The Complete History of Golf in Scotland: From the 1457 Ban to the Present Day

Most people know golf started in Scotland. Fewer people know that the first official mention of the game was a law telling everyone to stop playing it.

Before 1457: what we know and what we don't

The honest answer is that nobody quite knows where golf began. There are reasonable claims for a Dutch ancestor — the medieval game of kolf, played with curved sticks and leather balls on town squares and frozen canals from at least the 13th century. Records of kolf survive in Holland; some Dutch historians have argued that travelling merchants brought the game to the Scottish east coast through trade with Aberdeen and Leith, where the conditions of common links land made the indoor-and-ice game obsolete and the outdoor variant flourished.

The competing claim is that golf evolved independently in Scotland — that shepherds tending flocks on the strips of links land between town and sea began hitting stones into rabbit holes with their crooks, and the game grew from there into something organised. Both versions probably contain some truth. The Dutch borrowed-then-evolved theory and the Scottish indigenous-folk-game theory have been debated by golf historians for over a century.

What is settled: by the mid-1400s, golf as a recognisable game was established enough on Scottish links land to worry the king.

1457: the year golf was banned

On 6 March 1457, King James II of Scotland sat down with his Parliament and passed an Act stating that "the fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryit doun and nocht usit." Translated: football and golf are banned, don't do them.

Why? Because young men were playing instead of practising archery, and an invasion from England felt uncomfortably close. A country that couldn't shoot straight couldn't defend itself. Scotland's military doctrine in the 15th century rested on the longbow; weekly practice at the parish butts was a legal obligation for every able-bodied male between 12 and 50. Golf was the distraction that the kirk and the crown blamed for emptying the butts.

The ban was renewed twice — in 1471 by James III, and in 1491 by James IV — which tells you two things. First, people kept playing. Second, there was already enough of a golfing culture to be worth banning repeatedly.

The 1491 Act is the harshest of the three. It threatened forty shillings — a meaningful sum — for any landowner whose tenants were caught at "futeball, golfe, or other unprofitable sportis" instead of archery. The Act survives in the Scottish parliamentary records; the original Latin text is held at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh.

The bans worked, as far as the historical record shows, less well than the parliament had hoped.

The royal game

By the early 1500s the bans had quietly faded — partly because James IV himself was a known golfer. The Lord High Treasurer of Scotland's accounts for 1502 record fourteen shillings paid for "golf clubbis and ballis" purchased by the King from a bowmaker in Perth. James IV is the first recorded royal golfer. His son James V is recorded playing at Gosford in East Lothian. His granddaughter, Mary Queen of Scots, was spotted playing at Seton House and at St Andrews shortly after the death of her husband Lord Darnley in 1567 — a choice of leisure that was mentioned at her eventual trial in 1586 as evidence of unsuitable widow's behaviour.

Mary's golfing has another consequence. The word "caddie" is said to derive from the French cadet (a junior or apprentice), which followed her court from France during her years there as a teenage queen. The cadets carried the clubs; the word stuck; the role evolved.

Golf was played on common links land — the rough strips between town and sea that were no good for farming but perfect for the game. The land dictated the game, not the other way round. The Old Course at St Andrews still has the routing it has because of the way the rabbits and the wind shaped the dunes; the holes were where the holes already were when humans first walked the land with sticks. That's why links golf feels the way it does six hundred years later.

The 17th and early 18th centuries: the game develops

Through the 1600s and into the early 1700s, Scottish golf settled into a recognisable shape but without formal rules, club competitions, or recorded scores. Most of what we know about the period comes from kirk records (sermons disapproving of Sunday golf), trade records (the Edinburgh and St Andrews ball-makers and club-makers turning out small numbers of items), and incidental references in royal accounts.

The ball used in this period was the feathery — a hand-stitched leather pouch stuffed with boiled goose feathers, dried, and then waxed. A skilled ball-maker could produce three or four feathery balls a day. They flew well in dry conditions, lasted maybe a dozen rounds before the leather started to soften, and cost roughly the same as a club. A complete set of feathery balls and clubs was a meaningful expense — the game in this period was largely confined to the wealthy and the merchant class.

