Origins of cricket

In the opening paragraph of his Phoenix History of Cricket, Roy Webber says:

"The origins of the game have been lost in the mists of time and it is unlikely that we shall ever know much more about early cricket than we do today. Several cricket lovers have spent years in libraries all over the country in an attempt to collect more data, but their work is restricted to the amount of matter available for research. And this is the real core of the problem: few newspapers of the seventeenth century are available and in those which exist little space is devoted to cricket. Apart from a few items, therefore, we are completely in the dark over the early years of cricket history, and can only deduce the story (my italics) of the spread of cricket from the sparse evidence available".

Webber wrote that in 1960 which, hard to believe, is over half a century ago. Yet he could have written it yesterday for, apart from a few small finds here and a number of corrections there, we do indeed know little more today than he did in 1960. Now, as then, 99% of what we know about cricket before the nineteenth century is to be found in the works of Altham, Ashley-Cooper, Britcher, Buckley, Haygarth, Nyren, Pycroft, Waghorn and a few others. There have been some good contributors since Webber's day but the best we can get from them is a new angle, another approach or a fresh theory.

The earliest definite reference to cricket occurs in 1597 and makes clear that the sport was being played by children c.1550, but its true origin is a mystery. All that can be said with a fair degree of optimism is that its beginning was earlier than 1550, somewhere in south-east England within the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey, quite possibly in the region known as the Weald. The minimal information available about cricket's early years suggests that it was originally a children's game. Then, at the beginning of the 17th century, it was taken up by working men. Soon afterwards, the gentry became involved and village teams were formed to play inter-parish matches. In time, it interested gamblers and developed a lustre that attracted large crowds to the big matches. Some of the speculators became patrons who built teams representing several parishes and then whole counties. The best working class players were offered money for their services and turned professional, many of them being contracted to the new clubs that were founded. Meanwhile, the game spread throughout England and was taken overseas, leading to a county championship at home and Test cricket internationally. In the 21st century, it is big business and is believed to be the world's second most popular spectator sport after football. Not bad for a children's game from some village in the southeast.

Dates

It should be remembered that the old Julian Calendar was used in England until Wednesday, 2 September 1752 and that the Julian year began on 25 March. The New Year was moved to its present anniversary on 1 January 1753, thus 1752 was England's shortest calendar year because it spanned 25 March to 31 December and lost 11 days in September to accommodate the switch to the Gregorian Calendar. This meant that a date like 10 March 1300 in the Julian Calendar would have been 18 March 1301 in the Gregorian Calendar. Where a Julian date applies, it has been labelled as such. Fortunately, the cricket season has never begun before 25 March and so the change of calendar in 1752 has little impact on this work and only a few comments are necessary. Incidentally, Scotland switched the New Year to 1 January in 1600 and then adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. For anyone interested in conversion of calendar dates between Julian and Gregorian, the site you need to see is Converting between Julian and Gregorian Calendar in One Step by Stephen P. Morse.

Club-ball

Several sources are in agreement that cricket evolved from a generic activity which they have named "club-ball". Desmond Eagar, the former Hampshire captain, wrote the first three chapters of Barclays World of Cricket and mentioned the eighteenth century historian Joseph Strutt, who was the first to declare cricket to be a descendant of club-ball. John Nyren in 1833 agreed with Strutt. In 1851, James Pycroft went further by saying that club-ball was the name by which cricket was known in the thirteenth century but that, of course, is speculation of the worst possible kind. A few years later, Arthur Haygarth wrote that cricket has "so close an affinity to the primitive and indigenous game of club-ball as to be a direct off-shoot".

Harry Altham wrote that "most of all did our own forefathers enjoy hitting a ball with that which it was second nature for them to carry, a staff or club, be it straight or crooked". He saw that routine activity as the "parent tree" of club-ball which split into three distinct groupings: the hockey group in which the ball is driven to and fro between two goals; the golf group in which the ball is driven towards a specific target; and the cricket group in which the ball is aimed at a target and then driven away from it. Therefore, although there is no definite link between them, the cricket group must include baseball and rounders as well as cricket itself. Interestingly, Altham seems to have forgotten the tennis group, unless he thought tennis involves "goals" and so is akin to hockey. Well, it isn't, so there are four groups which involve hitting a ball with some kind of bat, club, racquet or stick. John Major begins his account by saying that cricket at its most basic is a club striking a ball and the same, he says, is true of golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. Major goes on to demolish Pycroft's nonsense and quotes Nicholas Felix, who asserted that club-ball was a very ancient game, totally distinct from cricket.

