At an early period the German tribes, as known to the Romans, were notoriously addicted to gambling. We are informed by Tacitus that a German in his time would risk not only his property, but his own personal liberty, on a throw of the dice; and if he lost, he submitted patiently, as a point of honour, to be bound by his opponent, and carried to the market to be sold into slavery. The Anglo-Saxons appear to have shared largely in this passion, and their habits of gambling are alluded to in different writers. A well-known writer of the first half of the twelfth century, Ordericus Vitalis, tells us that in his time even the prelates of the church were in the habit of playing at dice. A still more celebrated writer, John of Salisbury, who lived a little later in the same century, speaks of dice-playing as being then extremely prevalent, and enumerates no less than ten different games, which he names in Latin, as follows:--_tessera_, _calculus_, _tabula_ (tables), _urio vel Dardana pugna_ (Troy fight), _tricolus_, _senio_ (sice), _monarchus_, _orbiculi_, _taliorchus_, and _vulpes_ (the game of fox).--“De Nugis Curialium,” lib. i. c. 5. The sort of estimation in which the game was then held is curiously illustrated by an anecdote in the Carlovingian romance of “Parise la Duchesse,” where the king of the Hungarians wishes to contrive some means of telling the real character (aristocratic or plebeian) of his foundling, young Hugues, not then known to be the son of the duchess Parise. A party of robbers (which appears not to have been a specially disreputable avocation among the Hungarians of the romance) are employed, first to seduce the youth to “the chess and the dice,” and afterwards to lead him against his will to a thieving expedition, the object of which was to rob the treasury of the king, his godfather. They made a great hole in the wall, and thrust Hugues through it. The youth beheld the heaps of gold and silver with astonishment, but, resolved to touch none of the wealth he saw around him, his eyes fell upon a coffer on which lay three dice, “made and pointed in fine ivory”--
_Garde for i. escrin, si a veu iij. dez,_ _Qui sont de fin yvoire et fait et pointuré._ --Parise la Duchesse, p. 94.