmers
conscripted since the Dark Ages to serve for no more than forty days so that they could return home
regularly to tend their fields and herds. These fighting farmers were the yeomanry, the common
bowmen as opposed to the armored knights and thanes. The early archers bow was made from yew
wood, in legend the source of the word yeoman, and a broad disarming of the yeomanry and their
replacement by a state army took place between the 1500s and 1700s. Golfs popularity in the 1400s
was such that it was interfering with the more important weapons-showings that entailed weekly
archery practice, commoners included, after church services.
Fute ball [early Scottish soccer] was banned in 1424 because it was interfering with archery practice. In March of 1457 the 13th Scottish Parliament of James II decreed that weapons-showings be
held by both lay and church lords and barons four times each year, and that the two most popular
pastimes, football and golf, in their words, be utterly cried down and not used, [in Scots: decreted
and ordained that wapinsshawingis be halden be the lordis and baronis spiritual and temporal, four
times in the zeir; and that the fut bal ande golf be vtterly cryit doune ande nocht usit.] This Act required that bow-marks be made at each parish church on a pair of butts, and shooting [archery] be
practiced every Sunday. Such censorship of golf as frivolous continued for the next 200 years. Royalty
was given no exemption: Legend has it that in 1502 Mary Queen of Scots was rebuked for playing
golf at Seton House too soon after the death of her husband Lord Darnley. At Aberdeen, historically
Scotlands most conservative city, an injunction was passed as late as 1604 to prevent people from
participating in golf and lawn bowling on Sundays.
Scholarship requires precise evidence. Every proof of the etymology of a word requires literary
references and exact spellings. Literacy was rare in the 1400s and early literature, as we have seen
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with the word golf, had an extraordinary flexibility in spelling. Many sounds are similar enough to
substitute one letter for another, using pairs of interchangeable letters. For instance,
The interchangeable letters K and G would change kolf (or colf) to golf.
The interchangeable letters W and F would change gowf to golf.
The interchangeable letters V and F would change golv to golf.
The interchangeable letters A and L would change goaf to golf.
The exercise we are proposing is not facetious: Associated with ancient agriculture and weaponry
were several words that have these pairs of letters, but unfortunately, without references in literature
to prove their case, looking at them wont prove anything from a linguistic perspective regarding
golfs origins. In the spirit of the flexibility of language, however, particularly of prehistoric human
orality, which was the kind of language that preceded our written tongue, we will take license with
these pairs of letters and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.
- The origins of golf were out on the farm and not in town. It is a well-known statistic that in
1600 over 90% of northern Europes population lived on farms, and by 1850 upwards of 90% lived in
large towns and cities (T. M. Devine, Vol. 1, 1988. By 1900 57% of Scotlands population, to give an
instance, had been shifted into towns of 5000 or more [Flynn, Cambridge 1994]). In 1600 only Poland,
Austria-Bohemia, Scandinavia and Ireland were more rural than Scotland: Scandinavia had 1.4% of
its people living in cities of 10,000 or more, Poland 0.4%, Ireland less than 0.1%. If a standard of 1,000
inhabitants instead of 10,000 had been used in these studies, the percentages would be even further
decreasedand people who live in towns of 1,000 can hardly be considered farmersmeaning that
several countries in Europe in 1600 had 99% of their people living on farms.
However it evolved, by 1700 certain forms of golf had urbanized. Childrens golf courses were
built in Elizabethan towns where men could play only if accompanied by a child. The earliest British
golf portraits show tony children playing with customized small clubs. These paintings date from
only three or four centuries ago, while the origin and prehistory of golf, the broader subject of our
inquiry, relate to customs that are older than the scant evidence we have of well-heeled Scotsmen and
Dutchmen and their posh children in and around their big towns.
Golf may have developed among shepherds or farmers on long summer days, perhaps as contests
based upon the slinging and slapping of various staffs and tools, shepherds crooks, flails and so on.
The slinging of the hay-makers scythe, with its fluid and whip-like sideways motion, is similar to
the swing of the golf club, and there are also other tools and weapons that may have a linguistic
connection with golf. We will look at several early farming and foraging practices in some detail.
Before towns and cities people lived in an open landscape and spent most of their year outside,
occupying the kind of land that pertains to our inquiryland that was open enough to allow for a
golf-type shotand this requires some clarification. Some open land of this sort in early England and
Scotland was cleared of plant life by customary burnings, other open land was cleared by the reaping
of grain or hay, and other land by the grazing of animals. The small farmer and the small herder were
preceded, two or three millennia before, by the small forager who lived by wilder means, a primitive
subsistence garden-farmer or herder who gathered from the wild a substantial portion of the years
food.
After the notorious enclosures of the commons and the clearings of the peasant populations from
the woods and fields of Scotland and England between 1600 and 1800 (the cause of the dramatic shift
of population we noted earlier), the peasantry was moved into towns to work in mills, or forced to
emigrate abroad. When wool became England and Scotlands main export product, great commercial
sheep-walks were created with a single shepherd overseeing commercial herds where once dozens
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of small clans grazed their smaller flocks. Huge grain farms also dominated the landscape as wheat
became a major export crop. (It was at this time that the wily poacher entered English and Scottish
folklore as the bane of the rich farmer.) Open fieldsopen enough to allow for a golf shotwere
not new, however. Smaller open-land configurations preceded these large farms by hundreds, even
thousands of years, the open lands of prehistory.
The landscape words of Scotland and England dont tell us much about golf. The only kind of land
traditionally associated with golf is linksland, typically sandy open land along the seashore, but why,
or even whether, it has any connection to golf is uncertain. A word link (OE hlinc) in Old English
meant a bank or hill, and these hills were often planted in grain or hay, as were other kinds of land
like moors and downs and braes. The Scottish National Dictionary defines a link specifically as a
sandy knoll or a stretch of sandy, grass-covered land near the seashore, a golf course, a definition
that suits our modern use of the word but which by a more ancient measure would be confusing
