13/09/2016
The Badminton Story... :)
Badminton evolved from the ancient game of battledore and
shuttlecock, a game played by adults and children for at least
2000 years - in Ancient Greece, China, Japan, India and Siam.
Peasants played it in medieval England and by the late 16th
century, it had become a popular children's game. By the 17th
century, battledore or jeu de volant, had become a pastime of the
leisured classes in many European countries. The game simply
involved two players using simple bats to hit a shuttlecock back
and forth as many times as they could without letting it hit the
ground.
How the shuttlecock itself evolved is something of a mystery.
One possibility is that individual feathers were stored - perhaps
for writing or some other purpose - by sticking them in cork or
some similar material. It then only requires someone to throw,
or even drop, this ready-made collection of feathers to discover
the remarkable flight of the shuttlecock.How precisely the game of battledore and shuttlecock evolved into
the game of badminton is also uncertain. It is known however,
that badminton takes its name from Badminton House, the Duke of
Beaufort's residence in Gloucestershire (now Avon) where a new
version of battledore had emerged by the end of the 1850's.
(Isaac Spratt, a London toy dealer published a booklet,
"Badminton Battledore - a new game," in 1860, but unfortunately
no copy has survived.) It is also known that a quite advanced
form of the game was being played by the British in India in the
1860's and 1870's, and the first rules were compiled there.
The first rules were framed at Poona in 1873, but the game in
India developed chiefly as a a social pastime rather than a
competitive indoor game. In England too it was chiefly a
sociable garden recreation for its first two decades. This crude
but entertaining form of badminton, sometimes known as "hit and
scream", was the dominant form in the 1870's and 1880's.
An early version of the rules was published in 1883 in a slim
volume entitled, "Lawn Tennis, Croquet, Racquets, etc." One of
the etceteras consists of ten pages devoted to badminton which
the author described as "Lawn tennis played with shuttlecocks
instead of balls.
More serious badminton developed very gradually as many of the
Indian veterans returned to England and an officer's club was
formed at Folkestone as early as 1875. J.H.E. Hart was one of
the pioneers in India and when he came back to England he played
an important role in framing the rules. He revised the rules in
1887 and then again in 1890 with the assistance of Mr Bagnel
Wild. from england the game moves to america. from there the game spreaded all over the world now badminton has beacame one of the famous sport in all over the world.
