There are a plethora of terms, phrases and idioms in English which involve the generic male term, Jack.

Have you ever wondered who this Jack fellow is? Note that I don't have the ultimate answer to who Jack is, because he isn't really anyone, except an archetype, that goes back to when English was Anglo-Saxon, and back even further to when AngloSaxon was really just a dialect of German, as a variant of Johannes. An excerpt from the alwaysfacinating Phrase a Week website, is the first lead that I followed in order to come to a conclusion in this matter: With any phrase that includes a name, it's natural to consider whether its the name of a real person. In this case, as was the case with many other literary Jacks -Jack the Lad, Jack Robinson, Jack Sprat, Jack Horner, Jack Frost, etc, Jack of all trades was a generic term rather than a living and breathing individual. In fact, the very long list of terms that include 'Jack' exceeds that of any other name in English and this reflects the fact that, as a derivative of the common name 'John', 'Jack' has been used just to mean 'the common man'. This usage dates back to the 14th century and an example is found in John Gower's Middle English poem, Confessio Amantis, 1390: Therwhile he hath his fulle packe, They seie, 'A good felawe is Jacke'.1 Now this leads into a very interesting question: If we're examining the myriad forms that make use of the name Jack, who then is the Jack of playing card fame, and why is his card less valuable than the King, but still more valuable than the Queen? It is often popularly assumed that the Jack is part of the royal court, possibly even the prince, if he's one of the face cards in the pack, and why shouldn't we think so? After all, the rest of the suit is mere numbers; The Jack has a face and a character, is part of the royal suit, and is valued more than the numerical cards. So what is the history behind this Jack? Is he a specific person named Jack, or does the Jack of playing cards bear any relation to the generic Jack, of idiomatic name? Is he, as I had first guessed, after finding out that Jack was a generic name, a mercenary or warrior of the royal court? (Seriously now if you don't believe that this was my assertion before I did the research that went into this chapter, ask my husband, as it was his question I was answering.)

1. Martin, Gary; Phrase-a-week, jack-of-all-trades, Oct. 2011. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jack-of-all-trades.html . Accessed 01 Nov. 2011.

In order to fully answer these questions, the only way to get a really satisfactory answer is to go back to the history of playing cards in and of itself. The earliest evidence of cards existing in Europe dates to the late 1300's, having been imported to Europe from the Islamic world; they, no doubt, developed their cards as a result of their trades with the east, where Chinese cards had been in use since the Tang dynasty (early 600s to early 900s)1,2 and evidently took divergent paths through the two places where trade brought the cards: the Middle East and India. Interestingly, through all divergent paths, the 4 standard suits of the original Chinese deck (coins, strings, sticks and batons) are echoed throughout their evolution, in every place where they ended up as trade objects3. However, the suits varied from country to country, and still do. Though the majority of the world recognizes the suits of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades as standard, there are other sets of suits in Europe. For example, in Germany, the suits are hearts, bells, leaves and acorns. Spanish, Portuguese, Swiss and Italian decks each have different suits. Contrary to popular belief, the development of current card suits was not derived from the Tarot deck. Both the Tarot and regular playing cards followed parallel paths of sometimesintertwining evolutions from the original decks, which arrived as objects of trade with the Islamic world. Cartomancy actually dates as a later development than playing for purposes of amusement, gambling or trickery does. The earliest known cartomancy deck is from Bologna, and dates to 1750; regular cards used for cartomancy date to about the same period. Some occult historians claim that the original Tarot was the one which was traded by Gypsies, who acquired them in Egypt, but the original Tarot deck was used to play a game where a person could trump another player, and therefore use the cards to trick a person out of his money or betting materials, if played skillfully. This deck was highly artistic and emblematic of cultural advances of the era, and as it was hand-painted, it was available only to royalty. The uniqueness of the few surviving
1 http://i-p-c-s.org/history.html; History Of Playing Cards, John Berry for the International Playing Card Society. The brief brief history presented at their website is based on a leaflet prepared by John Berry to provide background for the Exhibition 'The World of Playing Cards' at the Guildhall Library, London, from September 1995 to March 1996. Accessed 1 Nov. 2011. 2 Information accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card#Early_history and further researched at Temple,

Robert K.G. (2007). The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention (3rd edition). London: Andr Deutsch, pp. 130-1, p. 390, pp. 131132, p. 328, p. 334 "Numbered dice, anciently widespread, were on a related line of development which gave rise to dominoes and playing-cards (+9th-century China)."
3 Ibid, Berry in 1; Information in section entitled Enigmatic origins-from East to West.