or even captious. It is true that linksland today is the traditional setting for the oldest golf courses,
gently rolling, low lying sand-dune land abutting the sea. These golf courses were always found near
commercial towns that were sited by ocean harbors, and this mercantile factor was probably the
reason linksland came to be associated with the seashore. Perhaps the source of Modern English link
as land is misunderstood, because it is usually thought to come from the Old Norse word for a link
in a chain (ON hlekkr, cognate with the Old English word for lank)as if the golf holes link together
like chain linksbut linksland seems more likely to have come from Old English hlinc, which meant
simply ridge, bank, rising ground, hill.
Many older sorts of landscapes would have been open for at least part of the year. The moors, or
muirs, were generally a kind of peat land. In Scotland the old heather was burned off the common
grazing lands in annual muirburns to let the young shoots sprout. The naturally regenerating grasses
after the burn are called in Scotland naitur gerss (nature grass). These young plants served two
purposes: The first was to provide food for the herds of ewes or cows that typically moved with
their small human clans each year from lowlands to highlands in a pattern of migration known as
transhumance. The special flavors of highland cheeses is still today said to come from these young
plants. The second purpose was to feed and hide the moorhens, as they were known, a variety of
small birds that were an important secondary food source hunted and gathered by the locals. Were
it not for the young plants that sprouted after the burnings, the grouse and partridge and other birds
would not return to nest and live in the moors. The old pagan burnings of the heath were eventually
outlawed by aristocratic landlords, and only much later, in the twentieth century, were they restored
by environmental authorities as annual controlled burnings to protect the moorfowl.
Moors, even when found in hilly country, are sometimes wetlands, but the low muddy lands near
the rivers and the sea called fenlands are more consistently boggy. Fens are usually low-lying marsh
not suitable for games like golf. Low hills, often along the sea, called downs, (a variant of our word
sand-dune, ME doun, OE dun, hill), were perfectly good golf-shot land, as it were. Other hills were
called braes, which could be a declivity or a slope or a knoll, a word said to be related to Old Norse
bra, cognate with our word eyebrow: As our brow slopes, so do the braes, typically as hills along
highland rivers. Scottish braemen lived on the slopes of the hills, and on the tops, at the braeheads,
are found the great cairns, piles of stone raised up in prehistoric times in memory of the hallows, as
the ancestors were called.
What is important to our inquiry is that the annual mowing of cereal grains or hay created open
expanses of land, whether the land was braes, moors, downs, links or something else. The agricultural
use of hay, for instance, was unknown before the domestication of animals, which began only four or
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five millennia ago in northern Europe. Domestic animals were not kept and fed over the winter, so hay
was not cut and cured to feed them. Hay (OE heg) is grass that is mowed and cured for fodder (fodder
= food for animals). The early barn was called a hay-house, and the scythe a hay-scythe (OE heghs,
hegse). Early migratory herders who travelled to warmer pastures in the winter must have laid up
smaller amounts of hay to feed their small herds during the months of snow and extreme cold. Such
prehistoric hay was wild hay, simply the local wild grass; but the hay of the last few centuries, which
is more nutritious, is wild hay combined with Timothy and its mixtures, alfalfa, clover, miscellaneous
hybrids like bluegrass, redtop and Johnson, annual legumes like soybeans, cowpeas and vetches, and
grains, like oats and wheat, cut before maturity.
Hay was cut with a scythe and laid up in windrows, which were long rows left on the ground to dry
in the sun and wind. Later the windrows were turned to help them dry, and then gathered together
and lifted into hayricks, that were also turned to expose the hay to the sun. Then the hayrick was
piled onto a hay-wain or hay-wagon, which was in its primitive form simply two ladders set atilt a
plank on two wheels and pulled by a horse or ox to the hay-house or barnyard. This work was all
about survival: Without storing hay for the winter a herder or dairyman could not keep his herd alive.
It took five cartloads of hay per cow to feed a cow through five English winter months.
An inventory of the stored hay was taken in the fall, and any beasts in excess of the amount of hay
on hand were slaughtered and salted for meat for the winter, because, obviously, they would have
died anyway. The annual sacrifice of these animals in pre-Christian times was dedicated, according
to the eighth-century English historian Bede, to the pagan spirits at Blot-month, approximating our
November (OE blotmonath, blot = sacrifice) with feasts and festivities, the relict of which is Martimas,
beginning on November 11th. St. Martins Day remained a day of great feasting until relatively recent
times.
In the East Anglian dialect of English goaf (found also as Danish gulve) meant to stack or store
hay or grain on the floor of the barn. There are many old uses of this word in English, as early as
1325 (Oxford English Dictionary, to golv the corn, with our interchangeable letters, golf the corn),
and in the 1400s spelled golvyn or golvon, (golfing the hay). East Anglia is an area in England
of Scandinavian settlement. As we will see, this is part of a broad pattern of golf-sounding words
associated with harvests and hunting in the Nordic and Low German languages.
The growing and cutting and storing of hay for the winter is an agricultural custom known as haymaking. Primitive hay-making has three steps, 1. mow, 2. make, and 3. carry, so hay-making can refer
either to the custom of growing and using hay, or refer to its second step. The first step, discussed
earlier, is mowing, when hay is laid out in windrows, either by the mowers or by a horse- or ox-pulled
hay-rake that gathers the hay into heavier windrows. Mowing refered also to the harvest of barley
or oats or wheat or rye. The old word mow (OE mga), did not mean to cut, but meant a heap of
grain in the sense of our word golv. Mowing is a common verb in the West Germanic languages (OE
mwan, MLG meien, DA maaien, prehistoric Germanic m, to cut down grass, corn etc., as with a
scythe, cognate with our words mead and meadow); but mow is a Scandinavian noun (OE mga, ON
mge, SW muga, swath, crowd of people). The place the haycock or hayrick stood was called the
mowstead. In Old Norse common people or country folk were called all-mow (ON almge, MSW
almoghe, SW allmoge, DA almue). Mow came to mean in Modern English two things, 1. a stack of
hay, corn, peas, beans etc., or a heap of such in a barn; and 2. a place in a barn where hay or corn is
heaped up. This distinction is important for our study because we find that the word golf also related
to a heap of hay and to the place in the barn where it sat.

