Children's Games with Things: Marbles, Fivestones, Throwing and Catching, Gambling, Hopscotch, Chucking and Pitching, Ball-Bouncing, Skipping, Tops and Tipcat

by Iona Opie, Peter Opie

Iona Opie and the late Peter Opie have devoted their lives to the study of children. Now comes the final volume of their acclaimed trilogy on children's games. Together with Children's Games in Street & Playground (1969) and The Singing Game (1985), this volume completes the most comprehensive
study this century.
Based on thirty years of research, this intriguing volume focuses on games that use equipment of one kind or another--marbles, jump rope, balls--describing in colorful detail the objects used, the rules of play, and the accompanying rhymes and chants. The Opies examine the history of the games
from their earliest appearance and they consider the wider social context, tracing the varying attitudes towards them over the past three hundred years, from pedagogical disapproval, to legal suppression, to the sentimental nostalgia of the present.
Here then is the world of play, the imaginary space into which our young ones escape each day. Children's Games With Things is an evocation of this imaginary world as well as a reminder of our own past.

366 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 1997

About the author

Iona Margaret Balfour Archibald was born in Colchester, Essex, England. She was a researcher and writer on folklore and children's street culture. She is considered an authority on children's rhymes, street and playground games and the Mother Goose tradition. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1998 and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1999.

The couple met during World War II and married on 2 September 1943. The couple worked together closely, from their home near Farnham, Surrey, conducting primary fieldwork, library research, and interviews of thousands of children. In pursuing the folklore of contemporary childhood they directly recorded rhymes and games in real time as they were being sung, chanted, or played. Working from their home in Alton, Hampshire they collaborated on several celebrated books and produced over 30 works. The couple were jointly awarded the Coote Lake Medal in 1960. The medal is awarded by The Folklore Society "for outstanding research and scholarship".

Speaking in 2010, Iona speaks of working with her husband as being "like two of us in a very small boat and each had an oar and we were trying to row across the Atlantic." and that "[W]e would never discuss ideas verbally except very late at night."

Iona Opie died in 2017.