Researching Post & Pair

Researching "Post and Pair"

I first came across a description of Post and Pair thirty-five years ago in a modern facsimile copy of  "The Compleat Gamester" written by Charles Cotton and published in 1674. I was researching other period card games notably Ombre and Primero at the time, and paid little attention to Cotton's brief account of Post and Pair.

Several years later when I was writing up my notes on games I decided to include a reconstruction of Post and Pair partly for the sake of completeness, and partly because the odd name and the fact that the game had West country associations  had captured my attention. I naively assumed  from a cursory reading of Cotton's text that it would be a trivial task.  After all it was just a three card vying game, how difficult could it be ? I soon found out.

When I tried to extract a playable set of rules from Cotton's description I quickly found myself floundering. What exactly was a 'Post", what was a "Seat", how were the stakes divided ? As usual I looked for other sources and discovered there were none. Cotton's account of Post and Pair is the only original period  description. Later accounts by  Randle Holme "Academy of Armory"(1688) and  Richard Seymour "The Court Gamester"(1734) are pirated verbatim from Cotton, and Hoyle does not even mention Post and Pair. Try as I might, I could not locate any period dialogues, play scripts or poems involving the play of a hand at Post and Pair, though I did begin to accumulate an impressive array of literay allusions to the game (it was a very long while before I stumbled across the 17th century poem "Post & Pare compared to Mortall Life" by John Davies of Hereford).

When I compared my notes with the writings of other published  card game specialists, I discovered that I was not alone. No-one could make sense of the over-brief description of Post and Pair in "The Compleat Gamester". Quite a few writers I found had misled themselves by assuming that Post & Pair was related to the 18th century game of Brag, or by supposing it was almost the same as Brag's most immediate predecessor  Bone-Ace, even though Cotton provides quite separate descriptions of these two games. Most of these modern writers  attempted to rationalise their reconstructions by assuming that Cotton's account was corrupt or "muddled". This I felt was unsatisfactory. You can "prove" anything by tampering with texts. You have to respect your sources and assume that they were being truthful and that the original author meant exactly what they seem to be saying, however inconvenient it might be to a modern historian trying to draw up neat genealogies of card games.

Cracking the rules of Post and Pair turned into a passing hobby of several decades duration. I studied Cotton's 300 word description of the game like a Talmudic proof-reader. It became an exercise  in cryptography and inference which led at times in unexpected directions. Slowly I began to uncover relevant information about how the game was played.

Some of the first real clues came from French sources. Randle Cotgrave's French-English dictionary of 1611 for instance confirmed that a "Post" meant a flush. At which point the origin of the familiar proverb "Pipped at the Post" thundered into my head. The "Post" was the highest pointed flush holding of a suit with the Ace counting 1.

I was reading  Girolamo Cardano's 16th century "Liber de Ludo Aleae" in the original Latin, and was struck by his account of  a game  called Gallicus Fluxus. I realised that the English translator Gould had been foxed by Cardano's Latin, and had failed to realise that the Latin phrase "habeo ego"  did not mean "in my opinion", but was  in fact a reference to another 3 card game called "Je l'ai" or Gé in French, also known as Gillet. I discovered that John Florio had specifically associated Post and Pair with Gillet (Gile) in his English Italian Dictionary(1611). Some years earlier I had obtained photocopies of large parts of the 18th century  French compendium "Academie Universelle des jeux" which contains an account of Gillet.  I now re-read all of these sources in tandem.

It became clear that the English game of Post and Pair carries a Spanish name,  for "Post" comes from the Spanish  "Apostar " meaning to wager a sum of money. The game is however part of a closely related family of games all derived from the more ancient European game of il Flusso or Flush, and played under a variety  of names in different countries. The English called their version "Post and Pair". The French called it Gé or Gillet, the Germans called it Dreisatz, and the Italians called it Trionfetti or Gile a la Greca in Venice.

For a long time I boggled at the idea of a 3 card vying game which involved a trump suit,  in which a final show-down was optional, and the largest stakes were settled solely on the highest single card. All of these however were directly implied within Cotton's account of Post and Pair, and amplified by my own research. Eventually an internet link led me to search for an obscure poem called "Mortall Life compared to Post and Pare", an allegory which is contained within "The Wittes Pilgrimage"  by the cleric and minor poet John Davies of Hereford written in 1610. Finding this text was far from easy. It has been out of print in England since the 19th century. I eventually located a copy in a searchable online  database in Stanford university library USA, which would only liberate one line of text at a time. I had to keep doing overlapping chained-phrase searches to recover the 18 verses I required. Once I had the poem, careful reading of this time-capsule appears to confirm my reading of Cotton's rules for Post and Pair.

Post and Pair continues to fascinate me. It was the favourite game of  Shakespeare's great contemporary Ben Jonson, it was also a favourite game of George Washington, the first President of the USA. Numerous 17th century authors such as Sir John Harrington, Francis Willughby  and John Earle  refer to it. According to some folklorists such as the rural writer Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), the game survived here in the West Country up until the 1860s. It still does seem incredible that no-one other than Cotton ever wrote down the rules of the game, or that reconstructing them would prove so difficult.