The second step, making, is found in our often-used expression Make hay while the sun shines.
Rain is the enemy of hay-making. A Scottish proverb says May makes the hay. Hay-making is described in the English nursery rhyme Willie Boy, Willie Boy:
Willie boy, Willie boy
Where are you going?
Oh let us go with you
This sunshiny day.

Im going to the meadow

To see them a-mowing,
Im going to help the girls
Turn the new hay.
Making requires that the hay be piled up into ricks or pikes or cocks or trampcocks or stocks, as they
are variously called, where it goes through a preliminary sweating. Any round pile of hay in the field
was a haycock, and the purpose of this sweating was to further dry the hay. The haystacks ferment
if the moisture is not sweated away, causing the internal temperature of the hay to rise and possibly
ignite, even explosively, burning the hay and maybe the hay-house too. The haycock is mentioned, of
course, in our English nursery rhyme Little Boy Blue:
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
The sheeps in the meadow, the cows in the corn;
Where is the little boy who looks after the sheep?
Hes under the haycock, fast asleep.
The third step in making hay is carrying, and, as noted earlier, this was called a hay-golph or haygoaf. Ricks of hay were carried from the fields to their winter storage areas. The ricks were lifted onto
wagons by means of big levers called rick-lifters, and the wagons sometimes had extender platforms
on them called hay-racks. In the end a wagon came down the lane behind a horse or an ox, a poetic
great toppling wain of hay that was a joyous sight in ancient days. At the homestead the hay was
either put into the barn to get it out of the weather, or it was built into a giant haycock that sat on its
own mowstead, as its traditional place was called; it was thatched over to keep it dry in the winter.
Some haycocks rose as high as three stories. They were dismantled through the winter in a way that
kept it from falling apart, cutting into the cone from the side. This custom kept the hay dry all winter
without the use of a barn.
The final golf custom was that of stacking the hay on sections of the barn floor, or golving the
hay, as mentioned earlier. The Old Norse word for floor is, no surprise, golf, spelled precisely the
same as Modern English golf, and this word remains as Swedish golv and Danish gulv, which also
mean floor. In the hay-barn the golf or mow was the place where the hay or grain was stored. More
precisely, this bay in the barn stretched from one vertical post in the wall to the next, and a single
mowing of hay was limited to one hay-golf. Also the mowing or carrying was called a hay-goaf or
hay-golph. The Oxford English Dictionary notes:
Where horses or barns were constructed with a wooden framework [i.e., post and beam or the
more primitive cruck framing] the upright posts were placed at regular intervals along each side, the
space between two posts forming a bay, and the size of the building was frequently given by stating
the number of bays it contained. Each of these divisions is in the Scandinavian language called a floor
[golf], note staff-golf, Icelandic stafglf, from stafr, post. As late as 1450 Reek or golf and golfe or
stak are given in English associating the word golf with the hay-rick and the stake-posts of the barn.
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The hay or corn that was deposited between two posts was a golf, as in 1530, Goulfe of corne, so
much as may lye between two postes, otherwise a baye. Corn, of course, means grain in Britain, like
wheat, barley, oats or rye, not maize. The cereal grain was harvested on its stalks (in the straw) and
laid up like hay in the barn. In 1787 in East Norfolk this bay was still a gulph-stead or goafstead, a bay
or division of a barn. The East Anglian dialect mentioned earlier has the word spelled golf, [precisely
the same as Modern English golf], golfe, goffe, geoffe(e), gulph, goof, goaf, and its plural goaves.
So golf-like words were used for both the hay itself, a rick piled onto a wagon and hauled back to
the barnyard, and the section of floor on which it was stored. The importance of these bays and the
struggle to see them all filled, as we mentioned, relates to the survival of the animal herd over the
winter, and correspondingly, the survival of their human kindred. Thomas Tusser in 1573, in one of
his delightful English husbandry poems, refers to the goffe, or stack of hay, and the gofe ladder, one
of the tools of hay-making:
Let shock take sweate
Lest goffe take heate.

