Cricket from 1601 to 1620

See also:

History of cricket Origins of cricket Cricket from 1597 to 1600

The seventeenth century in England saw the transition of cricket from a children's game to a professional game via the evolutionary process of village cricket. This in its turn led to the formation of the earliest representative teams which eventually became the basis of county cricket. The key developments were the interest taken by the gentry as patrons and occasionally as players; and their recognition of the opportunities for gambling that the game afforded. This escalated in the years following the Restoration, when investment in cricket created the professional player and the first major clubs, thus establishing the sport as a popular social activity in London and the south of England. Meanwhile, English colonists had introduced cricket to North America and the West Indies; and the sailors and traders of the East India Company had taken it to the Indian subcontinent.

Cricket and other games in the seventeenth century

The seventeenth century began on Wednesday, 25 March 1601 in England and Wales (but on Thursday, 1 January 1601 in Scotland). On Thursday, 24 March 1602 (New Year's Eve; Julian date), Elizabeth I died to end the Tudor dynasty. She was succeeded by James VI and I (1566–1625), the first Stuart king of England (he was already James VI of Scotland). As it happened, he was a keen sportsman himself, but he was a golfer and it was during his reign that golf became popular in England.

Other bat and ball games included Bat and Trap in south-east England; Cat and Dog in lowland Scotland; Bandy Wicket in East Anglia; Tut aka Tut-Ball (see The English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright) in Cornwall and Devon; and Stow-Ball aka Stob-Ball in the counties of Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, north Somerset and parts of Dorset. According to Alice B. Gomme in The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, those games generally had batsmen, fielders and a bowler.

They all appear to have been originally single wicket or double-base games with the aim of scoring points. Some had variations whereby points were gained without taking a run; thus, if the ball was hit and not caught, a point was scored. Tut and stow-ball were local variations of the more generic stoolball and were played with bases. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), stow-ball and stob-ball appear to have been the same game and played with two bats, a bowler and fieldsmen in the middle of the seventeenth century. Stump, as in the lower part of a tree or its remaining stump, was the generic name for the dialect names of stob and stow, although stow also meant a wooden supporting frame used in small mining tunnels (see Oxford English Dictionary).

The noted anthropologist John Aubrey (1626–1697) in his Natural History of Wiltshire (1686) described stow-ball played in north Wiltshire while he lived there from c.1648 to c.1686. He records stow-ball being played in the evenings. The "withy" or willow staves were carefully shaped by their owners, or the local stave maker, and each son when he reached the age of eight was given two staves by his father. The ball was four inches in diameter with a sole leather case stuffed hard with boiled quills. The farm labourers used to hurry home from the fields to gather for a game in the evening. In Sport and Pastime in Stuart Oxford, Percy Manning records that a game of stow-ball was played on Bullingdon Green, Oxford, in 1667 on an area of three acres, which was much the same size as today's cricket grounds. Bullingdon Green, where many university students gathered, was a popular cricket venue in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Stoolball has survived and is still played today in the south-east counties. As for cricket itself, it had taken root in the south-east by 1600, but it was still predominantly a children's game played at local level only, though adults were beginning to adopt it too. Or rather, people who had played as children were continuing to play into adulthood.

The bats used in the seventeenth century did not have to be heavy like the four pounders of the late eighteenth century. They were light in weight (the 1729 bat at The Oval weighs 2.2 lbs) and were actually clubs shaped somewhat like a modern hockey stick. Hugh Barty-King in Quilt Winders and Pod Shavers: the history of cricket bat and ball manufacture (1979) records that the bat had a hockey stick shape with a broad flat surface at its base to hit or block trundled or skimmed deliveries (as we will see, the pitched delivery was not introduced until the 1760s and the modern straight bat was invented in direct response). The wicket was the same two-stump and single bail construction that prevailed into the 1770s. Mr Barty-King also records that an Englishman visiting Ireland in 1673 referred to the common people as playing bandy (hurling) with balls and crooked sticks "much after our play at stowball".

Early references

References to cricket remain sparse in the seventeenth century and the main sources tend to be legal cases, as in 1597. The main reason for the paucity of information is that printing was subject to serious constraints in England and it was not until nearly the end of the century that a cricket match was first reported in a newspaper. The earliest known English newspaper was published on Saturday, 2 December 1620, but not in England. It was produced in Amsterdam and reported on "Corrant (sic) out of Italy, Germany, etc".

Kent and Sussex

The earliest known organised match anywhere in the world took place around 1610 at Chevening in Kent. The reference is a court case in 1640 which records a "cricketing" of Weald and Upland versus Chalkhill at Chevening "about thirty years since". This is both the known beginning of village cricket and the first definite mention of cricket in Kent. As in 1597, the law case concerned the land on which the game was played.

In 1611, the first definite mention of cricket in Sussex occurs in ecclesiastical court records which state that Bartholomew Wyatt and Richard Latter, two parishioners of Sidlesham in West Sussex, failed to attend church on Easter Sunday because they were playing cricket. They were fined 12 pence (one shilling) each and ordered to do penance. In 1613, another court case recorded that someone was assaulted with a "cricket staffe" at Wanborough, near Guildford.

