The records of incidents, and the anecdotes appertaining to chess
or chess players in the middle ages, are so scattered, scant, and
meagre, that no writer has attempted to put them into shape, or
make a consecutive or connected narrative of them. Even
Professor Duncan Forbes the most elaborate of all the European
writers on the history of chess, dismisses the period from 750 to
1500 A.D., in a very few words not vouchsafing to it in his volume
of 400 pages a chapter of a single page, though his book able as it
is, contains much description of games of the past in different
countries, the interest in which seems not considerable in present
days. The Hon. Daines Barrington writing in 1787, says, (and
others have followed him to a like effect), "Our ancestors
certainly played much at chess before the general introduction of
cards, as no fewer than twenty-six English families have
emblazened chess boards and chess rooks on their arms, and it
therefore must have been considered as a valuable
accomplishment."
The opinions so commonly entertained and expressed, however,
so far at least as they can be taken to apply to the period before
Queen Elizabeth's reign, rest upon but slender data, and it is
highly probable that even in that monarch's reign the practice of
chess was confined to a very limited circle for we read of no fine
player, great games, or matches, or public competitions of any
kind, in our climes until Philidor's time; his career in England
though intermittant extended close upon fifty years and from his
time may be dated the budding forth of the popularity of chess,
which began to come to full bloom about 1828, (33 years after his
death) and produced its fruits in the France and England
championship contests of 1834 and 1843, and the inception of
International Tournaments in 1851 which first established
Germany's great reputation and furnished a chess champion of the
world from among them.
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