Ye lovers of pleasure, give ear and attend,

Unto these few lines which here I have penned,

I sing not of sea fights, of battles nor wars,

But of a fine game, which is called “Prison Bars.”

David Studley, poet laureate of Ellesmere, Shropshire, wrote the ballad excerpted throughout this chapter about a game played 8 August 1764 between teams of local married men and bachelors. Studley's term, “Prison Bars,” was a common alternate name for prisoner's base, and this game certainly had time to develop variants, as it was one of the most popular catching games in England from the fourteenth century until its decline in the twentieth. It was played by two teams, each with their own safe base and designated prison for captured opponents. The goal was to capture as many prisoners as possible in order to empty and eventually occupy the other team's base. Distinctively, each player left base in order to chase one specific adversary and was, in turn, targeted by someone else from the opposing team. All the players were simultaneously pursuer and pursued.

In the eighteenth century, as Studley's poem testifies, prisoner's base could be a formalized match between adult men, but in the seventeenth century it was often characterized as a boys’ country game. However, over generations it engaged a wide range of participants: children, youth, and adults; male and female; rural and urban.