The History of Nine Men's Morris

Period

Roman era to Middle Ages

Origin

Roman Empire / Medieval Europe

Players

2

Play time

10-20 min

Difficulty

Easy-Medium

A game cut into stone

Few games have left a more literal mark on history than Nine Men’s Morris. Across the lands of the former Roman Empire, its distinctive board (three nested squares joined by crossing lines) survives not on paper but scratched into stone: into paving slabs, the steps of public buildings, and blocks of masonry reused in later walls. The game’s many names tell of its long reach across Europe: mill, merels, merrills, marelles, and ninepenny marl. The word morris is thought to derive from the Latin merellus, meaning a counter or gaming piece, rather than from the morris dance, with which it shares only a sound.

The game was popular among Roman soldiers, who could lay out a board wherever they could find a flat surface and a sharp tool. That portability, a board you carved rather than carried, helps explain why it spread so widely and lasted so long. Some of the oldest surviving diagrams resembling the board have been claimed from sites far older than Rome, though the game’s documented life belongs to the Roman era through the Middle Ages.

Cloisters, cathedrals, and the medieval heyday

In the medieval centuries the game reached its peak of popularity in Italy, France, and England. It was a pastime of every rank, and the evidence is again carved into the architecture: boards cut into the cloister seats and stone benches of cathedrals and monasteries, where clerics and stonemasons alike passed the hours. Many boards turn up unexpectedly on building stones unearthed during excavation, scratched in before the block was set into a wall. The workers raising these great structures played as they built.

The game could be played outdoors on a grand scale, too. Village greens sometimes bore a giant merels board cut into the turf, where players walked their pieces from point to point. This is the version that William Shakespeare recorded in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene I), when Titania laments the disorder of the seasons: “the nine men’s morris is filled up with mud.” A neglected, rain-soaked board served as an image of a world out of joint.

A family of games

Nine Men’s Morris is the best known of a whole family of merels games, distinguished by how many pieces each player commands and how elaborate the board is. The simplest is three men’s morris, played on a single square with diagonals, closer in spirit to tic-tac-toe. Six men’s morris uses a board of two nested squares and no central cross-lines. The largest common variant, twelve men’s morris, adds diagonal lines to the standard board, multiplying the possible mills and often ending in a crowded draw.

By around 1600 the game had largely fallen out of fashion in England, eclipsed by newer pastimes. Yet its boards remained, silent in stone, long after the players were gone, making Nine Men’s Morris one of the most archaeologically visible games of the medieval world.