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.

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. Golf got caught in the crossfire.

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

The royal game

By the early 1500s the bans had quietly faded. James IV bought a set of clubs in 1502 from a bowmaker in Perth, making him the first recorded royal golfer. Mary Queen of Scots was spotted playing at St Andrews shortly after the death of her husband Lord Darnley in 1567 — a choice that was mentioned at her eventual trial. The word "caddie" is said to come from the French cadet, which followed her from France.

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. That's why links golf feels the way it does.

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. St Andrews followed ten years later with its own version. Most of the modern rulebook can be traced back to those two documents.

St Andrews takes over

The Society of St Andrews Golfers was founded in 1754. In 1834 King William IV gave it royal patronage, and it became the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews — the R&A. For the next 170 years it was the effective global governor of the rules, sharing that role eventually with the USGA.

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. You can still play it today, though you'll need to enter the ballot or turn up at dawn and hope.

1860: the Open begins

The first Open Championship was played at Prestwick in 1860, three years after the death of Allan Robertson — the man 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. Willie Park Senior won. Old Tom Morris came second.

Old Tom would go on to win four Opens. His son, Young Tom, won four in a row between 1868 and 1872. Young Tom died on Christmas Day 1875, aged twenty-four, a few months after losing his wife and child in childbirth. Scottish golf's folk memory is built as much on him as on any course.

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 at Pinehurst, Alister MacKenzie collaborating with Bobby Jones at Augusta, Willie Park Jr at more English courses than you'd believe.

The result is that every modern course, wherever you play, is in some small way a descendant of a Scottish original.

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), the most famous (the Old Course), 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. The game never stopped being a local one here. It's still cheap in a lot of places, still walkable, still stubbornly itself.

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.