The History of Lotteries: From Bruges to New Hampshire

Lotteries are older than the modern state, and their record is more tangled than the popular version suggests. Lotteries that sold tickets for prizes are documented in the Low Countries in the 1400s, run by towns that needed money for walls, churches and debts. From there the idea reached England, where Queen Elizabeth I’s lottery was drawn in 1569, and Jamestown, which the Virginia Company helped fund with lotteries from 1612. In the United States the Louisiana State Lottery Company grew into a national business after 1868, lost its mail business to a federal law in 1890, and held its last drawing in 1893. Legal lotteries returned only in 1964, when New Hampshire opened the modern era.

This article follows that arc with dates and sources, and it flags where historians disagree. Several famous claims, including the story that a Chinese lottery paid for the Great Wall, rest on thin evidence. The record also shows a cost: coerced ticket sales, corruption and public backlash led governments to ban the very games they had once promoted.

From Casting Lots to Selling Them

People have used chance to settle questions for as long as there are written records. The Old Testament describes land divided by lot, and Roman sources describe lots drawn to answer questions put to an oracle. Selling chances for a prize is a different and later idea. Accounts of Roman emperors differ: one history of lotteries describes Augustus handing out small presents to party guests by lot, while a report for the U.S. National Gambling Impact Study Commission says the first recorded public lottery in the West was held under Augustus for municipal repairs in Rome.

The better-documented story begins in the late medieval Low Countries. Historian Jeroen Puttevils writes that lotteries became established in Bruges in the early 1440s, and that the main prize of the 1441 lottery was a tax farm on wine inspection, alongside a score of money prizes. Among the buyers was the widow of the painter Jan van Eyck, who paid with arrears owed to her on the city’s annuities. That detail shows the city’s second goal: converting its debts into lottery tickets.

Puttevils identified 271 lotteries in the Low Countries between 1440 and 1600, most staged by city governments, churches and merchants. In the second half of the 1400s towns organized most of them. In the 1500s about a quarter came from churches and roughly 30 percent from private individuals, according to his count. Lotteries paid for fortifications, church rebuilding and poor relief, at a time when war and civil unrest had strained municipal finances.

From Elizabeth’s Lottery to Jamestown

Queen Elizabeth I announced England’s first state lottery in 1567, though some accounts date the project to 1566. Her aim, according to the Smithsonian, was to pay for harbor repairs and the royal fleet without a new tax. The scheme offered 400,000 lots at ten shillings each, with a top prize of £5,000 in cash and goods, and the Smithsonian, citing the British Library, reports that ticket buyers were promised immunity from arrest for crimes other than piracy, murder, felonies and treason. The drawing was delayed several times and took place in 1569.

It did not go well. Researcher P. S. Ball finds that under one twelfth of the tickets sold, that people were coerced into buying, and that organizers cut every prize to one twelfth of its advertised value to avoid a loss.

The next major English lotteries served an overseas colony. In 1612 King James I’s third charter authorized the Virginia Company of London to run lotteries for Jamestown, and the company built a lottery house at the west end of St. Paul’s Churchyard in London. The first standing lottery sold slowly and was postponed, according to Neal Millikan’s study of colonial lotteries, but from 1616 to 1621 company agents ran quick running lotteries in towns across England, with sealed tickets that revealed at once whether the buyer had won a prize or drawn a blank. The company estimated its income at £29,000 over five years. Captain John Smith called the lotteries “the reall and substantiall food” by which Virginia had grown.

The backlash arrived in Parliament. Millikan reports that when told of resistance in the House of Commons, James I replied that “he never liked the lotterie”, and on March 8, 1621 he ordered the company’s lotteries to stop within six months. The Society of Antiquaries of London notes that administrators had been accused of taking money from people who could not afford to gamble.

Turning Points: Annuities, Scandal and Bans

The first English state lottery, the Million Lottery of 1694, was a wartime financing device. The National Archives explains that most tickets cost £10 and buyers were guaranteed some return as a prize or an annuity. In 1769 the state lotteries changed to simple prize draws, which Millikan describes as a true hit-or-miss gamble, and ticket shares sold by stockjobbers brought in less wealthy buyers.

Historian James Raven notes that the English state lotteries faced strident protests over their allegedly corrupt and ruinous influence before they were abandoned. The final English state lottery was drawn at Coopers’ Hall on October 18, 1826, the 170th since 1694.