As for what club-ball was, no one actually knows. Derek Birley asks if it ever was a specific game? He doubts that and thinks it was, after all, generic. As he puts it, "a catch-all term to cover any form of ball-bashing the citizenry were apt to waste their time on". David Underdown, who was Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, deliberately "side-steps" the debates about cricket's prehistory and dismisses them as speculation. He doesn't mention club-ball at all except to concede that, yes, young people probably did always play whatever forms of the numerous bat-and-ball games were popular in their localities. The only one of the theories he supports is the where as he believes cricket to have originated in south-east England. He states with good reason that, before John Derrick in 1597, there is nothing any historian can usefully say about cricket.

Origin of cricket

So, from all of that, where does the history of cricket begin? As we have just seen, numerous theories have been put forward about the sport's supposed origin and most of them, as per Underdown, can been dismissed as not worth mentioning. Tentatively, we can accept the general view that cricket did begin in the south-east and that it evolved as a specific activity from a more generic bat-and-ball one. It is credible, too, that there was almost certainly a Flemish influence in the naming of the game at least. While it is highly unlikely that "creag" (see below) was cricket, it is worthy of mention because of the timing and the location. It is known, thanks to John Derrick, that children were playing the game in Guildford c.1550 and the key date in this article is 1597 when Derrick made his legal deposition which mentioned the sport in terms of certainty. Everything before 1597 is scene-setting and build-up. Prehistory, as Rowland Bowen called it.

"Creag"

It may be accepted that there is a long inherent human characteristic which predates civilisation itself by millennia and impels children to play games and to use their imagination to develop what games they can from implements readily available. The question here is this. Did a child once invent a game that evolved into modern cricket or was cricket derived from a much earlier club-and-stone pastime? Was cricket invented at Guildford in the reign of Henry VIII? Did Longshanks play it and call it "creag"? Or, as the 1912 writer Andrew Lang insisted, was it a Celtic game played in 6th century Dál Riata?

It is widely accepted that Lang was talking rubbish and probably trying to create a "sensation". Anthony Bateman, in his splendid Mightier than the Bat, the Pen, politely but amusingly refers to "Lang's idiosyncratic belief in the Celtic origin of cricket". The Celtic children probably did play a game that involved hitting something like a ball with some kind of stick or club but if that evolved into anything modern then it would be hurling or perhaps shinty. And yet an expert on hurling or on shinty might well say: "No, it did not". There have been a few of these "theories" lacking credible evidence.

"Creag" is, however, an interesting case. It is specified in a real document written in 1300 when Edward I (Longshanks) was king of England. On Thursday, 10 March 1300 (a Julian date which converts to Friday, 18 March 1301 in the Gregorian calendar), royal wardrobe accounts include reference to a game called "creag" being played at the town of Newenden in Kent by Prince Edward (the future Prince of Wales), then aged 15. Creag is probably a variation of "craic", a Gaelic word which was part of Middle English and means "fun and games in general". It has been suggested that this creag was an early form of cricket, but there is no evidence to support that view and creag could have been something quite different as per craic. The idea that it was cricket is based on the Kent location because it is widely believed that cricket developed in the south-east of England in medieval times. The Weald is generally held to have been the "cradle of cricket" and one historian Peter Wynne-Thomas even says so in a book's title. John Arlott, long regarded as the doyen of cricket writers and broadcasters, firmly believed that the Weald was the key location.

1597 – first definite mention

Monday, 17 January 1597 (a Julian date which converts to Tuesday, 27 January 1598 in the Gregorian calendar) is the first definite date in cricket history. A court case in Guildford, Surrey, concerned a dispute over a school's ownership of a plot of land. A 59-year old coroner, John Derrick, testified that he and his school friends had played creckett (sic) on the site fifty years earlier. The school was the Guildford Royal Grammar School (founded in 1509), and Derrick's account proves beyond reasonable doubt that the game was being played c.1550 and, perhaps significantly, that it was played by children. Derrick's deposition is preserved in the "Constitution Book" of Guildford and he bore written testimony as to a parcel of land in the parish of Holy Trinity in Guildford which, originally waste, had been appropriated and enclosed by one John Parvish to serve as a timber yard. This land, said Derrick, he had known for fifty years past and:

Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies.

