Hopscotch--ancient Roman maneuver, drunken carousing, or just a game?

Watching my five-year old play hopscotch the other day got me wondering--where did this simple game come from anyway?

I mean, if you think about it, doesn't HOP SCOTCH sound like it's connected to beer and liquor? Maybe the game came from kids watching adults stumbling out of taverns, under the influence, trying to hop on one foot while picking up stuff they'd dropped,  without toppling over. Maybe kids mimicked the grown ups and over time--voila!-- the game of hopscotch emerged.  (Okay, I'm writing this entry on a Friday night after a LONG week, so I could be reaching.)

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so these guys played hopscotch?

Indeed, a quick internet search informed me that no, hopscotch has nothing to do with alcohol (darn it! I thought I was onto something there). 

Instead, a jillion sites claim that the game actually derived from an ancient Roman military training exercise.  Roman soldiers, wearing full body armor, would hop through a hundred-yard field in a precise way, to help improve their footwork in battle. (Cool, hey? Shall I stop here?)

Wel-l-l-l, I'm always a bit skeptical of what I read on the internet. Especially since many of these sites seemed to be just parroting the same tidbit over and over without any evidence. And there didn't seem to be any evidence of the term before the seventeenth century.

And then I found this fascinating bit of detective work carried out by the "Rogue Classicist." Here, he essentially traced the origins of the hopscotch myth--and yes, it is a myth--to a misunderstanding. Apparently, in 1870 a scholar sharing his findings in an archeology journal made an offhand comment to the effect that some ancient tiles and disks might be 'admirably suited to our modern game of hopscotch.' But someone else misunderstood, and made an erroneous leap--reading a link from ancient times to modern game that was not there. This misunderstanding was picked up, and repeated so many times that eventually it became "fact".

Oh, and what's the truth of it all? 

Hopscotch, originally called "scotch-hop",  was a game which probably emerged in seventeenth-century England (although similar games can be found around the world.) 

First mentioned in the Book of Games in the 1670s, Francis Willughby describes the game of "hopscotchers" in which children play with a little piece of lead on a floor with lines etched--or "scotched"--onto its surface.

So, a game.  However, if you prefer, we can rewrite the history of hopscotch once again. Just cut and paste my imagined origins of the game--you know, where kids were laughing at drunk grown-ups--and pass it off as fact. What do you think?

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