History
The game claims lineage as far back as the late Zhou Dynasty (circa 500 B.C.) and the Han Dynasty of ancient China.
The game has been known to be played since during the Tudor period, as there are references to its recreation by Henry VIII's courtiers. It was also a popular parlor game in the Victorian era. The poet Robert Herrick mentions it, along with sundry related pastimes, in his poem "A New Yeares Gift Sent to Sir Simeon Steward":
That tells of Winters Tales and Mirth,
That Milk-Maids make about the hearth,
Of Christmas sports, the Wassell-boule,
That tost up, after Fox-i' th' hole:
Of Blind-man-buffe, and of the care
That young men have to shooe the Mare
Read more about this topic: Blind Man's Buff
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)