Randle Cotgrave

Also in 1611, a French-English dictionary was published by Randle Cotgrave (c.1570–1652). The noun crosse is defined as "the crooked staff wherewith boys play at cricket". The verb form of the word is crosser, defined as "to play at cricket". It is interesting that cricket was defined as a boys' game in the dictionary, as per the Guildford schoolboys of the sixteenth century, but that adults were playing it in Sussex at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It almost seems as if Mr Cotgrave was "overtaken by events" here. No sooner did he publish his dictionary than his definition was updated by the involvement of adults in cricket. There was another literary reference five years later by John Bullokar (1574–1627), the author of An English Expositor, in which he defined cricket as "a kind of game with a ball".

Declaration of Sports

In 1617, King James issued The Declaration of Sports (also known as The Book of Sports) which listed the sports and recreations that were permitted "on Sundays and other holy days". Initially, the declaration was effective in Lancashire only, partly as a reaction to Puritan suppression there of football (i.e., "mob football" in those days), blood sports and other activities which encouraged gambling. In 1618, the declaration was issued nationally and then reissued by Charles I in 1633. Cricket was not mentioned, although its near relation bowls (called bowling in the declaration) was on the prohibited list. The omission of cricket provides evidence, as such, that it was still an obscure regional activity. Also, perhaps, it had still not spread as far north as Lancashire.

The Declaration of Sports was strongly opposed by the Puritans, then an increasingly influential sect. Although the stated purpose of the declaration per se may seem sinister to our eyes, it was in fact an attempt to rebuke Puritans and prevent them from interfering in the people's lawful recreations. It had limited success until the Civil War began in 1642. The Puritans were by then in control of Parliament which closed the theatres and issued sanctions against other recreational activities although, again, there was no mention of cricket except when individual players were accused of "breaking the Sabbath". The manuscript was publicly burned by order of the Puritan Parliament in 1643.

Meanwhile, the future leader of the Puritans, 18-year old Oliver Cromwell, was reportedly playing cricket and football in London, where he was training at one of the Inns of Court. This, as it happens, is the earliest known reference to cricket in London.

Gunter's chain

In 1620, for purposes of land survey, Gunter's chain was introduced, having been designed by English mathematician Edmund Gunter (1581–1626). The chain is defined as a length of 22 yards long, and it was probably adopted at a very early stage by cricketers for measuring the length of the pitch. The pitch length was specified as 22 yards in the first known code of Laws in 1744 and it must have been a firmly-established rule long before then. Having a set length for the pitch probably enabled cricketers to determine some of the other rules which are related to the length, position and usage of the pitch. For example, the origin of the over is completely unknown, as is the practice of switching ends between overs but, from time immemorial until 1889, the over always consisted of four deliveries (it was increased to five in 1889 and to six in 1900).

Cricket goes overseas

Cricket did not arrive in Australia until the late 18th century. On Wednesday, 26 February 1606, the first European landfall was by a Dutch expedition from Java to New Guinea, led by navigator Willem Jansz (c. 1570–1630). Reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria, they went ashore on the western side of Cape York (northern Queensland) but, unaware of the Torres Strait, they thought they were still in New Guinea.

In the same year, James VI and I chartered the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock corporation for the purpose of trading in and colonising North America. The following year, the company organised the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, which was founded on Jamestown Island in the Virginia Colony on Thursday, 14 May 1607. Jamestown is believed to have been the first permanent English settlement in North America.

In 1609, the first English settlement in the West Indies (albeit not in the Caribbean) was established on Bermuda by shipwrecked colonists who had been part of a fleet bound for Jamestown. Blown off course by a hurricane, they succeeded in steering their ship onto the reef in Discovery Bay so that it didn't founder. As a result, everyone on board, including a dog, made it ashore and survived the storm. Living on what they could catch or find, they established a makeshift settlement by using salvaged tools and the native timber (Bermuda cedar). They also managed to build two small ships and, apart from caretakers who stayed to maintain the settlement, the majority sailed on to Jamestown next year. Their misadventures didn't end there, however, because Jamestown was afflicted by famine with few survivors left of the original colony. It was agreed that Jamestown should be abandoned. Everyone boarded the two Bermuda ships and they had just completed the evacuation when a relief fleet arrived from England. With fresh supplies and additional settlers, the colonists decided to return to Jamestown and persevere, but they endured hardship for many more years to come.

The settlement on Bermuda became permanent in 1612. It was originally called New London and it ultimately became St George's, the capital of Bermuda until 1815 when administration was transferred to Hamilton. Bermuda is a singular name although the country consists of over 180 islands. It is named after its discoverer, the Spanish navigator Juan de Bermúdez, who sighted the islands by chance when returning to Spain from Hispaniola in 1505. There was no indigenous population and the islands remained uninhabited until the English arrival. Formerly a Crown colony, Bermuda is now a British Overseas Territory (one of fourteen).

It was probably in either Bermuda or Jamestown that cricket was first played in the New World. Strictly speaking, of course, Bermuda is not a geographical constituent of the West Indies, being some 800 miles away from the Caribbean, but it is generally associated with the group for historical and cultural reasons.

In 1612, the East India Company established its first factory (trading post) at Surat following a naval battle with Portuguese ships in the nearby Gulf of Khambhat. Surat was the first firmly established English base in India and it was from there that English activity and influence began to spread. It is possible that cricket was first played on the sub-continent at this time.