History of Cricket

The game of cricket began in the Weald, in South East England. The landed gentry of the area adapted the game, took it to the great public schools and to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Thence the schoolboys amd students took it back to their estates. In Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire in particular, the game rapidly gained popularity. Through the army, cricket was introduced across the British Empire.

The search for when and where cricket started has occupied historians since the Reverand James Pycroft made the first attempt at tracing the story of the game in 1851.

A single statement by a witness in a court case in Guildford in 1598 contains the first definite mention cricket. John Derrick, aged 59, stated that at the time he was a schoolboy at the Free School in Guildford, he and his friends played "creckett" on a disputed piece of land in Holy Trinity Parish in Guildford.

Cricket was therefore bring played by boys in Guildford around 1550. In 1541, an Act of Parliament aimed at stimulating the practice of archery among the poplace banned people from playing and wasting their time on a list of games, but cricket (if called cricket) was not among those. Clearly, cricket was confined to the such a small area of the South East, that it was not worthy of mention.

The second definite mention of the game comes from Guildford too, from the hamlet of Wanborough. In 1613, a person was hit by another using a "cricket staff." Nine years later an ecclesiastical court in Chichester tried five youths of playing cricket on Sunday in the churchyard at Boxgrove, a local village. In 1624, a coroner's jury at West Hoathly in Sussex listened to a case in which a man accidentally hit and killed a fellow player with a small staff called a "cricket batt." These two men were part of a group playing cricket on Horsted Green.

Five years later, a curate of Ruckinge near Maidstone was tried in the Archdeacons Court. The was playing at "cricketts" with some parishoners after divine service on a Sunday.

These references to cricket continue through the seventeenth century. They are all confined, geographically, to the South East corner of England, from Chichester in the South West, up to Surrey and across South West Kent. The cresent neatly encloses the Weald - the area between the North and South Downs, which in Tudor times was the Black Country of England. 80 iron and glass foundaries flourished, using ample iron ore deposits and, for fuel, the charcoal which could be easily produced from the abundant supply of wood from the Ashdown and St. Leonards forests.

It has been suggested by some historians that cricket as an organised game began among the shepherds on the Downs, the theory that the shepherd's crook could be a bat and the wicket gate used for sheep pens could have been the stumps (often called the wicket). In addition, the pasture grazed by the sheep would have been an ideal surface on which to play. However, the first references to a cricket bat all suggest it was a small staff, whereas a shepherd's crook is more than 6 feet in length. The sheep grazed the land on the slopes of the Downs, rather than the flatter land which could be more useful for arable crops. The other argument against shepherds being instigators of cricket is that looking after sheep is normally a rather solitary occupation.

It is perhaps more likely that ironworkers and those involved in the trades connected with the iron industry were the ones playing cricket.

Whichever theory one accepts, cricket became popular in the Weald, which itself, was a closed community. The game took many years to break out of South East England.

In any case, most other regions had their own games involving hitting balls with sticks: Yorkshire had knurr and spell, Gloucestershire had stoolball, Scotland had golf, and Ireland had hurling.

In the second half of the seventeeth century, gamblers began to take note of cricket. In 1668, there is a mention of men selling drink at a cricket match near Maidstone and later the accounts of the gentry show money being paid for cricketing purposes, especially by the Earl of Sussex, who resided at Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex, and by Sir John Pelham, who lived in Halland, North East of Lewes.

In 1700, a series of matches was played on Clapham Common, with the players each betting £10, and in 1705 there is a mention of cricket being played on Walworth Common. Cricket was about to take London by storm. The first reference to a team styled "London" comes in a newspaper notice of 1707, when there were two "great matches" between London and Croydon, one in Croydon, one in Holborn. The days were now gone when the gentry and the people had no knowledge of cricket. A political pamphlet of 1712 attacking the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Townshend features the two playing cricket, supposedly near Fern Hill in Windsor Forest for 20 guineas.

That match may be fanciful, but cricket was certainly established at Trinity College, Cambridge, before then - Thomas Blomer, a fellow of the college, wrote in 1710 that the undergraduates were eating their meals too fast, in order to go out and play cricket.

The first detailed description of a cricket match was published in 1706 in London. The author was William Goldwin, who was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and had gone up to the universtity in 1700. The description was written in Latin, but the translation shows the game would be recognisable today. There were stumps, bails, a level pitch, two umpires, batsman dismissed bowled or caught, and the scorer recorded the runs.

