Scottish Golf in the Regency Era
Overview of Scottish golf clubs, course layouts, social culture, and institutional decline during the Regency period (c. 1811–1820).
Scottish golf in the Regency was both an ancient and a fragile institution. By 1815 about eighteen golf clubs could trace their origins to the eighteenth century, almost all of them in Scotland: the Royal Burgess (1735) and Bruntsfield Links Golfing Society (1761) playing over Bruntsfield Links in Edinburgh; the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (founded 1744 with the first written rules of golf, played over Leith Links); the Society of St Andrews Golfers (1754, later the Royal and Ancient); Royal Musselburgh (1774); Royal Aberdeen (1780); Fraserburgh (1777); Crail Golfing Society (1786); Glasgow Golf Club (1787); Earlsferry at Elie (1787); Burntisland (1791); Kingsbarns (1793); Fortrose (1793); Dunbar (1794); and outposts at Royal Blackheath in London and Savannah in Georgia. New foundations during the Regency itself were thin—the Thistle Golf Club joined the Honourable Company at Leith in 1815—and a wave of new societies (Perth in 1824, Montrose's modern incarnation in 1810, North Berwick in 1832) belongs more to the 1820s and 1830s.
Number of holes varied wildly because each club simply played whatever its piece of common ground accommodated. Leith Links had 5 holes (some sources say 7); Musselburgh Old Links varied between 7, 8, and 9; Montrose ranged from 7 up to 25 at one point; Bruntsfield Links carried 6. Crail's nine ran five out on the landward side and four back along the coast. Standardization had begun but not arrived. In 1764 St Andrews combined its first four short holes into two, producing an 18-hole round (still ten holes of which eight were played twice), but it would be a century before other courses followed suit. As late as the founding of Prestwick in 1851, twelve holes still looked unremarkable. A "round" in the Regency therefore meant whatever the local links offered, often played out-and-back over shared fairways, frequently in foursomes for stakes.
The shape of the clubs themselves was social as much as athletic. They were gentlemen's societies with elected captains, annual silver-trophy competitions, fines, dinners, and devoted clubhouse taverns: the Honourable Company had its Golf House at Leith from 1768, while the Bruntsfield golfers met at Golfhall, later the Golf Tavern at Wright's Houses, said to be the oldest surviving golf clubhouse in the world. Membership overlapped heavily with the Edinburgh legal and mercantile elite, the Royal Caledonian Hunt, and the masonic lodges. Wining, dining, and betting were as central as the golf itself; matches were typically match-play for money, the medal round at St Andrews having only been introduced in 1759.
What's often missed is that the Regency was a period of contraction. The wars in Europe played a part, and several early clubs went into abeyance in the early 19th century. Earlsferry effectively collapsed after 1812 when its tenant ploughed up the links. By 1813 Crail had only eight members and resolved to dissolve, though it staggered on. The Royal Burgess split in 1807 in an internecine row over the stymie rule. The Honourable Company itself, the senior society of the game, slid toward the financial crisis that would force it to sell the Leith Golf House in 1833 and decamp permanently to Musselburgh in 1836—the move that would eventually make Musselburgh's nine-hole links the world's most heavily trafficked course and the seedbed of the Open Championship rota. The Regency was thus the lean middle passage between Enlightenment-era foundation and the Victorian explosion of the game that followed the arrival of the gutta-percha ball in 1848 and the railways soon after.
