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Charter and Drawing of the First Official English Lottery

When: 1569
Where: England
Part of: First Recorded Lottery in England at St Paul's

Queen Elizabeth I chartered the first recorded official lottery in England in 1566, which was subsequently drawn in 1569.

The English had previously experimented with raffles and games of chance, but the first recorded official lottery was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1566. The drawing of this lottery occurred in 1569, marking a significant development in English gambling history.

Sources

Lottery Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-18

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.