page_title: Staunton chess set
section_title: Old-style chess sets
hierarchical_section_title: Staunton chess set / Old-style chess sets
caption_attribution_description: English: photo taken by me of one of my chess sets on 4 Oct 2006. The squares on the board are each 5cm square. I think that the black pieces are ebony and the white pieces are box wood. The black pieces are heavier than the white pieces. Comment&#160;: The pieces are in the St. George style.
context_page_description: The Staunton chess set is composed of a particular style of chess pieces used to play the game of chess. According to the rules of chess, this style is to be used for competitions. The journalist Nathaniel Cooke is credited with the design, and they are named after the English chess master Howard Staunton. The first 500 sets were hand signed and numbered by Staunton. This style of set was first made available by Jaques of London in 1849, and they quickly became the standard. They have been used around the world since.
context_section_description: The increased interest in the game of chess, particularly in international play during the late 18th century and early 19th century, brought about a renewed demand for a more universal model for chess pieces. The variety and styles of the conventional form, begun in the 15th century, had expanded tremendously by the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Conventional types popular during the period included the English Barleycorn chess set, the St. George chess set, the French Regence chess set (named after the Café de la Régence in Paris) and the central European. Most pieces were tall, easily tipped and cumbersome during play, but their major disadvantage was the similarity of the pieces within a set. A player's unfamiliarity with an opponent's set could alter the outcome of a game.
  By the early decades of the 19th century, it was all too clear that there was a great need for a chess set with pieces that were easy to use and universally recognized by chess players of diverse backgrounds. The solution, first released in 1849 by the purveyors of fine games, John Jaques of London, sport and games manufacturers, of Hatton Garden in London, was to become known as the Staunton chess set after Howard Staunton (1810–1874), the chess player and writer who was generally considered the strongest player in the world from 1843 to 1851.
  Although Nathaniel Cooke has long been credited with the design, it may have been conceived by his brother-in-law and owner of the firm, John Jaques. 
  One theory of the development of the set is that Mr. Cooke had used prestigious architectural concepts, familiar to an expanding class of educated and prosperous gentry. London architects, strongly influenced by the culture of Greece and the culture of ancient Rome, were designing prestigious buildings in the neoclassical style. The appearance of the new chessmen was based on this style and the pieces were symbols of "respectable" Victorian society: a distinguished bishop's mitre, a queen's coronet and king's crown, a knight carved as a stallion's head from the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, and a castle streamlined into clean classical lines, projecting an aura of strength and security. The form of the pawns was based on the Freemasons' Square and Compasses; however, another theory regards the pawns' form as derived from the balconies of Victorian architecture. There were also practical innovations: for the first time a crown emblem was stamped onto a rook and knight of each side, to identify their positioning on to the king's side of the board.  The reason for this is that in descriptive chess notation, the rooks and knights were often designated by being the "queen's knight", the "king's rook", etc.
  Another possibility is that Jaques, a master turner, had probably been experimenting with a design that would not only be accepted by players, but could also be produced at a reasonable cost. In the end, he most likely borrowed and synthesized elements from sets already available to create a new design that used universally recognizable symbols atop conventional stems and bases. Moreover, the pieces were compact, well balanced and weighted to provide a useful understandable playing set.
  It may have been a combination of both theories with the synergy of Mr. Cooke the entrepreneur and Mr. Jaques the artisan.
  Chess books from 1820 on were using in diagrams icons of chess pieces similar in many respects to the Staunton chessmen, including a recent change from arched crown to coronet for the queen. This shows that the Staunton design may have been taken from these diagrams, very likely picked up by a printer.
caption: A St. George-style set
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