With the breaking up of feudalism, the game of chess seems to have gone to a great extent out of practice, and made way for a comparatively new game,--that of cards, which now became very popular. When Caxton printed his “Boke of Chesse” in 1474, he sought only to publish a moral treatise, and not to furnish his countrymen with a book of instructions in the game. The cut of the chess-player given in this book, copied in our cut No. 148, shows some modifications in the forms of the chess-men. The knight, the rook, and the pawn, have preserved their old forms; but we are led to suppose, by the number of pieces with the bi-partite head, that the bishop had assumed a shape nearly resembling that of the rook. We have just seen Chaucer alluding to one of the legends relating to the origin of this game. Caxton, after Jean de Vignay and Jacques de Cessoles, gives us a strange story how it was invented under Evylmerodach, king of Babylon, by a philosopher, “whyche was named in Caldee Exerses, or in Greke Philemetor.”
[Illustration: _No. 148. Chess in the Fifteenth Century._]
[Illustration: _No. 149. An Italian Chess-board._]
Meanwhile, the game of chess had continued to flourish in Italy, where it appears to have experienced improvements, and where certainly the forms of the men were considerably modified. An Italian version of the work of Jacques de Cessoles was printed at Florence in 1493, under the title of _Libro de Giuocho delli Scacchi_, among the engravings to which, as in most of the editions of that work, there is a picture of a group of chess-players, who are here seated at a round table. The chess-board is represented in our cut, No. 149, and it will be seen at a glance that the chess-men present a far greater resemblance to those used at the present day than those given in the older illuminations. Within a few years of the date of this book, a Portuguese, named Damiano, who was perhaps residing in Italy, as his work seems to have appeared there first, drew up a book of directions for chess with a set of eighty-eight games, which display considerable ingenuity. An edition of this book was published at Rome as early as 1524, and perhaps this was not the first. The figures of the chess-men are given in this treatise; that of the king is vase-shaped, not unlike our modern chess-king, but with two crowns; the queen is similar in shape, but has one crown; the _delfino_ (bishop) differs from them in being smaller, and having no crown; the _cavallo_ (knight) has the form of a horse’s head; the _rocho_, as it is still called, is in the form of a tower, like our modern castle; and the _pedona_ (pawn) resembles a cone, with a knob at the apex. In England, the game of chess seems not to have been much in vogue during the sixteenth century; it is, I believe, only alluded to once in Shakespeare, in a well-known scene in the Tempest, which may have been taken from a foreign story, to which he owed his plot. The name of the game had been corrupted into _chests_ or _cheasts_. The game of chess was expressly discouraged by our “Solomon,” James I., as “overwise and philosophicke a folly.” An attempt to bring it into more notice appears to have been made early in the reign of Elizabeth, under the patronage of lord Robert Dudley, afterwards the celebrated earl of Leicester, who displayed on many occasions a taste for refinements of this sort. Instructions were again sought from Italy through France; for there was printed and published in London, in the year 1562, a little volume dedicated to lord Robert Dudley, under the title of “The Pleasaunt and wittie Playe of the Cheasts reniewed, with Instructions both to Learn it Easily and to Play it Well; lately translated out of Italian into French, and now set forth in Englishe by James Rowbotham.” Rowbotham gives us some remarks of his own on the character of the game, and on the different forms of the chess-men, which are not uninteresting. He says:--“As for the fashion of the pieces, that is according to the fantasie of the workman, which maketh them after this manner. Some make them lyke men, whereof the kynge is the highest, and the queene (whiche some name amasone or ladye) is the next, bothe two crowned. The bishoppes some name alphins, some fooles, and some name them princes, lyke as also they are next unto the kinge and the queene, other some cal them archers, and thei are fashioned accordinge to the wyll of the workeman. The knights some call horsemen, and thei are men on horse backe. The rookes some cal elephantes, cariyng towres upon their backes, and men within the towres. The paunes some cal fote men, as they are souldiours on fote, cariyng some of them pykes, other some harquebushes, other some halbards, and other some the javelyn and target.