Golf enters the written record
Scotland's parliament tries to stop the game.
King James II's parliament ordered that football and golf be abandoned so that men could practise archery. The ban is one of the earliest surviving written references to golf in Scotland. The game itself was already being played; its exact beginning remains uncertain.
The surviving parliamentary act tells us that golf was already popular enough to worry lawmakers. They wanted men to practise archery for defense, so golf and football became targets of a ban. The document records a conflict between recreation and military preparation, not the invention of a brand-new sport.
Other stick-and-ball games existed in Europe, and historians continue to debate golf's deeper origins. The 1457 reference is a secure starting point for Scotland's written story, while the game itself is older than the record.