The Roman edict mentioned by Mr. W. B. Donne, in his biographical sketch of Ahenholarbus, 842, has evidently escaped the observation of all writers on the game.  Chess and Draughts are specially exempted in it from the list of prohibited games of chance under date B.C. 115.  The Hon. Daines Barrington 1787, Sir F. Madden 1832, Herbert Coleridge, Esq., 1854, and Professor Duncan Forbes 1860 are prominent among those who confidently assert that the Romans as well as the ancient Greeks were quite unacquainted with the game of chess, at least, says Coleridge, without giving any reason for his qualification, before the time of Hadrian.  These writers having apparently satisfied themselves that the Romans as well as the Greeks played a game with pebbles, assume therefore that they knew not chess, but might have known a game something like Draughts.  Here in the edict, however, Chess and Draughts are both mentioned inferring a recognized distinction between the two.  It seems reasonable to assume that the writers would have paused and have searched a little deeper into the nature of the sedentary games which the Romans knew and permitted if they had seen this explicit statement.  It has never been suggested by any writer that the Romans ever left an inkling or taste for intellectual pastimes in Britain.  The name of Agricola or that of any other Roman is not associated with any tradition or story of the game, even Aristotle and Alexander the Great and Indian Porus (names we find in Eastern accounts) are names not so familiar in speculatory traditions as to chess, though less remote, than that of Thoth the Egyptian Mercury who Plato says invented chess “Hermes” (Asiatic M.S.) or the more frequently mentioned Moses, and the Kings of Babylon with their philosophers.  The favoured notion that chess (first) came into Europe through the Arabs in Spain about 710 to 715 A.D. may yet prove ill matured and require modification, and for English first knowledge of the game, we may on inferential and presumptive evidence prefer the contemporary period of Offa, Egbert and Alcuin when Charlemagne, the Greek Emperors and the Khalifs of the East so much practised and patronized the game, rather than the conquest or Crusaders theory of origin among us, which is also beside inconsistent with incidents related in the earlier reigns of Athelstan, Edgar and Canute, and moreover is not based upon any direct testimony whatever.

In proof of the ancient use of chess among the Scandinavians.  In the Sages of Ragnar Lodbrog printed in Bioiners collection, and in an ancient account of the Danish invasion of Northumberland in the Ninth century entitled Nordymbra, it is stated that after the death of Ragnar, messengers were sent to his sons in Denmark by King Alla to communicate the intelligence and to mark their behaviour when they received it.  They were thus occupied, Sigurd Snakeseye played at chess with Huitzeck the bold; but Biorn Ironside was polishing the shaft