Quidditch roots stem back further than you may have thought, nearly one thousand years of history! But before we dive into how the wonderful game of quidditch came to be we need to first learn a bit about the games that shaped and molded quidditch and it’s founders. Now quidditch wasn’t the first game to be played on broomsticks, in fact there were a few games prior to quidditch on brooms across the world.
There was Aingingein and Swivenhodge, an Irish game where players fly a ball through burning hoops and place the ball in a barrel. The fastest player wins. You may have heard of Shuntbumps, a game where the purpose is to knock all other players off their brooms. We have the German game of Stichstock where tied by a 10 foot rope to the top of a 20 meter pole, a single player must use any means to protect the ball on the top of the pole from the nine other players – including magic. But the game that most closely resembles and is thought to have inspired the game of Quidditch was Creaothceann, an extremely dangerous game forbidden at school where players catch charmed rocks using cauldrons strapped to their heads. Can be deadly. The player who caught the most charmed rocks was the winner.
Evolution:
Quidditch was appropriately named from the origin of it’s beginnings. The first location that quidditch is known to have been played was on Queerditch Marsh around 1050. Gertie Keddle, a witch who lived on the edge of the marsh wrote a series of entries into her journal documenting this new game that she could see being played. In these entries she recounts people playing a game with broomsticks and a ball over the marsh – including a “big Scottish warlock,” who may well have been a Creaothceann player. In a later journal she writes of the players shooting the balls between trees in order to score points. And in the third entry, she mentions the charmed rocks attempting to knock players off their brooms – sounds quite like bludgers to me!
100 years later is the next time we hear of the game being recorded by wizard Goodwin Kneen in a letter to his cousin Olaf in Norway. In this letter we start to see the first evidence of the game starting to become organized with teams and player titles.
The Snitch:
By the time the Snitch was introduced into Quidditch, the game had already been played for nearly 200 years. Our first documentation of this is in 1269 during a match played in Kent. At this time Quidditch had become very popular drawing in large crowds of spectators to enjoy the action. During this particular game in Kent, Barberus Bragge – Chief of the Wizards’ Council – decided to release a Snidget bird from it’s cage and onto the pitch with the lure of 150 Galleons being rewarded to the player who was able to catch this tiny, quickly maneuvering bird. Players were hot on trying to capture this bird up until a witch called Modesty Rabnott rescued it from certain death and hid it in her robes. At this point it was too late and Snidget hunting had been an exciting new release into the game of Quidditch. Each team had a Hunter, which later became called the Seeker, whose job it was to catch the snitch and have their team awarded 150 points.
As the popularity of Quidditch continued to grow, the population of the Snidget in turn decreased. So much so in fact that the bird was added to the protected species list by the Wizards Council in the mid-14th century.
The metal snitch that we know of today came to be from metal charmer Bowman Wright and his invention of the Golden Snitch. Measuring equal in both size and weight to a Snidget, the Snitch was enchanted to follow the birds flight paths. The Golden Snitch was approved as the official Snidget replacement and has been so ever since.
Rules & Regulations:
Following the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy act in 1692, which listed the Quidditch World Cup as a major security risk, The International Confederation of Wizards Quidditch Committee (ICWQC) was established to tackle the logistical issues of keeping noisy Quidditch matches away from the eyes and ears of Muggles. The British Ministry of Magic published the first official set of Quidditch rules half a century later, in 1750.