Excerpt from Handball and How to Play ItIt is altogether uncertain at what period handball was intro duced into England, but like the Greeks the early inhabitants of Albion copied it from the Celts. In the museum of Trinity Col lege, Oxford, there is a fourteenth century manuscript containing a life of St. Cuthbert. It says of him that when he was young 'he pleyde atte handeballe with the children that his fellows were. On what authority this information is established it is hard to understand, but the venerable Bede, who also wrote the life of that saint, mentions him to be an expert handball player and that he excelled in running, jumping and such exercises as required great muscular power. Fitzstephen, who wrote in the thirteenth century, speaking of the London schoolboys, says: Annually upon Shrove Tuesday they go into the field, im mediately after dinner, and play the celebrated game of handball, every party of boys carrying their own ball. During the Easter holidays it was the custom in those days to play for tansy cakes, but Bourne fails to understand why they should play handball at this season above any other time.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.