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Hoop rolling, also called hoop trundling, is both a sport and a child's game in which a large hoop is rolling along the ground, generally by means of an object wielded by the player. The aim of the game is to keep the hoop upright for long periods of time, or to do various juggling trick.
Hoop rolling has been documented since antiquity in Africa, Asia and Europe. Played as a target practice, it is an ancient tradition widely dispersed among different societies. In Asia, the earliest records date from Ancient China, and in Europe from Ancient Greece.
In the West, the most common materials for the equipment have been wood and metal. Wooden hoops, driven with a stick about one foot long, are struck with the centre of the stick in order to ensure good progress. Metal hoops, instead of being struck, can be guided by a metal hook.
In the Americas, it has been played by a great number of unrelated Native American tribes. The game has exhibited many variations of materials and size of implements and rules of play.Andrew McFarland Davis Indian Games. pp. 44–56. . It is postulated that its wide distribution is a factor of the rich symbolical possibilities of the game, rather than indicating radial diffusion from a single center of invention.
Hoops, also called krikoi, were probably made of bronze, iron, or copper, and were driven with a stick called the "elater".Edward M Plummer (1856) Athletics and Games of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge, Mass., Lombard & Caustic, Printers. p. 50 The hoop was sized according to the player, as it had to come up to the level of the chest. Greek vases generally show the elater as a short, straight stick. The sport was regarded as healthful, and was recommended by Hippocrates for strengthening weak constitutions."Hippocrates recommended playing with a hoop as a cure for weak people" Even very young children would play with hoops.James Augustus St. John (1878) The history of the manners and customs of ancient Greece. Volume 1. London, J. Murray. p. 148
The hoop thus held symbolic meanings in Greek myth and culture. Hoop driving is an attribute of Ganymede, often depicted on Ancient Greece vase paintings from the 5th century BCE. Images of the hoop are sometimes presented in the context of ancient Greek pederastic tradition.
The Roman game was to roll the hoop while throwing a spear or stick through it. For Romans, this was more an entertainment and military development, not a philosophical activity. Several ancient sources praise the sport. According to Horace, hoop driving was one of the manly sports.William Pulleyn (1830) The etymological compendium, or, Portfolio of origins and inventions. T. Tegg. p. 139 Ovid in his Tristia is more specific, putting the sport in the same category with horsemanship, javelin throwing and weapon practice: "Usus equi nunc est, levibus nunc luditur armis, Nunc pila, nunc celeri volvitur orbe trochus."Harris, p. 135 It was also presented as a virtue in the Distichs of Cato, which enjoin youth to "Trocho lude; aleam fuge" ("Play with the hoop, flee the dice").Harris, p. 136 A 2nd-century medical text by Antyllus, preserved in an anthology of Oribasius, Emperor Julian's physician, describes hoop rolling as a form of physical and mental therapy. Antyllus indicates that at first the player should roll the hoop maintaining an upright posture, but after warming up he can begin to jump and run through the hoop. Such exercises, he holds, are best done before a meal or a bath, as with any physical exercise.Harris, pp. 133 ff.
The game was a common pastime of Tanzania village children of the African Tanganyika plateau circa the 1910s.Cullen Gouldsbury (1911) The Great Plateau of Northern Rhodesia, Being Some Impressions of the .... E. Arnold. p. 273 Not long after, it is recorded in the Freetown settler community.Robert Benjamin Ageh Wellesley Cole (1960) Kossoh Town Boy. University Press. p. 54 Christian missionaries encountered it there in the 19th century."They also delight in rolling the hoop", p. 69 in The Gospel in all lands. Children in late Edo period Japan also were known to play the game.Sir Rutherford Alcock (1863) The capital of the tycoon: a narrative of a three years' residence in Japan. New York: Bradley Co. p. 281
In English the sport is known by several names, "hoop and stick", "bowling hoops", or "gird and cleek" in Scotland, where the gird is the hoop and the cleek, the stick.
In the west, around the end of the 19th century, the game was played by boys up to about twelve years of age. Cassell's Complete Book of Sports and Pastimes (1896). Cassell. p. 237. Hoops would at times have pairs of tin squares nailed to the inside of the circle, to jingle as the hoop was rolled.William Clarke (1829) The Boy's Own Book: A Complete Encyclopedia of All the Diversions Athletic. Vizetelly, Branston and Co. p. 28 Up to a dozen such pairs of rattles might be placed around the rim of the hoop. Some preferred the ashen hoops, round on the outside and flat on the inside, to the ones made of iron, as the latter could break windows and hurt the legs of the passers by and horses.
Conflict games such as "hoop battle" or "tournament" can also be played. For this game, boys organise into opposing teams that drive their hoops against each other with the aim of knocking down as many of the opponents' hoops as possible. Only those hoops which fall as a result of a strike by another hoop are counted out.John Kendrick (1852) Every boy's book of games, sports, and diversions, or The school-boy's manual of amusement, instruction and health. London: Grieves. p. 18. In some parts of England, boys played a similar game called "encounters", where two boys would drive their hoops against each other, with the one whose hoop was left standing being declared the winner.