Trans.:
[Let the stock take sweat,
Lest the golf take heat.]

Tussers hay tools:

Gofe ladder, short pitchfork and long flaile, strawforke and rake.
Lest it become tedious, here are just a few more examples of the use of this old golf word in the
OED, some of them fairly recent:
1661:
A Geoff, or Goffe, a Mow or Reek.
Trans.:
[A Golf, a Mow, or Rick.]

1787, East Norfolk:

Gulph, a mow, or bay-full in a barn.

1800, Norfolk dialect:

The stra that the throsher had hulld down from the gofe in the barn.
Trans:
[The straw that the thrasher had hauled down from the golf in the barn.]

c. 1825, Vocabulary of East Anglia:

Goof, a rick of corn in the straw laid up in a barn; if in the open air it is a stack.

1825, East Anglia:

Goave, to stow corn in a barn Do you intend to stack this wheat, or goave it?

1823, Suffolk Words:

Goof, or Goaf, the mass of corn in the straw in a barn. Riding the goof is the work of a boy on
horseback, to compress the corn as thrown on the goof.
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Medieval German (Holthausen 1948, 93) has golf, deal floor, flooring, compartment, room, chamber, sleeping-place, hiding-place, shed-room, granary-room, barn-room, spelled precisely the same as
Modern English golf. Evidently the word golf referred to various kinds of food-floors or food-rooms in
Scots, English, Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages. Jakob Grimm, who compiled
a Germanic super-dictionary in the mid-nineteenth century, found the word gulf in Frisia, 2. East
Frisian threshing room (Grimm 1072).
After the greater population shifted into towns following the enclosure of the commons the older
customs associated with going a-golfing became bucolic memories. When the state disarmed the
Scottish and English yeomanry, the possession of a spear or a bow by common people became illegal.
Customary hunting became the privilege of the upper classes, as it remains today in most of Europe.
The few shepherds who remained still had their crooks, and the remaining farmers still had their flails
and scythes, so we can imagine contests and games that employed these tools. The shepherds staff
was made from resilient, lithe woods like the yew, the wood of the forbidden bow, and its head was
not unlike the golf clubs.
Grimm noted the Swiss-German word golf, little bound rough oakum or flax, that is, a little ball of
oakum or linen thread, spelled precisely the same as Modern English golf. This he related to German
gufe, clew, clue, ball, skein, ball of thread. So here, finally, is a real clue, if you will. A careful examination of games played with small oakum balls in Switzerland, Germany and the low countries is
indicated; a connection with primitive golf-like games is almost predictable. A clue, or clew, in Modern English is a ball of thread, yarn or cord (OE cliewen, OHG kliuwa, ball, SKT glau, lump. The verb
to clew or to clew up means to roll something into a ball, such as windrows of hay into rounded
mounds, or threads of jute, hemp or flax fiber into oakum clues. In Cretan mythology Ariadne helped
Theseus escape from the labyrinth by providing him with a ball of thread to unroll as he sought the
Minotaur: Hence the phrase Ariadnes clue, and our modern sense of clues solving mysteries.
Before commercial caulk was available everyone sealed roofs, windows, doors and boats planking
with oakum. Small balls of oakum were typically made from jute or hemp fiber impregnated with tar,
sap or resin. They are mostly used today for caulking the seams in wooden ships and in packing the
joints of cast iron drain pipes. Small oakum clues must have been nearly ubiquitous in medieval times.
Their resinous quality must have made small remnant golfs perfect for playing games and there must
be some record of the time when they were common.
The word oakum (ME okome, okom, OE cumba, meaning a-comb) meant literally the offcombings or combings-out of fibers. Oakum was at one time recycled from old tarry ropes and
cordage, which were painstakingly unraveled and taken apart into fiber; this task of picking and
preparation was a common penal occupation in prisons and workhouses.
As an urban footnote, in Dickens Oliver Twist oakum is extracted by orphaned children in a workhouse. Their oakum clews were used by navy ships and the children were told that they were serving
their country. In Melvilles Benito Cereno the crew of a slave ship spends idle hours picking oakum.
Picking oakum was common in Victorian childrens workhouses: Girls were required to pick one
pound each day, boys 1.5 pounds, and those over sixteen years of age 2 pounds. At Coldbath Fields
Prison prisoners had to pick 2 pounds unless sentenced to hard labor, in which case they had to pick
from 3 to 6 pounds per day.
It was not long before an urban aristocracy held a corporate monopoly of the manufacture of golf
balls. We know that there was substantial traffic in early golf balls between Scotland, Holland, Frisia
and northern Germany. An enactment of James VI of Scotland (James I of England) in 1618 stated
9

