Croquet ball

Croquet is a sport that involves hitting plastic or wooden balls with a mallet through (often called "wickets" in the United States) embedded in a grass playing court.

The oldest document to bear the word croquet with a description of the modern game is the set of rules registered by Isaac Spratt in November 1856 with the Stationers' Company in London. This record is now in the Public Record Office. In 1868, the first croquet all-comers meet was held at Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire and in the same year the All England Croquet Club was formed at Wimbledon, London.

Regardless when and by what route it reached England and the British colonies in its recognizable form, croquet is, like golf, pall-mall, trucco, and kolven, among the later forms of ground billiards, which as a class have been popular in Western Europe back to at least the Late Middle Ages, with roots in classical antiquity, including sometimes the use of arches and pegs along with balls and mallets or other striking sticks (some more akin to modern field hockey sticks). By the 12th century, a team ball game called la soule or choule, akin to a chaotic version of hockey or football (depending on whether sticks were used), was regularly played in France and southern Britain between villages or parishes; it was attested in Cornwall as early as 1283.

In the book Queen of Games: The History of Croquet, Nicky Smith presents two theories of the origin of the modern game of croquet, which took England by storm in the 1860s and then spread overseas.

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