Pawn (chess) Pawn (chess) The pawn (♙,♟) is the most numerous piece in the game of chess, and in most circumstances, also the weakest. It historically represents infantry, or more particularly, armed peasants or pikemen. Each player begins a game with eight pawns, one on each square of the immediately in front of the other pieces. (The white pawns start on a2, b2, c2, d2, e2, f2, g2, h2; the black pawns start on a7, b7, c7, d7. e7, f7, g7, h7.) Individual pawns are referred to by the on which they stand. For example, one speaks of "White's f-pawn" or "Black's
Courier chess "Wigalois", and expected his readers to know what he was talking about. Heinrich von Beringen, about a hundred years later, mentioned the introduction of the couriers as an improvement in chess. Kunrat von Ammenhausen, still in the first half of the fourteenth century, told how he had once in Constance seen a game with sixteen more men than in the "right chess": each side having a trull, two couriers, a counsellor, and four extra pawns. He added that he had never seen the game anywhere else, in Provence, France, or Kurwalhen. Sometime shortly after 1475 someone put the courier on