that no small quantity of gold and silver is transported zierly [yearly] out of Hienes kingdome of
Scotland [his Highness kingdom] to support a considerable importation of golf balls from Holland.
Were Dutch or German golf balls in such demand that they threatened Scotlands treasury?
The historian Michael William noted that in 1502 James IV of Scotland acquired a set of clubs and
balls from a bowmaker in Perth. The invention of firearms eventually made Sunday archery practice obsolete. The artisans who previously made weapons continued their work as golf club makers,
charging exorbitant prices for clubs and balls. James I established a monopoly for implements including golf clubs in 1603. In a letter of April 14 he wrote William Maye, bower [bow-maker], burgess
of Edinburgh during all the days of his lyftime, master fledger, bower, club-maker and speir maker,
to his Hieness, alsweill for game as weir [trans: during all the days of his lifetime, master arrowmaker, bow-maker, club-maker and spear-maker to his Highness, all as well for games as for war.]
Some years later he awarded James Meivill a twenty-one year exclusive franchise to manufacture golf
balls, and he embargoed the importation of golf balls from the Netherlands. He also lifted the ban on
playing golf on Sunday so long as devine services were attended.
The Modern German word kolben, club, mace, used also for the butt of a rifle, is cognate with the
Dutch word kolbe, club, possibly the origin of the word golf, as mentioned earlier. Kolbig in German
means club-shaped, knobby, and perhaps black powder rifles after they had shot their load were
swung by the barrel like clubs. Grimm connected the old definition of kolbe with Scandinavian klfr,
as arrow, bolt, javelin, throwing club or cudgel. The Old Norse term klf-skot, meant (distance of
an) arrow-shot. Such a distance can only be conceived in open country, in places where the projectile
wont be lost in the trees or high brush.
This kolf-shot may indicate that the distance between shots fired in practice or play was related to
the openness of mowings in the meadows, or it may indicate that other kinds of kolf-shots were used
in sling-practice and spear-practice. What is intriguing is that the bow and arrow, the spear and the
golf club share a similar ancient identity: They had the same makers and they were used in the same
open fields in a natural setting and they performed similar tasks. The Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega
y Gasset wrote in Meditations on Hunting (1948) that as the atrophy of his instincts increases man
grows away from his pristine intimacy with Nature. First he becomes a shepherd, semistationary,
then a farmer. He ceases to be an expert tracker, he has ceased to be wildthat is, he has lost form as
a fieldsman. So, suggests Ortega, the quest of the hunter is to go against history, against civilization,
and to return to Nature.
Casting projectiles, including arrows and blunt arrows, is an art from the wild, an art of the hunter.
Walking in the fields, swinging old tools and weapons and wielding sticks and handaxes is in general
one of the oldest arts in the world.
In the January/February 2013 issue of Orion magazine the ecologist Paul Kingsnorth offered a critique of civilization and technological progress. Kingsnorth gives summer classes in England and
Scotland in the use of the scythe. He wrote in his article that these classes are the most fulfilling thing
he does. He described curved cutting tools for use on grass that date back at least ten thousand years
to the dawn of agriculture and thus to the dawn of civilization. He wrote that like the tool, the word
scythe has prehistoric origins, its Proto-Indo-European root SEK meaning to cut or to divide, the root
found in our words sickle and sex.
Kingsnorth wrote that mowing with a scythe shuts down the jabbering brain for a little while, or
at least the rational part of it, leaving only the primitive part. He says it leaves the body in tune with
the tool, and the tool in tune with the land. The mower concentrates without thinking, following the
lay of the ground with the curve of the blade, aware of the keenness of its edge, hearing the birds and
10

seeing things moving in the grass, everything connected with everything else and if it isnt, he
writes, it doesnt work.
The primitive farmers of northern Europe were also hunters, and they had for millennia used their
slings to hurl small stones. They threw various forms of lead-staffs, which are sticks weighted at one
end with lead. Edward Tylor (1865) wrote that in Hampshire the throwing cudgel called a squoyle was
used in a ritual the day after Christmas, which was the day of the English squirrel feast. Twenty or
thirty villagers headed to the wood with leaded sticks called squoyles or scales, and by encircling the
trees gathered a heaping pile of squirrels for the feast. The squoyle was a short stick loaded at one
end with lead, as opposed to the snog, which was a throwing stick weighted only with wood. Anne
Wilson (1973), who wrote about the foods of early Britain, found evidence of the red squirrel being a
dish for a great lord, and described the delicacy browet farsure, an early fifteenth-century pottage
meat of partridge and squirrel.
Hunting with primitive projectiles is universal. The curved throwing-club of the Native Americans
was sometimes called a rappahannock or rabbit-stick. It was often made from the base and trunk of a
dogwood sapling, the root-knot being the hard and heavy end. Two or three sticks would be thrown
at a rabbit simultaneously. The rappahannock is similar to the knockberry of lower Africa and the
trombash of the Upper Nile and the waddy of Australia (the aborigines throw a boomerang and a
waddy interchangeably). The point is that our ancestors didnt need complex tools like the bow and
arrow to forage in wood and field, and the art of casting things for dinner was as familiar to the
Englishman or Scotsman as it was to everyone else.
The act of spear-throwing, especially with the atlatl or spear-throwing stick (pronounced like Atlantic), closely approximates the swing of the golf club. The atlatl greatly increases a spears velocity
and penetrating power. The peculiar weighted atlatls of North America are particularly curious, early
golf-techie-like hurling devices. Another such device is the wield-sling (Old Norse val-slngva), the
war-sling of David and Goliath fame. Inside the old crannogs and earthen fortresses of northern Europe archaeologist often find piles of small stones, the most primitive of ammunitions.
A sling pouch may be fabricated from a piece of leather or cloth approximately 3 by 10. To each
end is attached a cord, one cord being 3 shorter than the other. The tips of the cords often terminate
in little balls or knots. As many as three small stones may be cast in one shot. The sling is swung three
times around ones head and the smaller cord is released. Tylor cited in Primitive Culture (1871) a
fifteenth-century English poem commending the art of slinging among the exercises of a good soldier.
Actual practice had fallen out of use by late medieval times:
Use eek the cast of stone, with slynge or honde:
It falleth oft, yf other shot there none is,
Men harnysed in steel may not withstonde
The multitude and mighty cast of stonys;
And slynges are not noyous for to beare.
Trans:
[Always use the casting of stones, with the sling or the hand:
It befalls one often, if there isnt another kind of shot,
That men wearing steel armor may not withstand
The mighty casting of a multitude of stones;
And slings are not noxious for to bear]
(i.e., slings are not heavy to carry around like metal weaponry).

