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This linkspage features images of ice skating in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and information about medieval ice skates. Additional information about medieval skates made of bone can be found in these links; I think that the re-creation projects by Hurstwic, Küchelmann & Zidarov, and Calvin College's Wassail club are especially interesting. Several of these images include players of an ancestor of the modern game of hockey (kolf); more images of these sorts of bent-stick ball games can be found in the ball games linkspage. Additional extant examples are described in the Bone Skates Database. See also Ice skates and their history at The Virtual Ice Skates Museum (Het virtuele Schaatsenmuseum). Information about ice skating in the 18th century is available elsewhere on this site.
In winter almost all their holidays before dinner are spent in seeing another kind of sport ... When the great marsh which washes the northern walls of the city is frozen over, numerous bands of young men go out to play on the ice. There they arrange their feet at a set distance, and gaining additional rapidity as they move, they traverse an enormous space with one side advanced before the other. Others make seats of a large mass of ice, and whilst one sits, the others holding by their hands pull him along, with such rapidity of motion on so slippery a surface, that they often trip their feet, and all fall together. Others of them are more knowing in their play, for they fit the leg-bones of animals to their feet, binding them firmly round their ankles, and hold in their hands poles shod with iron, which they strike against the ice, and thus impel themselves on it with the swiftness of a bird or a ball from an engine. Sometimes it is agreed that two of them shall advance one against the other in this way from a great distance; they rush together, each lifts his staff to strike the other, and the contest ends by one or both falling, and receiving some severe bodily injury; for after they are down, the velocity still acting carries them past one another, and wherever the ice comes in contact with their head, they become wholly excoriated. Sometimes a leg or an arm, if they fall with it under them, is broken; but theirs is an age that covets glory; youth is fond of victory, and practises itself in sham battles that it may succeed better in real ones.
From William Fitz-Stephen's 1173 description |
