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Yes Steven,you 're my best friend now I guess ;-)
Pall Mall was game similar to croquet,
featuring an iron ball, a mallet, and a ring or hoop, which was positioned at
the end of an alley as a target. Pall Mall and The Mall in London both owe
their names to the game, whose name was adopted into English from the French
Paillemaille, in turn from the original Italian Pallamaglio, derived from the
root Italian words palla, meaning ball, and maglio, meaning mallet. The game
was a favourite of Charles II (1630-1685) and was played in an alley which
stood on St James's Park on the site the present Mall, which now connects
Trafalgar Square with Buckingham Palace. Pall Mall incidentally runs parallel
to The Mall, and connects St James's Street to Trafalgar Square. Brewer's
dictionary of 1870 (revised 1894) lists Pall Mall as 'A game in which a palle
or iron ball is struck through an iron ring with a mall or mallet' which
indicates that the game and the name were still in use at the end of the 19th
century. According to Chambers, the word mall was first used to describe a
promenade (from which we get today's shopping mall term) in 1737, derived from
from The Mall (the London street name), which seems to have been named in 1674,
happily coinciding with the later years of Charles II's reign.
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