11

From the Irish folksong Ned of the Hill

Young Ned of the hill has no castle, no hall,
No bowmen, no spearmen to come at his call

What could be more like a well-hit golf shot than a perfectly-cast spear or cudgel or sling? Our
inquiry is more about hunting, however, than it is about warfare. The real attraction of golf may be
the same experience that Paul Kingsnorth reported: When we sling our scythe we follow the lay of
the ground with the curve of the blade and become aware of the keenness of its edge and can hear
the birds and see things moving in the grass ahead of us, and everything becomes connected with
everything else.
Jos Ortega y Gasset, considered by many to be the foremost philosopher of the twentieth century
and the man who gave birth to modern ecology, wrote something similar to Kingsnorth in his Meditations on Hunting: At its zenith the hunt causes the whole horizon to become charged with a strange
electricity; it begins to move, to stretch elastically. Suddenly the orgiastic element shoots forth, the
dionysiac, which flows and boils in the depths of all hunting. Dionysos is the hunting god: Skilled
cynegetic, Euripides called him in the Bacchantes. Yes, yes, answers the chorus, the god is a hunter!
There is a universal vibration. Things that before were inert and flaccid have suddenly grown nerves,
and they gesticulate, announce, fortell.
Civilization is all about progress and improvements. New inventions used to be rare. The first true
machine was the bow and arrow, and an extraordinary ten thousand years passed before the appearance of the second machine, the potters wheel. The bow and arrow never really replaced the spear,
which was the preferred weapon of Beowulfs warriors in the eighth century and remained essential
weaponry until the invention of firearms. Are these the primitive golfers arts, casting the Old Norse
klfr, which meant all these things, arrow, bolt, javelin, throwing club and cudgel? Was the kolf-shot
limited to the bow and arrow, or did it include all these weapons of the hunt? Any photograph of the
golf shots point of impact tells the storyand this is best seen in shots of golfers faces. There is no
doubt that this dynamism is attractive, and so too is simply being out in the open air together, being
in Nature; but does it really mean we are hunter-golfers?
Gathering in the grain and hay during the thousands of years of early farming, which harvest
happened just once each year, was an arduous job, but it was also a joyful task that guaranteed our
winter food supply. This gathering-in went on for several weeks, creating pre-cured golfs, curing
them in the fields and carrying them home. Were the rounded fat ricks on their wagons shot back at
the target golf bay in the barn, which floor was waiting between its posts to be filled like a hole on a
green by a golf ball? However the term evolved, the hay-house bays were not filled in a day. A deeper
question is whether bringing in load after load, week after week, this cheerfulness of going a-golfing,
was connected with the hunt when game was raised, when birds were flushed, when a reconnection
with Nature and wildlife and bringing in wild food took place?
To conclude, golf in various spellings referred to little balls of fiber and to harvests and to fodder or
food-floors or food-rooms in Scots, English, Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages.
A prehistoric connection is implied between a natural life of farming, tools and weapons and the
origins of golf. With so much circumstantial evidence why is there nothing about this in mandarin golf
histories? Why this apparent breach of historical consciousness? The customs that became modern
golf were never recorded by the urban clerks and clerics. Is it possible that golfs connection with
peasants was being denied?

