Despite its title, Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it. First printed in 1474, then reprinted in 1483 with woodcuts added, it is instead a translation of Jacobus de Cessolis’ thirteenth-century political treatise, the Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scachorum (The Book of the Morals of Men and the Duties of Nobles and Commoners, on the Game of Chess).1 Neither the Liber nor Caxton’s translation contains any diagrams of boards set up for play, nor does the text itself suggest any advice for a player’s improvement. Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good. Readers first meet the king, queen, bishops (imagined as judges), knights, and rooks, here depicted as the king’s emissaries. They are then introduced in succession to the eight different pawns, who represent trades that range from farmers to messengers, and include innkeepers, money-changers, doctors, notaries, blacksmiths, and several other professional artisans and tradesmen. Paired with each profession is a list of moral codes. The pawn who represents the money-changer, for example, handles gold, silver, and valuable possessions, and thus “ought to flee avarice and covetyse, and eschewe brekyng of the dayes of payment” (3.600–601). The knights, entrusted with the safety of the realm, must be “wyse, lyberalle, trewe, strong, and ful of mercy and pyté” (2.448–49). The queen, charged with giving birth to the community’s future ruler, should take care to be “chaste, wyse, of honest lyf, wel manerd” (2.136). And so on. These pairings reinforce the idea of a kingdom organised around professional ties and associations, ties that are in turn regulated by moral law, rather than around kinship. Read more here.