The "hoop hunt" is yet another game, in which one or more hoops are allowed to roll down a hill, with the double aim of rolling as far as possible and then of locating the hoop wherever it may have ended up.William Chambers, Robert Chambers (1864) Chamber's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts. p. 503
Other writers mocked the complainers as grumblers depriving the "juvenile community" of a healthy and harmless pastime that had been practised for hundreds of years "without any apparent inconvenience to the public at large". The passion for passing laws was ridiculed: "Enact, say our modern philosophers, enact. Pass statute after statute. Regulate with exquisite minuteness the cries of the baby in the cradle, the laughter of the hoop-trundling boy, the murmurrings of the toothless old man." In the 1860s, the anti-trundling campaign was taken up by Charles Babbage, who blamed the boys for driving iron hoops under horses' legs, with the result that the rider is thrown and very often the horse breaks a leg.Charles Babbage (1864) Passages from the life of a philosopher. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press; Piscataway, N.J. : IEEE Press. p. 360 Babbage achieved a certain notoriety in this matter, being denounced in debate in Commons in 1864 for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat and the trundling of hoops".Hansard's parliamentary debates. THIRD SERIES COMMENCING WITH THE ACCESSION OF WILLIAM IV. 27° & 28° VICTORIA, 1864. VOL. CLXXVI. COMPRISING THE PERIOD FROM THE TWENTY-FIRST DAY OF JUNE 1864, TO THE TWENTY-NINTH DAY OF JULY 1864. Parliament, Thomas Curson Hansard "Street Music (Metropolis) Bill"; V4, p. 471
The fuss over boys playing with hoops reached around the globe—in the Colony of Tasmania, boys trundling hoops were blamed for endangering men riding horses and women's silk dresses, and the Hobart newspaper called for their banishment to the suburbs by law and police attention.
Not only schoolboys, but even graduate students at Cambridge enjoyed trundling hoops after their lectures. The practice, however, was brought to an end sometime before 1816, by means of a statute that forbade Masters of Arts to roll hoops or play marbles.
By the early 19th century, the game was already part of the standard physical education of girls, together with jumping rope and dumbbells.George Ripley (1858) New American Cyclopedia, Vol. 8. p. 609 Girls from four to fourteen could be seen by the hundreds, trundling their hoops across the grass in the London parks. Though held to be common in the early years of the 19th century, the simplicity and innocence of those years was alleged to have been replaced by the 1850s with a precocious maturity, where "Instead of trundling hoops, urchins smoke cigars."
In the mid-19th century, bent fraxinus was favoured as material for making wooden hoops. In early 20th-century England, girls played with a wooden hoop driven with a wooden stick, while boys' hoops were made of metal and the sticks were key-shaped and also made of metal. In some locations, hoops with spokes and bells were available in stores, but they were often disdained by boys .
Another alternate name for hoop rolling is Gird ‘N Cleek. The World Gird ‘N Cleek championships are held annually in New Galloway, Scotland. Winners include Andrew Firth (1983), Alexander McKenna (2009,2018), Arthur Harfield (2019). .
Since hoop and stick involves spear throwing, it is thought to predate the introduction of the bow and arrow that took place around 500 AD. In the California region in the 18th century, it was widespread and known as "takersia". Canadian Inuit players divide into two groups. While the first group rolls the hoops—a large and a small one—the players in the other group attempt to throw spears through the hoops. The Cheyenne named two months of the year after the game: January is known as Ok sey' e shi his, "Hoop-and-stick game moon", and February as Mak ok sey' i shi, "Big hoop-and-stick game moon". Among the Blackfoot, children would play the game by throwing a feathered stick through the rolling hoop. Salish and Pend d'Oreilles youth played hoop and arrow games "to become skillful at bringing down small game for the village" in early spring, when the men were gone in search of large game.
Among the European settlers, hoop-rolling was a seasonal sport, seeing the greatest activity in the winter. American Education (1910), Vols. 14–15. Nabu Press p. 350 . Children, besides rolling the hoops, also tossed them back and forth, catching them on their sticks. In the 1830s, hoop trundling was seen as an activity so characteristic of the young that it was adopted by a fanatic sect in Kentucky whose members mimicked children's activities in order to gain access to heaven."The Fanatics in New York" (1832). From The North American Review. March 26, 1899, p. 23 Hoop driving was also seen as a remedy for the sedentary and overprotected lives led by many American girls of the mid-19th century.Wisconsin journal of education, Volume 1 By Wisconsin. Dept. of Public Instruction, Wisconsin Education Association Council, Wisconsin Teachers' Association, Wisconsin Education Association; p. 52; 1857 The game was popular with both girls and boys: in an 1898 survey of 1000 boys and 1000 girls in Massachusetts, both the girls and the boys named hoop and stick their favorite toy. In Ohio, the wood of the Ulmus americana was particularly valued for making hoop-poles.
At Bryn Mawr College, Wellesley College, and Wheaton College, the Hoop Rolling Contest is an annual spring tradition that dates back to 1895, and is only open to graduating seniors on that college's May Day celebration.
British Empire
In England, children are known to have played the game as early as the 15th century. The Pictorial History of England vol. 2, by George Lillie Craik, Charles Knight, Charles MacFarlane, Harriet Martineau; p. 263 By the late 18th century, boys driving hoops in the London streets had become a nuisance, according to Joseph Strutt. Throughout the 1840s, a barrage of denunciations appeared in the papers against "The Hoop Nuisance", in which their iron hoops were blamed for inflicting severe injuries to pedestrians' shins. The London police attempted to eradicate the practice, confiscating the iron hoops of boys and girls trundling them through the streets and parks. That campaign, however, seems to have failed, as it was accompanied by renewed complaints about the increase of the nuisance.
(2025). 9781139566100 ISBN 9781139566100
Americas
A great number of widely separated Native American peoples play or played an ancient target-shooting version of hoop rolling currently known as Chunkey. Though the forms of the game exhibited great variation, generally certain elements were present, namely a prepared terrain over which a disc or hoop was rolled at high speed, at which implements similar to spears were thrown. The game, when played by adults, was often associated with gambling; and quite often, very valuable prizes, such as horses, exchanged hands.Charles Augustus Murray (1839) Travels in North America: including a summer residence with the ... Vol. 2. London, R. Bentley. p. 19 The game has been played by tribes such as the Arapaho, the Omaha, the Pawnee people and many others.
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