Origins: from the lawn to the royal table.

A game played on grass

Billiards is generally thought to descend from outdoor stick-and-ball games, now called "ground billiards," related to jeu de mail, palle-malle, croquet and golf. The Billiard Congress of America says the game grew out of a croquet-like lawn game in northern Europe, probably France, in the fifteenth century; other sources put a recognizable outdoor form in the 1340s. A French woodcut from about 1480 shows outdoor players using a mace-like stick, a hoop and an upright post called a king.

Older books make grander claims, such as an Irish king leaving brass balls and cues in the second century or a traveler seeing the game in ancient Greece. Historian Norman Clare reports these as claims, not facts, and so do we.

The name

"Billiard" may come from the French billart or billette, a stick, or from bille, a ball; the derivation is uncertain. "Cue" comes from the French queue, tail, after the practice of shooting with the tail end of the mace. The story that the word comes from "Bill's yard" is folklore.

Royal tables

• Louis XI of France (reigned 1461 to 1483) owned the first known indoor billiard table. Billiards Digest dates the first definite mention to an inventory of his from 1470.
• Mary of Hungary, governor of the Netherlands, played on a green-cloth table in 1535.
• James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) had a billiard board covered in green cloth at Holyrood Palace in 1581.
• The Duke of Norfolk's 1588 inventory lists a billiard table, three sticks and eleven ivory balls.
• Mary, Queen of Scots had a billiard table during her captivity and complained when it was taken away.
• Louis XIV refined and popularized the game in the seventeenth century, spreading it through the French nobility; an illustration dated 1694 shows him playing indoors with a mace. The often-repeated story that his doctors prescribed billiards as exercise is not something we could confirm.

By 1727 billiards was played in almost every café in Paris.

Billiards in England

An early English rule book from about 1675 said there were few towns of note without a public billiard table. Charles Cotton's 1674 The Compleat Gamester describes a version played with an arch (or port) and a king. English billiards became the dominant British game around 1770 and stayed on top until the 1920s. Shakespeare had already put the word on stage: in Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra suggests a game of billiards to her attendant Charmian.

From mace to cue

The first implement was the mace, a single piece of wood curved at one end, used to push the ball. Players increasingly turned the mace around to shoot with its narrow tail end, especially when the ball lay against a cushion; sources date this to roughly 1660 to 1690. When the cue became a separate implement is disputed: the BCA says the late 1600s, Billiards Digest says 1740, and Clare says the second half of the eighteenth century. These likely describe different stages of one gradual change.

The two implements coexisted for a long time. Hoyle's 1779 rules required players to choose cue or mace before play. A 1807 treatise called the cue the most widely used tool but said the mace was still used almost exclusively in England, and books and pictures from the 1830s and 1840s still show maces in the rack. The straight, footless cue had developed by about 1800, and maces were phased out by the mid-nineteenth century as leather-tipped cues became standard. The Billiards Association, formed in 1885, required the ball to be struck with the cue tip, and a minimum cue length of 3 feet was introduced in 1938.