The Abbé Rive, who ascribes the invention of cards to Spain, endeavours to show that they were known there in the early part of the fourteenth century. The evidence of this is, according to his statement, to be found in the Statutes of the military order of the Band, promulgated by Alphonso, King of Castile, where there is a passage expressly forbidding the members to play at cards. Whether cards are expressly mentioned in any old Spanish manuscripts of the Statutes in question, has not been ascertained; but of all the different editions, original and translated, of Guevara's 'Golden Epistles,' the work from which the Abbé Rive obtained his information, the first in which cards are expressly named, is that of the French translation by Gutery, published at Lyons in 1558.[79] As the word is not to be found in the original Spanish editions, nor in the Italian translations made from them, there cannot be a reasonable doubt of its being an interpolation of Gutery, who probably thought that a general prohibition of gaming necessarily included cards; and thus, "par conséquent," the Abbé Rive is furnished with positive evidence that the game of cards was common in Spain in 1332. Another authority, referred to by the Abbé Rive in favour of the antiquity of Spanish cards, is of the same kind. In a collection of the 'Laws of Spain,' printed in 1640, he finds the following passage in an Ordonnance issued by John I, King of Castile, in 1387: "We command and ordain that none of our subjects shall dare to play at dice or at cards (_Naypes_) either in public or in private, and that whoever shall so play, &c."[80] There can, however, be no doubt that the word cards (Naypes) is an interpolation; for it is not to be found in the same Ordonnance as given in the collection entitled 'Ordenanças Reales de Castilla,' printed at Medina del Campo, 1541. In this earlier edition, playing at dice and tables for money is indeed forbidden--"de jugar juego de dados ni de tables, a dinero"--but cards are not mentioned. Jansen, in his 'Essai sur l'Origine de la Gravure en Bois et en Taille-douce,' cites the four following verses from the romance of Renard le Contrefait, pointed out to him by the late Mons. Van Praet, in evidence of cards being known in France at least as early as 1341, the year in which the romance was finished: "Si comme fols et folles sont, Qui pour gagner, au bordel vont; Jouent aux dez, aux cartes, aux tables, Qui à Dieu ne sont délectables." The manuscript containing the verses as they are here given is in the Bibliothèque du Roi; but certainly it is not of earlier date than 1450; while in another manuscript, of the same romance, apparently about a hundred years older, also preserved in the Bibliothèque du Roi, the word "Cartes" is not to be found in the corresponding verse, which is as follows: "Jouent à geux de dez ou de tables."