decks is a result of the fact that each deck had to be commissioned to an artist. These decks dated from the early 1400s, and predated the arrival of the Gypsies in Europe by 100 years; furthermore, books of game instructions have been found to exist, and describe the ways in which the Tarot deck can be used for a trick-taking card game, but do not tell of any use as a divination deck, thus substantiating that the Tarot and regular decks originated in the pursuit of royal game-playing diversions, rather than divination4. Regular playing cards, with their four suits, were soon also accorded a trump set, in the form of royals, which started to come about in the 1400's, and was meant to echo important figures in European royalty and its attendants. The three royal persons of the suits were originally King, Chevalier (knight), and Knave5.6 Oddly enough, two French designs came out as clear favorites in the royal courts of the 1400s. One originated in Rouen, and became the favorite of the British courts, and one originated in Paris, and became the favorite in the royal courts of France. Interestingly, the English adopted the French suit system of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds, and was the only European country to do so7; the rest of Europe preferred to keep their own suit systems in place, and those remain to this day8. The cards of the English and Parisian standard were different as to their cadre of royal figures, but all were named after specific historic and mythic heroes and heroines. The mix of mythic cultures reflected in the cards is a true glimpse into enlightenment era thinking, ranging from the ranks of those employed in Charlemagne's court, to Hector of Homer's Illiad, to
4 This section owes a great deal to the ibid reference to John Barry, in the section sTarot A Diversion; Cartomancy and the occult, and Tarot gets a new look, Wikipedia records the incorrect history of the deck as owing to the tarot, when in reality, there is a great deal of archeological and literary evidence for Barry's assertion and history. 5^ Barrington, Daines (1787). Archaeologia, or, Miscellaneous tracts relating to antiquity. 8. Society of Antiquaries of London. p. 141. 6 Special Note: if you go and look this up on Wikipedia, this is where it'll tell you that the Knave is a Prince, due to word etymology. Look carefully. There is evidence here in this against that Wikipedia claim, and it is most certainly a missed dateline that caused this to occur. Look at the dates; this chapter explains this well, in later paragraphs. Proof again that Wikipedia is useful, but contains a great deal of erroneous information. You can rest assured that where Wikipedia is cited in this book, the facts have at least been single-checked, if not checked many times over. 7 . Facts and speculations on the origin and history of playing cards; Chatto, William Andrew. Out of Print, can be read in its entirety online via Google eBooks: http://books.google.com/books? id=y99CAAAAIAAJ&dq=spielkarten&as_brr=1 .

8 Ibid; John Barry in the section Other lands - other cards.

Lancelot and biblical figures such as Rachel and Judith. This was the time in which the Chevalier and Knave suits merged, and the Queen suit was introduced.9 In decks of this era, the value of the Queen varied; if there was a queen in power in real life, the Queen was the highest ranking card, above King and Knave. If there was a King in power, the Queen card moved to a different status, and had less rank power in the deck, if it was included at all. These cards had become standardized by the 1600's, when printing methods allowed cards to be produced on a more massive scale, and the English preferred the Parisian titles and ranks of the cards, and made them to reflect the Parisian royals, though the cards remained Rouennaise in design10. In the 1800's, it became very vogue to replace the royal figures with characters of the modern era, or topical representations of novel subjects. In the US, in particular, this was common practice11. This created a dilemma; a person who is not familiar with the picture on the card might not know what card it is without printed indices on the corner of the card, especially if fanned out in the hand with a multiplicity of other cards. Because of the limited surface area, the suits indices had to be printed in abbreviation11. Therefore, the King card and the Knave card became much too similar, when abbreviated: Ki and Kn; so, though the term Jack was considered vulgar, there was a card game known in the late 1700s to early 1800s in England as All Fours, by which the Knave was known by an alternate name: Jack13. The Knave of Trumps was specifically known by this name, and soon, all Knaves became so-called Jacks, in the nomenclature of the lower-class citizens who played All-Fours. In 1864, a card maker by the name Samuel Hart patented the cards in England, but they were not popularly accepted there, because of the fact that the term Jack was still seen as vulgar by the middle and upper classes, when it stood on its own as a name for a male. However, in America, this innovation took hold and became immensely popular, when the New York Consolidated Card Company patented their squeezers deck, able to be fanned out and held with one hand instead of the previouslycustomary two handed hold13.

9 1 1 1

Ibid; Chatto. 0 Ibid; Chatto. 1 Ibid; John Barry, in the section Artists Transform the Pack. 3 Wikipedia; No other source given therein, no author listed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card#Later_design_changes; however, the ibid John Barry article agrees with all information given in the Wikipedia article.

So there is the history of Jack as a card. However, the question still remains: who was Jack? As it turns out, Phrase-a-week holds part of the answer to this question, as well, in the very same article: ...We now use 'Jack of all trades, master of none' in a derogatory way. Originally, this wasn't the case and the label 'Jack of all trades' carried no negative connotation, the ' master of none' part being added later. Nevertheless, mediaeval Jacks were pretty much at the bottom of the social tree. The OED defines the generic meaning of the name Jack thusly: Jack - A man of the common people; a lad, fellow, chap; especially a low-bred or illmannered fellow, a 'knave'.14 There it is again Jack as Knave. There still remains the question, however: Why is there a Knave, or Jack, if you will, in the royal suit of cards, if Jack was the common man? The answer to this has to come as part of an auxiliary study of the history of the Knave in the royal courts during the Medieval and Enlightenment eras of feudal and monarchical rule. What use does the royal court have for the common man? What can we learn, as this book's premise rests upon, from the etymology of the word? The origin of the word is Anglo-Saxon, cnafa, which originally meant male child or boy. It is interesting to note that the term has a cognate in Old Norse, and does not appear in the various listings of words borrowed from Norse into English, thus substantiating it as a very old term. Through a process of pejoration, however, the term gained a meaning as a scoundrel or rogue. The first attestation of this term is 1200 in Anglo-Saxon; this means that the term would have had a meaning, roughly equivalent to scoundrel or peasant at the time in which a card in the newly-emerging European deck would have appeared, as early as 1377, but not earlier, when the term could have referred to the Prince, or male child of the royal family15. Furthermore, when considering that the decks of cards that reached England were a direct import of France, in all likelihood, the cards were probably not altered much when they received the
1 4 Ibid: Gary Martin. 1 5 Online Etymology Disctionary, etymonline.com, serch term knave. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php? allowed_in_frame=0&search=knave&searchmode=none . Accessed 3 Nov. 2011.

