There are 34 Rules of Golf. And for those with a particular enthusiasm for their application, the current edition of the book of Decisions on the Rules, runs to 550 pages. One is tempted to think that if things were not considerably simpler in its embryonic days, the game might have died an early death.

Yet what they lacked in quantity, the original guidelines made up for in gravitas. Written by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744, they were adopted by the Society of St Andrews Golfers - the forerunners of the Royal and Ancient - 11 years later. Grandly titled the "Articles and Laws in Playing the Golf", they were admirably comprehensive for their time. But it would be almost another 200 years before the first worldwide unified code of rules was agreed. Coincidentally, that also happened to be when competitors were obliged to countersign their scorecard.

Writing about that landmark meeting between the R and A and the US Golf Association, American official Joe Dey reported: "Twelve men sat around a large conference table. They were in a committee room of the House of Lords in London. The 12 men represented the governing authorities of golf in Great Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.

"They were trying to develop a code of Rules of Golf which could be used uniformly throughout the world. In the main, this meant trying to reconcile the differences between the British and American codes, in substance and form. At the moment of which we write, the conferees were in deep discussion of a point. After full consideration, the British view prevailed.

"At lunch, the R and A representatives decided it would be preferable to change their position because of possible complications for the USGA. `That', said Lord Brabazon of Tara, `is the way to negotiate: you win your point and then concede it'." Still, after much discussion, agreement was reached and a uniform code came into use worldwide in 1952.

One suspects that matters were very much simpler when the Honourable Company set about their work. In the event, the original articles were:

I - You must Tee your Ball within a club length of the Hole.

II - Your Tee must be upon the ground.

III - You are not to change the Ball which you strike off the Tee.

IV - You are not to remove Stones, Bones, or any Break-club for the sake of playing your Ball, except upon the fair Green, and that only within a Club length of your Ball.

V - If your ball come among Watter, or any Wattery filth, you are at liberty to take out your ball and throw it behind the hazard, six yards at least; you may play it with any club, and allow your Adversary a stroke for so getting out your Ball.

VI - If your Balls be found anywhere touching one another, you are to lift the first ball till you play the last.

VII - At holing, you are to play your Ball honestly for the hole and not to play upon your Adversary's Ball, not lying in your way to the Hole.

VIII - If you should lose your Ball by its being taken up, or in any other way, you are to go back to the spot where you struck last, and drop another Ball, and allow your Adversary a stroke for the misfortune.

IX - No man, at Holing his Ball, is to be allowed to mark to the Hole with his Club or anything else.

X - If a Ball be stop'd by any person, Horse, Dog, or anything else, the Ball so stopped must be played where it lies.

XI - If you draw your Club in order to strike, and proceed so far in the stroke as to be bringing down your Club - if then your Club shall break in any way, it is to be accounted a stroke.

XII - He whose Ball lies farthest from the Hole is obliged to play first.

XIII - Neither Trench, Ditch nor Dyke made for the preservation of the Links, nor the Scholars' holes, nor the Soldiers' lines, shall be accounted a Hazard, but the Ball is to be taken out, Teed, and played with any iron Club.

In those early days, the rules dealt only with matchplay, so the principles were consequently simple. Essentially, if you lost your ball, infringed a rule or found it impossible to play the ball as it lay, you lost the hole and walked to the next tee. It was also a time when the adage "Play the ball where it lay" reflected the spirit of the game.

There were only two exceptions to the principle that the ball should not be touched by hand during the play of a hole. These had to do with the nature of the terrain. For instance, the "Break-club" referred to in Article IV was a large pebble or similar obstacle which, if within a club-length of the ball, could be removed without penalty. Similarly, a ball in "Wattery filth", which was the slime left by the receding tide, could be lifted for a penalty of one stroke.

Interestingly, there was no provision for a lost ball or a ball out of bounds. Indeed, as the game evolved, societies and clubs made their own rules and it gradually became apparent that some sense of uniformity would have to be achieved.

Though the St Andrews Golfers - later the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews - was not the oldest of the Scottish societies, it became the acknowledged authority on the regulations of the game.

Meanwhile, in the context of the game being formalised, it should be noted that the second half of the 18th Century saw Scotland embrace the beginning of the industrial revolution. As a consequence, the population of Glasgow rose from 17,000 in 1740 to 42,000 in 1780 and to 84,000 by the end of that century.

Concurrent with these developments was the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, which caused Edinburgh to become known as the "Athens of the North". So it was that from a time when it was considered to be a land of barbarians, Scotland became a centre of learning and academic achievement. And golf was an inextricable part of these dramatic changes.

As far as the rules were concerned, it was only with the advent of strokeplay that it became necessary to broaden their application, otherwise it would not have been possible for a competitor to complete a scorecard. But an attempt by the St Andrews club to define "unplayable" required almost as many words as the original 13 articles combined. And as Harry Bradshaw discovered during his "ball-in-the-bottle" incident in the British Open at Royal St George's, it hadn't been clarified even by 1949.

Things were headed in the right direction, however, when the R and A formed their Rules of Golf Committee in 1897. Then, in 1922, limitations were imposed on the weight and size of the golf ball; in 1929 steel shafts were permitted for the first time and in 1939 a maximum of 14 clubs was introduced.

Under another revision in the autumn of 1949, committees were empowered to disqualify players who unduly delayed others. Three years later, this was modified to loss of hole or a two-stroke penalty, though disqualification was retained for repeated offences.

It was to become an intriguing development in the light of events in 1996. That was when the words "Slow Play" were mentioned in the rules for the first time. And those cynics among us could have been forgiven for wondering, after all the various committee meetings and rule changes, if this was the price of progress.