Clubs were almost all wooden — long-noses (the precursors to drivers), play-clubs, baffies (a kind of fairway wood), and putters. Iron clubs existed but were specialist tools used for getting out of trouble (rocks, paths, trampled lies); they damaged feathery balls and weren't part of the regular set.

1744: the first rules

Leith, just outside Edinburgh, is where the first written rules of golf appeared. The Gentlemen Golfers of Leith (later the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, now at Muirfield) wrote thirteen rules for a silver club competition in 1744. The original document survives in the National Library of Scotland.

The thirteen rules are surprisingly close to the modern game. They cover teeing the ball ("on the ground within a club's length of the hole"), playing the ball as it lies, lifting from water hazards with a one-stroke penalty, dealing with broken clubs ("if your ball comes among water, you may take out your ball, and bringing it behind the hazard, and Teeing it, you may play it with any club, allowing your adversary a stroke"), and the order of play. Most of what governs a Saturday morning fourball today is recognisably descended from those thirteen sentences.

St Andrews followed ten years later. The Society of St Andrews Golfers was founded in 1754, with its own version of rules largely modelled on the Leith ones. For roughly a century the Honourable Company at Leith was the leading authority on the game; in the mid-1800s, as Edinburgh's links land at Leith began to be encroached on by the growing port and the city, the centre of gravity shifted to St Andrews.

St Andrews takes over

In 1834 King William IV gave the Society of St Andrews Golfers royal patronage, and it became the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews — the R&A. For the next 170 years the R&A was the effective global governor of the rules of golf, eventually sharing that role with the USGA from the early 20th century onwards.

The Old Course itself is older than any club. It's common land, owned by the town, played for centuries before anyone thought to write it down. The course as currently played has 18 holes — but until the mid-19th century it was a 22-hole course (eleven out, eleven back, sharing fairways). The change to 18 holes in 1764, a decision of the Society of St Andrews Golfers' members, made 18 the de facto standard for the rest of the world. Most courses outside Scotland built in the late 1800s and early 1900s adopted 18 holes specifically because St Andrews had it.

You can still play the Old Course today. You'll need to enter the Daily Ballot, win one of the Advance Reservation slots up to a year ahead, or turn up at dawn and hope.

The 19th century ball revolution

The single biggest change in 19th-century golf wasn't a course or a club — it was the ball.

In 1848, gutta-percha balls (gutties) appeared. Gutta-percha is a hardened tree-sap from Malaya; the ball-maker boils it, moulds it into a sphere, and lets it cool. Gutties were cheaper than feathers (around a quarter the price), more durable (50–80 rounds versus a dozen), and flew differently. The transition from feathery to gutty in the 1850s opened the game to the working classes for the first time. The Open Championship — founded a few years later — would have been impossible without it.

In 1898, the American chemist Coburn Haskell patented the rubber-cored ball — a tightly-wound rubber band core with a gutta-percha cover. Haskell balls flew further, spun more, and made the late-19th-century courses suddenly play short. Course design responded; lengths grew; the modern game began to take its shape.

1860: the Open begins

The first Open Championship was played at Prestwick on 17 October 1860, three years after the death of Allan Robertson — the St Andrews ball-maker and feathery-era champion most people considered the best golfer alive. The inaugural event was a small affair: eight professionals, three rounds of the twelve-hole Prestwick course in a single day, on gutta-percha balls. Willie Park Senior of Musselburgh won. Old Tom Morris of Prestwick came second.

The early Open had no Claret Jug — winners received a red Moroccan-leather Championship Belt, which Young Tom Morris (Old Tom's son) won outright in 1870 by taking the title three years in succession. The original belt is still on display in Prestwick's clubhouse. The Claret Jug, commissioned in 1872, has been awarded ever since.