With cricket now a common game among the landed gentry, as well as among the general public, and with money wagered on games, there must obviously be laws in place. However, historians can only find laws that were published in 1744, although it has been proven that these are a revision of previous laws.

Several of the great landowners in the South East were no longer content to go to matches and place their bets. They formed their own cricket teams and challenged one another. A 1725 letter reveals such challenges were taking place between the Duke of Richmond and his side near Goodwood, and Sir William Gage's side from Fearle near Seaford. A third challenger was Edward Stead of Kent. These games used to be played on the estates of the involved patrons, but in 1730 a major enclosed ground in London was in use - the Artillery Ground. It still exists in City Road, Moorfields. The landlord of the local pub built a wall around it, and charged money to watch matches there.

At the same time as spectators began to be charged, the first professional cricketers emerged. The Duke of Richmond and other members of the upper-class who raised teams were employing good cricketers as grooms, bailiffs, so that they could work on their estate. One of the first such was Thomas Waymark, who is mentioned several times in comtemporary reports. He was employed by Richmond.

Aside from those three teams, the priciple side of the 1730s was the London Club, whose home was the Artillery Ground. A 1732 report that a match was "the thirteenth match the London gamestars have played this year and not lost one match."

The stakes for matches increased to about £100, a huge amount at the time. Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of George II, had only just come to England from Hanover when he realised cricket was good for gambling purposes. In 1733, he picked a side to challenge Stead's Kent team for £30. In 1735, it had raised to £1,000 when the Prince opposed the Earl of Middlesex, the eldest son of the Duke of Dorset.

The cricket matches in London had begun to attract vast crowds, especially with numbers of rogues and vagabonds.

It had been the habit of aspiring teams to challenge London Club, but in 1744, Kent, raised by the Sacksville family at Sevenoaks, challenged the Rest of England. "Played on the Artillery Ground, it was described as the greatest Cricket Match ever known." The Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Richmond and many other notables attended the game. Kent won by one wicket. This is the first major match with the entire score preserved, so to speak.

Because of the enormous interest and vast sums wagered on the game, the laws were redrafted. James Love was commissioned to write a heroic poem describing the match which was published a month after the game. Love, whose real name was Dance, was the son of the architect of the Mansion House in the City.

Over the next decade or so, cricket matches were reported increasingly in the press, although unfortunately, not in their detailed score. The crowds had become unruly; which is identified by Robert Colchin. He was one of the best batsman of the London Club and at the same time a major figure in the criminal underworld. Respectable people began to turn away from matches, and eventually, the Honourable Artillery Company, owners of the Artillery Ground, stopped the playing of public matches there. Oxford and Cambridge tended to discourage cricket. In 1796, the Eton Headmaster flogged the Eton team for playing a match against his wishes.

In 1751, the dissolute Prince of Wales died, reported to be because a cricket ball hit him in the chest. The other cricket patrons faded away, and what major matches there were tended to be played in the country estates, rather than London.

A combination of unrelated events rescued cricket from the mire that it had fallen into. The game was to rise to new heights. Richard Nyren, whose uncles had been part of an outstanding team raised by the Duke of Richmond and centred on the Goodwood Estate, became the landlord of an inn in the Hampshire village of Hambledon. The Reverend Charles Powlett, son of Duke of Bolton and educated at Westminster and Trinity, Cambridge, was the curate of Itchen Abbas from 1763; his family home was near Basingstoke. Both were passionate about cricket. They created the Hambledon Cricket Club in the mid 1760s. It struggled for some years before it took off in 1772. In the subsequent decade, Hambledon Club built up a Hampshire side capable of not only taking on, but beating an England side.

Richard Nyren captained the side, which was normally an all-professional eleven. Several players came from Hambledon itself, but others came from distant areas, such as Northchapel and Wrecclesham.

Many of the gentry whom Powlett persuaded to join the club also tooke part in the social life of London and met at the Star and Garter Tavern in Pall Mall, which had been the unofficial headquarters of cricket and horseracing for many years. The Jockey Club had been founded there, and the laws of cricket revised there. In the 1780s, the members of the Star and Garter played cricket among themselves on White Conduit Fields in Islington. They decided they would like their own private ground, rather than using White Conduit Fields to which the public had access.

