Jeu de mail

[2] It is a now-obsolete lawn game originating in the Late Middle Ages and mostly played in the Kingdom of Naples and France,[3] surviving in some locales into the 20th century.

It is a form of ground billiards, using one or more balls, a stick with a mallet-like head, and usually featuring one or more targets such as hoops or holes.

Jeu de mail was ancestral to the games golf, palle-malle and croquet, and (by moving it indoors and playing on a table with smaller equipment), billiards.

[citation needed] An alternative meaning of 'straw' has been suggested (Modern French maille), on the basis that the target hoops used in some versions of the game were sometimes made of bound straw.

[6]: 308 Quite popular in various forms in the Kingdom of Naples, then in other parts of Italy and France in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the game developed into pall-mall in the early modern period, which spread to Scotland then England; this, in turn, eventually led to croquet.