LCCL Dicing School

History Note: Medieval Dice Schools

Dicing was widespread throughout the Middle Ages, and societies (scholae deciorum) and guilds for dicing were known to exist.¹ The special dicing schools (scholae deciorum) and guilds of medieval France not only trained knights in the art of gambling, but helped them to uphold its standards as well.² For example, Sir Mustapha-Agha, officer in the royal troops, Knight of Saint-Louis, was head of an academy of three dice. The Duke of Orleans allowed him to have a dice academy at home.³ Dice guilds introduced statutes of uniformity: all dice had to have the exact same dimensions, with numbers positioned in the same configuration on the six sides of the cube. This standardization foiled swindlers and made the patterns of the dice games visible, which enabled Cardano, Pascal and Fermat to begin to think systematically about probability.⁴

[1] Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY): The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages (1975), p. 214
[2] Bettina L. Knapp: Gambling, Game, and Psyche (2000), p. 7
[3] Balleroy, Barthélemy. Les correspondants de la Marquise de Balleroy, Volume 2. Hachette (1883)
[4] Steven Johnson – Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World (2016)