12

We obviously dont know what really happened. We transited very quickly from a rural and oral
prehistory to a literate and selective history written by the urban conquerors. We were corporatized.
Englands corporatization of Celtic peasants is infamous. It became illegal for Welsh, Scottish or Irish
natives to speak their native languages or own land, the penalty for which was death. But English
family-farmers had been disenfranchized even earlier, as we know from a long list of infamous English
uprisings, each one in its way a protest against technologic corporatization and alienation from the
comfort and independence of family farming.
Luddites, early 1800s.
Machine-Breakers, late 1700s.
Levellers, 1720s.
Diggers, 1640s.
Ketts Rising, 1540s.
Ill Lammas Day, 1520s.
Briscoes Close Rising, 1480s.
Jack Cades Rebellion, 1450s.
There were even larger uprisings that preceded these. Across the British and Irish landscape the
old farmsteads and later villages eventually stood deserted, the countryside dispopulated. By 1789,
when Oliver Goldsmiths poem The Deserted Village was published, it protested too late the decay over
several centuries of Englands villages, which lay as empty ruins across the land. Goldsmith defended
the accuracy of his reporting, saying as to the facts of
the depopulation I have taken all possible pains, in my country excursions for these four or five
years past, to be certain
In regretting the depopulation of the country, I inveigh against the increase of our luxuries. For twenty
or thirty years past it has been the fashion to consider luxury as one of the greatest national advantages;
and all the wisdom of antiquity in that particular as erroneous. Still, however, I must remain a professed
ancient
What were these luxuries but the allure of the new towns and their shops? One of the most
poignant lamentations over the loss of a simpler country life was the Scottish poet Robert Henrysons
Tale of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, written in the late 1400sthree centuries before Goldsmith. Small children still hear a nursery version today but the original was written for adults. When
City Mouse went to visit her twin sister in the country and was fed a meal of nuts she was affronted
by the simple fare and said Sister, is this your daily food? and called the meal a mockery. Country
Mouse defended her ancient ways, saying that she kept the goods and custom of my mother, and also
my living in poverty, for lands we have none in property. They went together to the city and after
nearly losing her life visiting the sumptuous home of her city sister, Country Mouse says (authors
translation from Scots, Mackie, Scottish Verse, 1956): Farewell, sister, thy feast here I defy!:
Your [city] manor is all mingled with care,
Your goose is good, but your garlic-sauce is as sour as gall
I heard her say as she passed into her [country] den
As warm as wool, though supposedly not great,
Full and dry, stuffed both butt and ben
With beans and nuts, peas, rye and wheat;
Whenever she wants, she has enough to eat;
In quiet and ease, without any dread,
But to her sisters feast no more was led.
13


Moral:
Who has enough, of more he has no need,
Though what he has be little in quantity.
Great abundance and blind prosperity
Oftentimes makes for a bad conclusion;
The sweetest life, therefore, in this country,
Is security with few possessions.
This protest against the Renaissance and its newly-hatched market economy appeared concurrently
with modern golf in the written record.
In Scotland, our putative home of golf, a commercialization of agriculture took place after the clearings of the peasant populations from their family farms. Former farmers became farm workers, employees who were hired for six-month stints, at Martimas, the old autumn feast day, and six months
later at Whitsuntide (Whitsunday in Scotland is a fixed date, May 25th). Commercial landlords leased
their land in lots to farmers for agreed terms who in turn employed laborers for six month periods.
At the bigger commercial farms, the fairm-toons [farm-towns], as they were called, the landlord
employed a grieve as a general farm manager. Next in line was the ploughman, the most respected
and best paid of the workers. Then came the cattleman (the orra-man) a young jack of all trades. The
unmarried men, the bothy loons in Northeast Scotland, lived in the small farm bothy, a tiny rustic
building usually built in two connected parts, butt and ben, one a human side and one an animal byre.
It was with the animals that the bothy boys slept. (Bothy boys became famous among folklorists as
balladeers for their singing of traditional Scottish folksongs.) Every six months all employed laborers
were forced to flit in search of new employment and quarters. Moonlight flitting was the moving of
ones family at night to avoid paying debts. These were the economic predecessors of todays migrant
workers. Flitting Friday was the Whitsunday moving day and many poor Scots today living in small
flats still must move twice each year, or at least once.
Behind the usual sad history of urban alienation is there something more tragic, something unspoken like the Emperors New Clothes? Was our shift to modernity an under-documented, virtually unrecorded social trauma? Was it on the scale of a social holocaust? For those who lost their farmsteads,
had the older customs, like making hay and cheese, become unspeakable post-traumatic memories?
Only now, with hyper-urbanity suffocating the planet, are we wondering what happened and what
we may have lost. The received history may be worse than a lie it may be more like a gaping
wound: Instead of merely 300 documented peasant rebellions across the northern European landscape,
there may have been thousands of uprisings and skirmishes. Instead of merely 15000 of Goldsmiths
deserted villages, there may have been hundreds of thousands of community tragedies, every one
awful and unspeakable. This wasnt just a Generation Gap, it was an Ages Gap: an Age of Earth and
Wildlife had become an Age of Town and Luxury.
With the commercialization of agriculture former farmers had become farm workers. How different
their lives were from the primitive farm families who had lived as cohesive units, who had now lost
more than an earlier version of farming or, for that matter, an earlier version of a pastime like golf.
The question regarding golfs origins is altered at its core: Instead of Where did golf come from? it
becomes Why golf? We suddenly realize we know almost nothing about pre-literate times.
Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties
normal to farming? They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an