In 1786, two members of the Star and Garter, the Earl of Winchelsea and Colonel Lennox, the son of the Duke of Richmond, asked Thomas Lord, who was paid to help with the matches on the Conduit Fields, if he would find a suitable piece of land and set out a private ground. Winchelsea and Lennox promised Lord their full support, and Lord created what was to become known as Lord's Cricket Ground, in Marylebone. The first matches were played there in 1787. The cricket club of the Star and Garter, which was described of the White Conduit Club, soon became known as the Marylebone Cricket Club. The club itself can be traced back to the earliest revision of the laws in 1744.

Owing to the redevelopment and the building of Regent's Canal, Lord twice moved his ground to its' present location, where it was established in 1814. The Marylebone Club attracted most of the wealthy supporters of cricket, particularly those educated at the major public schools and Oxford and Cambridge. The club continued to be the forum for the revision of the laws, and was the most opulent club in the British Isles. Its position as the world's premier club has remained unchallenged since it was founded.

Cricket as a popular game was spread from its' South East England birthplace, throughout the British Isles by the landed gentry. The locals of Nottingham, Leicester, and Sheffield soon adopted the game of cricket. In Ireland, the game remained inside the landowners' parks.

The first plans for international cricket were made in 1789, when the Duke of Dorset, a patron of Kent cricket and British Ambassador in Paris, arranged for a side to play matches in France. When the side reached Dover to board the ferry, they were met by the Duke coming the other way. He was fleeing from the French Revolution, and that was the end of that idea.

During the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers in some regiments were encouraged to play cricket - Colonel Lennox, for instance, organised inter-militia matches in the 1790s. A game of cricket was played prior to the Battle of Waterloo.

As the British Empire grew, the army garrisons stationed in its various outposts took cricket with them. On the European continent, British residents in Paris, Rome and other major cities played the game, though the local inhabitants paid little attention to the British ritual. North America, with its' large number of residents of British descent, was the only part of the world outside the British Isles where cricket established itself in the eighteenth century.

The American War of Independence caused a break to the development of the game in the United States, but cricket recovered. In 1844, the first ever International Match was played between the United States and Canada. In 1859, an English touring side went to North America for a profitable tour.

The American Civil War finally destroyed cricket in North America, as matches between the United States and Canada were halted, and Americans adapted the game to create baseball. When the war ended, baseball grew at the same rate cricket languished. In the 1870s, the only stronghold of cricket was in the Philadelphia area.

Cricket remains a minority sport in North America to this day. However, in Australia, the game grew as the number of British emigrants increased. The development of colonies enhanced the game's reputation in Australia. The first inter-colonial game was played in 1850-51 between Tasmania and Victoria. Shortly after, the New South Wales team grew, and these matches were the highlight of the season until Test Match cricket came along.

With England unable to tour America in the early 1860s due to the aftermath of the Civil War, an entrepeneur arranged for an England side to go to Australia. The top players refused to go, but a Second Twelve went, and were successful financially, even though no match was evenhanded. Indeed most featured 22 Australians against 11 Englishmen.

The first people of Non-British stock to take to cricket in an organised fashion were the Parsee community of Bombay. They began playing in the 1840s and by the 1880s went on tour to England. From the parsees, cricket spread throughout India, and what developed was the great Bombay Tournament, between Europeans, Parsees, Hindus and Muslims. Until the Ranji Trophy came along (the Indian equivalent of the County Championship) in the 1930s, the Bombay Tournament was the major cricket contest in India.

The game's development in the West Indies and South Africa was through the military. The game established itself in Argentina, but was only played in the English communities.

The first team to come on tour to England was a side of Australian Aborigines in 1868. The team was not of first-class standard, but opposed local club sides in an over-ambitious programme of 47 two and three day matches. Charles Lawrence, a former Surrey cricketer, captained the side.

The starting point of 'modern' cricket, when over-arm bowling was legalised in 1864. In the following years, W.G. Grace began his career and created many records which succeding generations attempted to equal or beat. By 1864, both Australia and New Zealand held first-class cricket, where inter-provincial games had started. In the West Indies, the first inter-colonial games had begun. The first first-class game in the United States saw Australia oppose Philadelphia in 1878. 10 years later, a match at Port Elizabeth between England and South Africa marked the start of South African first-class cricket. Indian first-class cricket commenced in 1891-92, with a tour from England, and a match between the Europeans, and the Parsees. A Fijian touring side to New Zealand in 1894-95 had first-class status.

By the turn of the 20th century, outside of the British Empire and isolated areas such as Philadelphia, cricket remained a mystery.