History of Golf - Part Two: The Early Years - 07/03/2002

The hole – it was the final bit that was missing in the stick-and-ball exercise. And the Scots were most likely the first to use a hole in the ground with the stick and ball. Most likely the hole was originally made by a rabbit, many thousands of which roamed the velvety linksland on the Scottish coasts.
 
Men on the east coast, in the Kingdom of Fife – home to St. Andrews – would hit a pebble around a course laid out by Mother Nature. Golf was far more popular on the east coast than the west coast. The difference was that the west coast was much damper, due to the persistent rains which sweep across that terrain. And the golf balls were highly susceptible to dampness, since they were stuffed with feathers.
 
Rabbit runs proved to be ideal fairways – an old sailing term which meant the easiest direction to navigate. The rabbits linked their burrows in the dunes by means of these runs, and foxes and hunters expanded the runs. Sheep and other animals were known to hunker down in the raw winds, wearing away the grasses and preparing the bunker areas. It became a wonderful place to play, with fairways and bunkers and, of course, a hole that was in place already, thanks to the proliferation of rabbits.
 
The sandy playing areas also were good for something else – tees which were used to begin play and to continue play after each hole. Early golfers scooped sand to make a tiny platform for their initial shots.
 
For all these reasons, Scotland is widely considered to be birthplace of golf. And it began haphazardly, a way of hitting a pebble or other roundish object into a hole by means of a stick or club.
 
It is known that golf was played at St. Andrews before the founding of the university there in 1403, and there is sufficient evidence that it was being played in one form or another in Scotland as much as a century before that, about 1300.

By 1457, the game of ‘gowf’ or ‘golfe’ (as it was known in the British Isles) was so firmly established in Scotland, and its playing so widespread, that King James II had an Act of Scottish Parliament to ban it on Sundays so as to preserve the skills of archery. He declared that “fute-ball (soccer) and Golfe be utterly cryit doune, and nocht useit!” ‘Fute-ball’ had been banned by his father, King James I, in 1424.
 
The English were a constant threat and the Scots were inferior to the English in matters of the bow and arrow. Residents of Aberdeen, St. Andrews and Leith on the east coast were the main culprits – they played and played. That was the first documented reference to today’s game – the edicts of Parliament in 1457. In many parts of Scotland’s east coast, parishioners were constantly being punished for playing golf “at the time of the preaching of the Sermon.”
 
Two more attempts were made to restrict the playing of ‘gowf,’ James III banning it again in 1470 and 1493 – although the people largely ignored it. And the Scots finally had to pay the consequences. At the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513, the Scots were assaulted by English bowmen and were no match for them. England routed the Scots, who had spent so much time playing golf.