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COSTLY COLOURS
The colourful cousin of Crib
They found Duroy and Heartley playing at Costly Colours: a game upon the cards peculiar to that country.from W. Toldervy, The History of Two Orphans (1756). (Country means county, and presumably Shropshire is meant, as will become apparent.) Cotton's account is supplemented by some aberrant additional comments from Randle Holme (1688). I should probably not have paid much attention to so ill-served a game were it not for two happy coincidences. One of these was that Arthur Taylor, the author of a book on pub games, once happened to mention in conversation that he had seen a peculiar sort of three-card Cribbage played in a Lancashire pub in the early 1980s, and that he thought it was called something like "Costly". Unfortunately he was not aware of its significance, and by the time he went back to find it, there had been a change of management and no one seemed to know anything about it. The other had previously come my way in 1975 by courtesy of Robert Reid, then of the Queen's University of Belfast, who kindly sent me a photocopy of some pages describing the game taken from Charlotte Sophia Burne's Shropshire Folklore, 1883. Here is the introduction to it:
The following digest of the game of Costly, now [1874] obsolescent, was made partly from oral instructions given by "old players", partly from rules set forth in a scarce hand-book kindly lent for the purpose, entitled "The Royal Game of Costly Colours." "Printed for and sold by J. and W. Eddowes in the Market Place, Shrewsbury, 1805."
In the Advertisement the Editor says, "The way in which the game was first introduced to his notice was as follows:- Having a few years ago taken up his residence in a village in Shropshire, whenever be was invited to spend an evening with his neighbours, rarely any other Game at Cards was talked of but the Game of Costly Colours, and which therefore he was told he must learn. Several considerations weighed with him," he says, "to be at the pains to collect all the Information respecting it that the oldest players in the village, assisted by some of his acquaintance at Shrewsbury, were competent to give him,... for the purpose of introducing it amongst his Friends elsewhere: and seeing his expectations not disappointed in the pleasure he promised himself it would afford them, he is induced to present it to the public, and particularly to the admirers of the Game of Cribbage, with the like confidence that they will admit its advantages in the comparison with that game."
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