England holds its first national lottery - January 11th, 1569

On this day in 1569, in a public square outside Old St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the drawing began for the first state-run lottery in English history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio, Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that pulls a winning number from history every
day of the week. I'm Gave Louizier and today we're
testing our luck with the story of England's first national lottery,

(00:23):
which gave citizens the chance to win cash, legal immunity, and,
if they were really lucky, a life changing amount of
good cloth. Linen to The day was January eleven, fifteen
sixty nine. In a public square outside Old St Paul's

(00:45):
Cathedral in London, the drawing began for the first state
run lottery in English history. Although the event wasn't as
popular as expected, each of the forty thousand or so
entries had been gearing t to prize, so the drawing
process dragged on for almost four months. The idea of

(01:07):
holding a national lottery had been proposed by Queen Elizabeth
the First nearly three years earlier. She had needed a
way to raise money for several large scale public projects,
including the reconstruction of most of the nation's docks, harbors,
and coastal defenses. Her father's reign had saddled England with

(01:28):
an enormous amount of debt, so if Elizabeth wanted to
repair the crumbling infrastructure, she would have to think outside
the box to find the funding. She essentially had two options,
increased taxes and risk upsetting the populace, or hold a big,
fancy prize draw and raise the money from ticket sales. Wisely,

(01:50):
the Queen chose the latter option and began making plans
for England's first state lottery. The Queen of England wasn't
the first ruler to use a now national lottery to
raise money for government projects. The strategy dates back to
ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty
of China, which reportedly used a type of lottery called

(02:13):
Keno to raise some of the funding for the Great Wall.
Smaller scale lotteries had been held in Western Europe for
at least a hundred years before England's first drawing. Selling
tickets for a chance to win a prize was a
reliable way for merchants to unload expensive merchandise that had
otherwise failed to sell. For England's first national lottery, the

(02:37):
stakes were much higher. First prize was of five thousand
pound prize package, the equivalent of more than a million
pounds today. The jackpot consisted of three thousand pounds cash
and an array of luxury goods ranging from tapestries and
wall hangings to gold and silver plate, as well as

(02:58):
an undisclosed quantity of quote good linen cloth. Second prize
was thirty five hundred pounds worth of cash and items,
and a diminishing value of similar prizes was offered for
any ticket drawn in third to eleventh place. However, all
other tickets were also guaranteed a prize of some sort,

(03:22):
and if that wasn't enough, the Queen added one extra
incentive to sweeten the pot. She decreed that any person
who purchased a ticket would be granted one week of immunity,
during which time they could not be arrested for any crime,
with the exception of murder, piracy, treason, and other serious felonies.

(03:45):
Despite the added draw of what was basically a get
out of jail free card, the lottery tickets didn't sell
as well as the Queen had hoped. That was mostly
due to the high cost of the tickets, which were
priced at ten shillings each the equivalent of about a
hundred and twenty pounds today. It was too steep a
price for most ordinary citizens, meaning that unlike the state

(04:09):
lotteries of today, which tend to target those with lower incomes,
the lottery of fifteen sixty nine was aimed squarely at
the wealthy. That high cost of entry proved to be
a mistake, as it greatly hindered the lotteries mass appeal.
Most people simply couldn't afford to gamble with that much money,

(04:29):
and many of those who could would have rather bought
their own good linen instead of waiting around in the
winter cold to see if they could win some. In
the end, it's believed that only about ten percent of
the four hundred thousand allotted tickets were ever sold. The
tickets themselves were specially printed slips on which a player

(04:50):
would write their name and a short note or phrase
known as a device. The idea was to write a
biographical sentence, or maybe a favorite max him or Bible verse,
something unique enough that the player could identify it as
their own if they heard it. For example, one of
the few tickets to survive from the fifteen sixty nine

(05:11):
lottery was a personal prayer from a cash strapped family man.
It read quote, God send a good luck for my
children and me, which have had twenty by one wife. Truly.
The system for drawing the prizes was straightforward, if not
a little bizarre. It consisted of two large urns, one

(05:35):
containing all of the players tickets and the other holding
an equal number of prize slips. To ensure there was
no cheating, the drawing was done by an impartial party,
which in this case was a blindfolded child. The child
simply picked a lottery ticket from one urn and then
paired it with a prize slip drawn from the other urn.

(05:58):
For the sake of privacy, the name of each winner
wasn't revealed at the drawing. Instead, the unique device written
on a ticket was read aloud, and whoever recognized it
could then go and collect their prize. This process was
repeated over and over until all forty thousand or so

(06:18):
prizes had been awarded. According to some accounts, the drawing
continued without pause, day and night from January tenth all
the way until May the six. It's a good thing
they only sold ten percent of the tickets, or else
they'd probably still be drawing prizes. As for who won

(06:40):
the jackpot, we sadly don't know. There's no record of
the names of any of the winners, but for my part,
I'm hoping the grand prize went to the guy with
twenty kids to feed. The lottery wasn't a roaring success,
but it still earned enough money to jump start those
much needed repairs to Lynn's infrastructure, and that came not

(07:02):
a moment too soon either, as less than twenty years later,
England's defenses would be put to the test by an
invasion of the Spanish Armada. Still, England's first lottery was
a bit of a letdown overall. For the next four
hundred years, the system fell in and out of use,
depending on who was in power. Unlike Elizabeth the First,

(07:26):
some rulers chose to skip the lottery and just raise
taxes instead. The current incarnation of the British National Lottery
was established by the administration of Prime Minister John Major.
It officially launched in and it's still going strong today.
The winning tickets are no longer chosen by a blindfolded child,

(07:50):
but really that's probably for the best. I'm Gay Bluzier
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you enjoyed today's episode,
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d i HC Show. You can also rate and review

(08:12):
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comments or suggestions, you can always send them my way
at this Day at i heeart media dot com. Thanks
to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for
another day in History class. For more podcasts from I

(08:41):
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