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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 1/11/23: If you had a losing lotto ticket [1]
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Date: 2023-01-11
The Mega Millions lottery pot is over a billion dollars again. Did you buy a ticket? Did you know England’s first lottery was drawn on this very date in 1569?
By 1566, England's harbours and coastal defences were looking a little shabby. To fix them, Queen Elizabeth I would either have to raise taxes (boo) or hold a glittering prize draw and raise the money that way. Unsurprisingly, she chose the latter.
Selling tickets for the chance to win a prize was nothing new. The idea had been around on the continent for at least a hundred years, where lotteries were sometimes held by merchants looking to shift expensive stock that wasn't selling. So on 11 January 1569, outside the west wing of the old St Paul's Cathedral in London, punters huddled together against the chill to see what they had won in England's first state lottery draw. The event was hardly a runaway success. Less than 10% of the 400,000 tickets had been bought at ten shillings each. (If you thought that was a bit steep, you could always buy a share of a ticket – a sort of Renaissance office syndicate.)
Every ticket was guaranteed a prize, and that made for a lot of waiting around – until 6 May, to be precise. Prizes ranged from silver plate and tapestries to a £5,000 jackpot, so it was worth bracing the winter weather.
Your lottery ticket was a blank piece of paper. On it, you wrote your name and a “unique device”, which often took the form of a prayer or a line or two of verse. One ticket that survived from the 1569 lottery read, “God send a good lot for my children and me, which have had 20 by one wife truly”. It's probably fair to say they needed the money.
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