The date of the introduction of the games of chess and draughts into Europe, and more particularly among the northern nations and our own ancestors the Anglo-saxons, is a historical question upon which there has been great dispute. The game of chess was certainly played at a very early period in the east, and from thence probably passed through the Arabs into Greece. There are allusions to chess and chessmen in many writers before the twelfth century, and these incidental references are of more value than the positive assertions which later authors, after the manner of their day, did not hesitate to advance. For example Caxton, or rather the author of the “Playe of the Chesse.” “This playe fonde a phylosopher of thoryent whych was named in caldee Exerces, for which is as moche to say in englissh as he that louyth Justyce and mesure.” And this decision was not without due consideration of the matter; for just before we are told: “Trewe it is that somme men wene that this play was founden in the tyme of the bataylles and siege of troye. But that is not so.... After that cam this playe in the tyme of Alixaunder the grete in to egypt, and so unto alle the parties toward the south.” This treatise on chess is said to have been written nearly two hundred years before Caxton lived by Jacobus de Casulis, a French Dominican friar, about 1290. A copy is in the British museum, MS. Harl. 1275; and it was printed at Milan in 1479. Chaucer however, in “the Dreame,” names not Exerces but Athalus as the supposed inventor of the game, in a passage worth quoting: “Therewith Fortune saith, check here, And mate in the mid point of the checkere, With a pawne errant, alas, Ful craftier to playe she was Than Athalus that made the game, First to the chesse, so was his name.”