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''Jeu de mail'' or ''jeu de maille'' (Middle French: 'mallet game', or sometimes interpreted as 'straw game') is a now-obsolete lawn game originating in the 15th century and mostly played in France, surviving in some locales into the 20th century. It is a form of ground billiards, using one or more balls, a stick with a mallet-like head, and usually featuring one or more targets such as hoops or holes. ''Jeu de mail'' was ancestral to the games pall-mall and croquet. ==History== The first written record of ''jeu de mail'' is a Renaissance Latin text dating to 1416. The ''mail'' in the name probably means 'maul, mallet', from Latin ''malleus''. An alternative meaning of "straw" has been suggested (Modern French ''maille''), on the basis that the target hoops used in some versions of the game were sometimes made of bound straw.〔 Quite popular in various forms in France and Italy in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the game developed into paille-maille in the early modern period, which spread to Scotland then England, and eventually led to croquet.〔 According to Brantôme, King Henry II of France (ruled 1547–1559) was an excellent player of ''jeu de mail'' and ''jeu de paume'' (a form of that eventually developed into tennis and other raquet sports). Louis XIV (ruled 1661–1715), who hated ''jeu de paume'', was on the other hand enthusiastic about ''jeu de mail'', and the playing court in the gardens of Tuileries Palace was enlarged during his reign. The game was still played in France, in the areas of Montpellier and Aix-en-Provence, into the early 20th century, before the First World War.〔 A college in Montpellier still bears the name of this game (College Jeu de Mail). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「jeu de mail」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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