Magyar kártya / William Tell pattern / doppeldeutsche. Piatnik, Hungary. Stripped regular deck, German suited, 33 cards. Size: 63mm x 100mm.
Deck make-up:
Hearts, acorns, bells, leaves: A, 7-10, under-jack, over-jack, king.
Extras: title card (double-sided).
The William Tell or double-German (doppeldeutsche ) pattern is popular throughout the former Austro-Hungarian empire. The cards depict William Tell and other characters from Friedrich Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (the title character is on the over-jack of acorns). The play's first Hungarian performance was in 1833 and the first decks were made by József Schneider of Pest around 1835. The characters from the drama were chosen to avoid censorship at the time of the Hungarian opposition to Habsburg rule (the story, after all, was about a successful revolt against the Habsburgs).
The aces (which are, confusingly, here shown with four pips, and are also referred to as deuces) break from the Tell theme and show each of the four seasons. The kings are generic and not taken from the Tell saga.
The variant shown here is a current one from Hungary; the Austrian versions have carried a few differences.
Click on any card to explore the design.
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Card image size, below:
The season on the ace of hearts is spring (tavasz in Hungarian). In general within German-suited packs, the under-jack is told from the over-jack by the position of the pip symbol. If it's placed lower down with respect to the main picture, it's the under-jack; if placed higher up, it is the over-jack. There are no queens.
This suit carried straight through to French-suited decks and ultimately to British decks.
The wonderfully evocative ace here represents winter (tél ). William Tell himself makes an appearance on the over-jack.
The acorn suit would (via an extremely approximate rendition of the design) end up as clovers / trefoils (trèfles) when the suit arrived in France. Once the suit got to Britain, the design remained the same as in France but it inherited its name from the Latin suit of clubs.
One theory about the appearance of the suit of diamonds when it eventually appeared in France (called carreaux (tiles) over there) is that it was taken from the appearance of the acorn – oddly coloured red – in some patterns, chiefly from Saxony:
The suit here is bells; specifically the hawk bells that are attached to the legs of birds in falconry (and are similar to the type of bells that cats wear on their collars).
The ace is summer (nyár ). Note that the 7 of bells in this pack is not 100% reversible (it features Piatnik's logo of a horse in lieu of an upside-down repeat of the crossbow).
It has been theorised that this hawk-bells graphic was somehow derived from a looking-down-into-the-cup view as used in some Latin patterns for the cups suit. Something like a corrupted version of this...
... another possibility is that it came from an earlier hunting deck.
The ace is autumn (ösz ).
This suit ended up as pikes (piques) in France, and then spades in Britain – both names being applied from the Latin suit of swords (swords are spade in Italian).
