Regency Pastimes: Shuttlecock

The Book of Games, Or, A History on [i.e. Of] Juvenile Sports Practised at the Kingston Academy: Illustrated with Twenty-four Copperplates. (1822). United States: George Long, no. 71 Pearl-Street.

Shuttlecock was a game played with rackets and a “cork stuck with feathers, and beaten backward and forward” (Maxwell, 1833).

Said to be around since at least the early 17th century, it was often called Battledore and shuttlecock, or jeu de volant, an original version of what would become badmitton.  The rackets were the battledores, made of parchment or gut strings stretched across wooden frames. The object of the game was to bat the shuttlecock from one battledore to another as many times as possible without it falling to the ground.

There are versions of this through various Eastern cultures, too, with some credit for the British pastime going to the Chinese.

Chadwick, H. (1884). The Sports and Pastimes of American Boys: A Guide and Text-book of Games of the Play-ground, the Parlor, and the Field : Adapted Especially for American Youth. United States: George Routledge and sons, 9 Layfayette Place.

As the sport began to become more commercialised, formal rules and industrial-made battledore and shuttlecocks would proliferate in Britain and the Americas.
Maxwell, W. H. (1833). The Field Book: Or, Sports and Pastimes of the British Islands. United Kingdom: W. Tweedie.