14

idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of
their lives without a boss.
Wendell Berry
i.e., without an archos, the very definition of anarchy. We lost our relatively egalitarian and
anarchist clans with their enduring relationships. Rather than a prehistoric golf course we lost a
prehistoric countryside with its independent food sources and convivialities. Rather than a primitive
form of golf we lost our natural world.
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals
the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may
approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
Gary Snyder
The Practice of the Wild, 1991
Ortega wrote that history is always made against the grain of Nature. We need rest from the
enormous discomfort and all-embracing disquiet of history by returning to Nature, an instinct that
is already evanescent in us, that is almost entirely erased. Without this natural instinct we fall
into those chasms of vital emptiness that are generally called wearisomeness, spleen, boredom. To
re-enter Nature, to find immersion in Nature, is achieved by the temporary rehabilitation of that
part of himself that is still an animal, in hunting. Golf may have been reduced by civilization to a
game played on strictly drafted courses with rigidly strict rules, but in its unique way it may harbor
and activate instincts we have almost forgotten.
After the early farmers hills were mowed low at the end of the harvest, (and after any hunting that
had accompanied the mowing), there was an annual opportunity to practice in the open fields with
a variety of long-distance throwing and hurling and casting and striking instruments. Perhaps it was
then that a target patch was marked out, a prototype of the modern golf green, and standing far away
from it we tried our golf-shot. We saw who could fire an arrow the farthest, who could hit a target
with a sling from the greatest distance, or strike a small object with a club of one kind or another to
see how far and accurately it would fly.
When Europe urbanized and we were dragged into towns did we refuse to give up this old conviviality by creating civilized golf courses upon which we could still play? Did we make golf rules and
did we then make even more golf rules? Perhaps all this rigidity is civilized golfs worst misdemeanor,
but it doesnt preclude that which makes walking the golf course attractive if golf is a throwback to
the prehistoric hunt. A golfing threesome or foursome arms itself with implements capable of enormous speed and power. Then they set out together as small bands in search of very small targets.
They hush altogether while one of them takes aim and strikes. They watch in mutual awe or dismay.
They experience together the rapture of a good shot finding its mark. They celebrate and feast at the
nineteenth hole. According to Ortega something ancient is at work here, something prehistoric and
still vestigial in us our most primitive human memory. From this perspective golf may have arisen
in four stages:
As hunters for untold millenia we practiced the art of long-shot projectiles with striking clubs
(kolben), slings and spears, bolts and arrows (kolfr) over enormous distances (kolf-shot).
As herders we practiced our art in the low-grazed dells and hills, we hunted birds and small game
in season to supplement our diet, striking (gowf) clews (golf, gufe) and other small balls enormous
distances with our shepherds crooks.
As farmers we waited each year to go a-golfing (a-golphing), mowing with our swinging scythes,
and afterwards practicing our long-shot art upon the wide-open meadow floor, while our corn and
15

hay was heaped into rounded mows (golph, golfe) to cure before being brought (goave) home to be
placed or stacked (gulve, gulving), a heap (goffe) sitting on the hay-house floor (golf).
As town- and city-dwellers, bereft of our ancestral fields, we staked out the little-used sandy hills
(links and dunes) along the shore and practiced our prehistoric long-shot art in spite of every civilized
sensibility orderly citizens, men and women alike, passing on to their children a practice of the
ancient ways.
Not every golfer will share this vision of the prehistoric, of the Practice of the Wild as the poet
Gary Snyder calls it. Only hunting, Ortega believed, allows us to be in the country. He wrote I mean
within a countryside which, moreover is authentically countryside. And only the hunting ground
is pure countrysideneither farmland, nor battleground, nor tourist country. Isnt this also what
Kingsnorth was describing? When one is hunting, writes Ortega, one is emigrating from our human
world to an authentic outside from which history represents the retreat or anabasis When one is
hunting the air has another, more exquisite feel as it glides over the skin or enters the lungs, the rocks
acquire a more expressive psysiognomy, and the vegetation becomes loaded with meaning.
This is because the hunter feels tied through the earth to the animal he pursues, whether the animal
is in view, hidden or absent. This mystical union with the animal allows the hunter to perceive the
environment as the prey does Are we as golfers seeking our unalienated animal selves of prehistory
and our species oldest dance?
Primary References
Craigie, William A., ed., A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, from the twelfth to the end of the
seventeenth centuries, 12 vols (London: OUP, 1937)
DeVries, Jan, Altnordisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, 2 vols (Leiden: 1962)
Grant, William and David D. Morrison, eds, The Scottish National Dictionary, 10 vols (Edinburgh:
The Scottish National Dictionary Association, 1952)
Hall, John R., A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Cambridge: CUP, 1916)
Hellquist, Elof, Svensk etymologist Ordbok, 2 vols (Lund: 1964)
Holthausen, Ferdinand, Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wrterbuch des Altwestnordischen (Gttingen: 1948)
Jamieson, John, ed., Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 5 vols (Edinburgh: UEP, 188087)
Kurath, Hans, ed., Middle English Dictionary, 13 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1959)
Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, eds, The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 3 vols
(Oxford: OUP, 1989)

16

The Anarchist Library

Anti-Copyright

Joseph Winogrond
On The Anarchist Origins of Golf
Fall/Winter 2014
Retrieved on December 10th, 2014 from
http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/392-fallwinter-2014/anarchist-golf/
Fifth Estate # 392, Fall/Winter 2014 Note: a version of this article published in Fifth Estate #392,
Fall/Winter, 2014, is available online at:
http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/392-fallwinter-2014/anarchist-golf/
theanarchistlibrary.org