Gambling
Introduction
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Gambling was not a marginal pastime in early modern England; it was a social and economic institution that cut across class, gender, and geography.[1] From the gaming tables of the Inns of Court to village alehouses, wagering was a ubiquitous feature of daily life. Between 1500 and 1700, England’s gambling culture evolved alongside the expansion of credit, print, and consumer exchange, making it an illuminating site for understanding the moral and material foundations of capitalism.[2]
The World of Play and Risk
To gamble in Tudor and Stuart England was to participate in a world increasingly preoccupied with chance, calculation, and fortune. The language of “hazard”—derived from a popular dice game—became a metaphor for both divine providence and human enterprise.[3] Gambling permeated every level of society. Commoners played cards, dice, and shove-groat in taverns and fairs, while elites bet heavily on horse races, cockfights, and lotteries. In London, gambling dens proliferated near the theaters and bear-baiting arenas of Southwark, places where money and spectacle mingled freely.
Card games such as primero (a forerunner of poker) and maw were fashionable in the Tudor court, often associated with foreign sophistication and moral peril.[4] Dice games like hazard and passage were condemned for their association with idleness and vice, yet they remained stubbornly popular. By the seventeenth century, new games like ombre and basset reflected continental tastes imported by courtiers and exiles returning from Europe after the Civil Wars.
Regulation and Moral Anxiety
The Tudor and Stuart governments repeatedly attempted to regulate gaming, not out of puritanical zeal alone but because gambling blurred the line between legitimate commerce and disorderly speculation. The Statute of Unlawful Games (1541) under Henry VIII prohibited most forms of gaming among the lower orders, fearing that soldiers and apprentices neglected their trades in favor of dice and cards.[5] The law exempted noble households, however, exposing the double standard that defined early modern moral legislation: gambling was to be condemned when it undermined labor, but tolerated—even celebrated—when it displayed wealth and leisure.
Sermons and moral tracts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries railed against gambling as a gateway to damnation and ruin.[6] Preachers like William Perkins and Thomas Adams described it as a sin against providence, an attempt to wrest control of fortune from God’s hands. Pamphlets circulated with lurid stories of gamblers who, in despair, hanged themselves or squandered entire estates. Yet the persistence of such literature attests to gambling’s deep entrenchment in social life—moralists fought a losing battle against a practice that mirrored England’s emerging credit economy, where risk, speculation, and trust were becoming daily realities.
Capitalism, Credit, and Chance
Gambling served as both a metaphor and a mechanism for England’s transition toward capitalist modes of thought. The act of staking money on an uncertain future paralleled mercantile investment, colonial ventures, and stock speculation. The state itself entered the gaming business with the introduction of national lotteries. Elizabeth I’s Great Lottery of 1569 raised funds for public works, signaling a crucial moment when gambling was nationalized—transformed from sin into civic enterprise.[7] By the Restoration, lotteries were common fund-raising tools for theaters, bridge projects, and colonial schemes.
The culture of gaming also trained subjects in probabilistic thinking before the formalization of probability theory.[8] When a player weighed the odds of drawing a winning card or rolling a seven, he was—however crudely—practicing the mental habits that underpinned modern financial speculation. In this sense, gambling was an early education in risk, a rehearsal for capitalism’s logic of uncertain gain.
Social Performance and Gender
Gambling was also a performance of identity. Among the elite, high-stakes play became a form of conspicuous consumption. At court, card tables were arenas of wit and display, where women like Lady Castlemaine or the Duchess of Portsmouth could gain or lose fortunes—and political influence—in an evening. The Restoration court of Charles II, famous for its libertine atmosphere, turned gaming into both entertainment and diplomacy. Samuel Pepys’s Diary records repeated bouts of play, often with sums large enough to suggest both leisure and anxiety.[9]
For women, gambling could offer rare social mobility. It permitted entry into spaces of mixed company and even agency in financial matters otherwise barred to them. Yet moralists portrayed female gamblers as particularly dangerous, their passion for cards conflated with lust and vanity. The image of the “gaming lady” haunted sermons and satires alike, symbolizing a world turned upside down by fortune’s caprice.
Spaces of Play
Gaming houses became key urban institutions. The Inns of Court, a training ground for lawyers and courtiers, were notorious for dice and card play; so were London’s coffeehouses, where speculation about trade, politics, and wagers overlapped.[10] Taverns, meanwhile, hosted humble forms of betting—from cockfighting to ninepins—that blurred social boundaries. In rural England, parish wakes and fairs featured gambling on everything from cudgel matches to cheese-rolling. Across all these venues, gambling mediated the flow of cash, credit, and sociability.
Theological and Philosophical Dimensions
The period’s fascination with fortune and providence gave gambling a profound philosophical resonance. Writers from Thomas Browne to Robert Burton mused on chance as a principle of both nature and grace. The gambler’s toss of the dice echoed broader anxieties about divine justice and human agency. As Calvinist doctrines of predestination took hold, gambling became a symbolic rebellion—a way to test, even mock, the inscrutability of Providence. At the same time, defenders of play argued that gaming merely dramatized life’s inherent uncertainties: “All the world is but hazard,” wrote one Restoration wit, “and we but gamesters in it.”
Conclusion
Between 1500 and 1700, gambling in England was both mirror and engine of economic transformation. It linked the alehouse to the Exchange, the tavern wager to the colonial venture, the player’s risk to the merchant’s investment. Moralists saw it as disorder; modern historians may see it as training for a capitalist order grounded in credit, probability, and performance. Whether in a parish alehouse or Whitehall’s drawing rooms, the gambler of early modern England was not merely chasing luck—he was rehearsing the future.
- ↑ John Ashton, The History of Gambling in England (London: Duckworth & Co., 1898).
- ↑ Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014).
- ↑ Nicholas B. Tosney, Gaming in England, c.1540–1760 (PhD diss., University of York, 2008).
- ↑ The Compleat Gamester, anonymous (attrib. Charles Cotton), 1st ed. (London, 1674).
- ↑ Unlawful Games Act (33 Hen. 8 c. 9 [1541]).
- ↑ David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
- ↑ Alan Haynes, “The First English National Lottery,” History Today 29:9 (1979).
- ↑ Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
- ↑ Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970–83).
- ↑ Nicholas B. Tosney, “The Playing-Card Trade in Early Modern England,” Historical Research 84, no. 226 (May 2011): 637–56.
