The History of the piece names: Part 2 - The Bishop

The Vikings had 70 different words for Fish.   One of them Fiske meaning rank malodorous rotten fish-waste came to be the English word fish that we recognise today.  It was also the name of a popular Norse board-game played on an 8 by 8 square board with King pieces and Fish pieces circa 700 AD.

From Magnus Vermagnusson’s  seminal work The Saga of Hagar the Horrible:

“And so Hagar Hadraidosshon son of Hagar Hadraider smote dead Thor Bjornnersshon son of Thor Bjorner at the board of Fiske.  Dishonoured was he by the move that took his fiske off”

With the Viking invasion of Lindisfarne in AD 793 the game of Fiske was brought to Northern England whereupon a Queen was added by the Britons in honour of their great buxom warrior queen Boudicea.

The retelling of the saga of Hagar into Olde Englyshe was completed by the venerable Bede in AD 795.  His transliteration from the ancient Norse bore the mistaken line:

“Dishonoured was he by the move that took his Biske off”. 

Rather than careless transcription this was thought to be caused by the Norse “F” which at that time was commonly written with converging horizontals.

Within ten years Biske off had become Bisheoff and within another decade we see the term Bishop first used.

From Cholmondley’s Barber’s Tale AD 815:

“The Chest game began and forsooth and verily the long diagonal was commanded by thine mitr’d fyshe.  As powerful display of Bishopry as seen since the demyse of the late lamented bull-buggering Bishop of Bath and Wells”

And so from AD 815 the Bishop was born.

Footnote:

Scholars believe that the Britons renamed the game from Fiske to Chest with the introduction of the buxom queen-piece Boudicea some time after AD 793.

I already learned all that from my American school.