Old Tom Morris won four Opens (1861, 1862, 1864, 1867). Young Tom won four in a row between 1868 and 1872 — at the time the most dominant player the game had seen. Young Tom died on Christmas Day 1875, aged 24, a few months after losing his wife and child in childbirth. The grief of the loss is widely held to have killed him as much as any specific cause; he is buried in St Andrews Cathedral churchyard, where his grave remains a quiet pilgrimage spot for visiting golfers.

Scottish golf's folk memory is built as much on Young Tom as on any course or any clubhouse.

The export

By the late 1800s, Scottish professionals were being sent around the world to lay out courses and teach the game. Every great early American course has a Scot somewhere in its history.

Donald Ross, born in Dornoch in 1872, emigrated to America in 1899 and designed Pinehurst No. 2, Oakland Hills, Seminole, and over 400 other courses across the United States. Charles Blair Macdonald, born in America to Scottish parents and educated at St Andrews, designed the original National Golf Links of America (Long Island, 1911) — explicitly modelled on Scottish links holes including the Redan from North Berwick.

Alister MacKenzie, English-born to Scottish parents, collaborated with Bobby Jones on Augusta National (opened 1933) and designed Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne. Willie Park Jr. — son of the first Open winner — designed more than 170 courses in England, Scotland, and North America between 1880 and 1925, including the original Sunningdale Old Course.

The result is that every modern course, wherever you play, is in some small way a descendant of a Scottish original. The strategic principles, the green-complex shaping, the use of natural land contours, the routing decisions — all of these were exported by Scottish professionals trained on links land in the 19th century, and now form the foundation vocabulary of golf-course architecture worldwide.

The 20th century

The two World Wars hit Scottish golf hard. Many courses were ploughed up for food production during 1914–18 and again during 1939–45; some were used as airfields or military training grounds. Carnoustie's Burnside Course was used for tank training; Royal Aberdeen's land was partially appropriated by the RAF; Turnberry was an active wartime aerodrome and the original Ailsa Course was lost entirely (rebuilt by Mackenzie Ross in 1951).

The Open Championship paused for both wars. It returned in 1920 and 1946 respectively, to the same venues and largely the same conditions. The post-war reconstruction era — particularly Mackenzie Ross at Turnberry, the modernisation work at Carnoustie, and the rebuilding of Aberdeen and other east-coast courses — shaped the modern Open rota.

The transition from amateur to professional dominance in the post-war era happened more slowly in Scotland than in the United States. Scotland's last home-grown Open winner before the modern era was Sandy Lyle in 1985 (Royal St George's, in England) and Paul Lawrie in 1999 (Carnoustie). The shift in the global game from a Scottish-and-American duopoly to a fully international tour reflects the broader 20th-century opening of the sport — but Scotland's role as the place the game came from is undimmed.

Today

Scotland has over 550 golf courses — more per capita than anywhere on earth. You can play the oldest course in continuous use (Musselburgh Old Links, founded 1672 and still played), the most famous (the Old Course at St Andrews), the hardest Open venue (Carnoustie), and a hundred village nine-holers you've never heard of that are better than half the parkland courses in England — you can browse them all at the Birdie Brae Green Fee Index.

The game is governed in Scotland by Scottish Golf, the national governing body for amateur golf, and by the R&A for professional and rules matters. Women's golf in Scotland has been transformed in the last decade — the membership rules at Muirfield (2017), at the Royal & Ancient Club itself (2014), and at the few remaining men-only members' clubs have changed; the Curtis Cup will return to Scottish soil in 2028; the Solheim Cup at Gleneagles in 2019 was the highest-attended women's golf event ever held in the UK.

The game never stopped being a local one in Scotland. It's still cheap in a lot of places — the South Ayrshire season ticket at £200 covers six courses for the year — still walkable, still stubbornly itself. The municipal courses of Edinburgh and Glasgow are the descendants of the medieval common-land golf the 1457 Act was trying to suppress; you can still play them for £20 a round in 2026.

The 1457 ban lasted about forty years. The game has lasted closer to six hundred. Whatever they were worried about in Edinburgh that day, history suggests the archers lost.