rank names of each royal card. Therefore, it is of utility to consider the French names of the cards and what they mean in French, in order to determine who Jack might be. In the original French decks, the four royals are: Le Roi, La Dame, Le Valet, and Le cuyer (or in Old French, escuier.)16 In England, the cuyer was known as a squire, and the Valet known as a personal servant of the royals, usually a page. The two were merged in both English Rouennaise decks and French Parisian decks for reasons of easier game-play,17 and in English, the merger of the two characters, as face cards, became known as the Knave (the French merger was eventually known as Le Valet, and remains so to this day). This presents an even-more complicated problem: How did two respectable royal positions become known as a Knave, and why did the Knave merit a place in the royal suit, if he was a scoundrel and a rogue18? Some of our best answers to this question are held in the adoption of the Parisian personages behind the royals of the suits. In particular, we can look at the kinds of people and characters the Parisians chose for their deck, and make some assumptions about the kind of people these knaves were, by looking at their role in history and mythology19, and making some assumptions, as there seem to be no answers yet thoroughly researched in order to answer this question without further scholarly doubt. In looking into who the knaves were, those of the Parisian deck were as follows: 1. The Knave of Spades: Ogier the Dane, rival of the son of Charlemagne, and foreign

warrior19;
1 6 Wikipedia article on squire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squire lists no sources or citations; therefore, it was necessary to confirm information on O.F. Translation by looking at both the Dico Robert and OED for etymology of the word squire. 1 7 Ibid; Chatto. 1 8 English Etymological Dictionary Online, etymonline. Com. Search term Knave, Accessed 3 Nov. 2011. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=knave&searchmode=none 1 9 Wikipedia chart; No source given, but multiple articles confirm the personages behind the cards: a. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card#Later_design_changes b. White Knuckle Cards, author's name not given; http://whiteknucklecards.com/history/frenchsuits.html c. Singer, Samuel Weller, Researches into the History of Playing Cards with Illustrations of the Origin of Printing

and Engraving on Wood; London 1816. Digitized copy at: http://books.google.com/books? id=ZTMCAAAAYAAJ&hl=en d. Masters, James; Playing Cards - History and Useful Information. 1997. Published online at: http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/playing-cards.htm. All articles accessed 3 Nov. 2011. 1 9 Bulfinch, Thomas; Bulfinch Mythology Legends of Charlemagne, Romance of the Middle Ages; 1796 to 1897.

2.

Knave of Hearts: Le Hire, otherwise known as tienne de Vignolles, a military

commander and close comrade of Joan of Arc20; 3. Knave of Diamonds: Hector of Homer's Illiad, noblest of all warriors, and the victor of

the battle at Troy21; 4. Knave of Clubs: Judas Maccabeus22, known as the most victorious warrior of Old

Testament Hebrew history, or alternately, Sir Lancelot23, famed warrior of the Arthurian Round Table legends. Are you getting a clear picture here? All of the Knaves of the suit are warriors. I had surmised at the beginning of my venture into the research of this topic, that the only scoundrel or rogue that was likely to be a part of the royal court was a person of great use a mercenary. While this doesn't exactly prove that the knave is a mercenary, it does prove that I had a correct inclination about the way in which the Knave was accepted as a royal. So Jack is still a generic term, but it turns out that, in real life, none of the people or characters of the past are named Jack at all. So Jack is the Knave, Jack is the common man; the only common man for whom the kings have always had use, and for whom the rulers of today still have a use, is the warrior, the mercenary.

ebook 19, cont.: online at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bulfinch/thomas/b93cha/. Accessed 3 Nov, 2011. 20 . Kennedy, Ben. Maid of Heaven, La Hire, RLK Press..http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_lahire.asp. Accessed 3 Nov. 2011. 2 1 Decent and reliable overview of the exploits of Hector in Homer's Illad can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector. Accessed 3 Nov. 2011. 2 2 Gottheil, Richard; Krauss, Samuel; Judas Maccabeus, Jewish Encyclopedia. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9034-judas-maccabeus Accessed 3 Nov. 2011. 2 3 Taylor, Patrick. Sir Lancelot (Sir Launcelot). http://www.arthurian-legend.com/more-about/moreabout-arthur-6.php .Accessed 3 Nov. 2011.