In the United States the decisive turn came after the Civil War. The Louisiana General Assembly chartered the Louisiana State Lottery Company in 1868 for 25 years, in return for $40,000 a year paid to the state, according to the U.S. House of Representatives’ history office. By 1890 its net profit exceeded $8 million, and it sold tickets nationwide by mail. Congress’s mail law of September 19, 1890 cut that route, and the company held its last drawing in 1893.

Aftermath: The 1964 Revival

In 1895 Congress went further, forbidding interstate shipment of lottery tickets and advertisements, which the National Gambling Impact Study Commission says effectively ended lotteries across the United States. Lotteries then ceased to exist in the United States for about seven decades.

New Hampshire broke the pattern. Governor John King signed its sweepstakes bill on April 30, 1963. According to New Hampshire Magazine, federal officials worried about racketeers, and tickets could not legally be sold or promoted outside the state. Tickets went on sale on March 12, 1964 at Rockingham Park, with Governor King buying the first $3 ticket. The sweepstakes was a horse race: ticket holders were matched to horses, and the race was run on September 14, 1964, after $5.7 million in tickets had been sold.

The experiment spread. The commission records that New York followed in 1966 and New Jersey in 1970, and that by February 1999 thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia operated lotteries. New Hampshire’s game was a sweepstakes drawn days or weeks later, much like colonial lotteries, and the commission notes that this older format later gave way to games with quicker payoffs.

Legends, Disputes and the Other Side

A widely repeated story says Han dynasty China used keno-style lotteries to pay for the Great Wall. The Smithsonian repeats it, citing a lottery trade association, but no contemporary record is cited for the claim, so it is best treated as a legend rather than established fact.

Even the first lottery is disputed. Scholars Gerda Reith and Marie-Laure Legay cite L’Ecluse in 1420, historian Puttevils points to Bruges in 1441, and a St. John’s Law Review study cites L’Ecluse records for lotteries in 1445 and 1446. The answer depends on what counts as a lottery with ticket sales and cash prizes. Elizabeth’s lottery carries several dates for the same project: John Ashton’s history says it was projected in 1566, the Smithsonian says 1567, and the drawing came in 1569. One Oxford library blog dates England’s last state lottery to July 1826, while Raven gives October 18.

The other side of the ledger matters too. Lotteries financed colleges, public works and colonies, but they also brought coercion in 1560s England, accusations against the Virginia lotteries, and, according to a National Gambling Impact Study Commission research paper, extensive bribery of state and federal officials in the Louisiana scandal.

Lottery Timeline

Related Stories

Lotteries are one thread in a longer story of chance, and WagerPast follows several others. The same urge to leave outcomes to luck runs through the older history of dice, which traces cubes and bone lots from the Ice Age through Rome. Casino games had their own rise, told in the history of roulette, and organized wagering on sport produced the story in the history of the point spread. Together they show how the games people play, and the rules around them, changed over the centuries, and how lotteries fit into that wider history of risk and reward.

Sources & References

• Jeroen Puttevils — The Lure of Lady Luck: design and appeal of lotteries in the fifteenth- and sixteenth century Low Countries (2015)
• P. S. Ball — Gambling in Elizabethan England: perspectives on England’s ‘Lotterie Generall’ of 1567–69 (University of Tasmania thesis, 2018)
• Smithsonian Magazine — Queen Elizabeth I Held England’s First Official Lottery 450 Years Ago (2016)
• Neal Millikan — “A Taxation Upon All the Fools in Creation”: Lotteries in the British North American Empire (NCSU thesis, 2004)
• Society of Antiquaries of London — Virginia Company Lottery
• The National Archives (UK) — Lottery Office records
• James Raven — The Abolition of the English State Lotteries, The Historical Journal (1991)
• Bodleian Libraries — Lotteries End for Ever, John Johnson Collection (2020)
• U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives — A Marvel among Swindles: The Louisiana State Lottery Company and the Post Office Department (2021)
• LSU Libraries — Topic Guide to Louisiana Lottery (1868-1895)
• National Gambling Impact Study Commission — Lotteries
• National Gambling Impact Study Commission — State Lotteries at the Turn of the Century
• Kevin Flynn, New Hampshire Magazine — How NH Defied the Feds, Mob and Church to Create the First State Lottery (2015)
• George F. Palmer — Bank Nights: Are They Lotteries?, St. John’s Law Review
• Gerda Reith — The Economics of Ethics: Lotteries and State Funding (2004)
• Marie-Laure Legay — Loteries et utilité publique (Presses du Septentrion, 2014)
• Gerald Willmann — The History of Lotteries
• John Ashton — A History of English Lotteries (Project Gutenberg)