It has to be said now, and this is something upon which all authorities agree, that there is no evidence whatsoever of cricket having evolved from another sport and, vice-versa, none whatsoever that any other sport evolved from cricket. So, there is no evidence that cricket derived from stoolball or "club-ball" and, equally, no evidence, that baseball or any other sport evolved from cricket. The idea of using a club to hit a smaller object has been around since children first played games but it simply is not known if any of those ancient pastimes was the direct ancestor of cricket.

1598

Harry Altham and others have recorded the probable reference to cricket in an Italian-English dictionary produced in 1598 by Giovanni Florio (1553–1625), who defined the word sgillare as: "to make a noise as a cricket, to play cricket-a-wicket, and be merry". Some people think the reference is spurious and relates only to the insect variety of cricket but "to play cricket-a-wicket" hardly suggests insect activity. Given the reference to cricket as a boys' game in another dictionary only thirteen years later, it would seem that Florio had both an insect and a game in mind.

Florio's reference may be seen at Italian/English Dictionary: A Worlde of Words. The problem is that, in a later edition of his dictionary in 1611, Florio infers that "to play cricket-a-wicket" has sexual associations with references to frittfritt, defined "as we say, cricket-a-wicket", or gigaioggie and dibatticare, defined as "to thrum a wench lustily till the bed cry giggaioggie"! See Queen Anna's New World of Words, f.144 and f.198. All of which means that "cricket-a-wicket" was a euphemism for sex in the same way that "rock 'n' roll" originally was, and it might not actually refer to the sport of cricket.

1600

On Tuesday, 1 January, Scotland moved the New Year to 1 January from 25 March. England did not follow suit until 1752 when the Gregorian Calendar was introduced and, until then, dates from 1 January to 24 March were a year ahead in Scotland. On Tuesday, 25 March, for clarification, this was New Year's Day in England, twelve weeks after the Scots.

There are social reasons why cricket would have expanded in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It was a time when parishioners began to pay poor rates instead of holding "church ales" to raise money. Church ales were largely activities within each parish. Churches in medieval times brewed and sold their own ales. Sometimes it was to commemorate a particular festival such as Whitsuntide or it might be done on a seasonal basis. The point is that the sales were a significant means of raising funds for both church expenses and relief of the poor. It was done on a similar basis to modern fetes which are themselves a genteel continuation of the practice. But the ale sales were known for provoking rowdiness and their demise in the late sixteenth century owed much to pressure from the Puritans, who were beginning to make their presence felt in no uncertain terms. With the suppression of church ale sales, inter-village sport developed and there were competitions between parishes from the 1590s at football, Morris dancing, cudgeling and wrestling. It is likely that cricket matches were arranged too, though there is no actual evidence of them.

On Wednesday, 31 December, Elizabeth I granted a Royal Charter to the Honourable East India Company, often colloquially referred to as "John Company". It was initially a joint-stock company that sought trading privileges in India and the East Indies, but the Royal Charter effectively gave it a 21-year monopoly on all trade in the region. In time, the East India Company transformed from a commercial trading venture to one which virtually ruled India as it acquired auxiliary governmental and military functions, until its dissolution in 1858 following the Indian Mutiny. The East India Company was the means by which cricket was introduced into India and, hence, into Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

Wednesday, 31 December was the last day of the sixteenth century (Julian calendar) in Scotland. Tuesday, 24 March was the last day of the sixteenth century (Julian calendar) in England and so, as the century ended, it was known thanks to John Derrick that cricket was a sixteenth century game.

Notes

Bibliography

• Altham, H. S.: A History of Cricket, Volume 1 (to 1914). George Allen & Unwin (1962).
• Birley, Derek: A Social History of English Cricket. Aurum (1999).
• Bowen, Rowland: Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development. Eyre & Spottiswoode (1970).
• Major, John: More Than A Game. HarperCollins (2007).
• Swanton, E. W. (editor): Barclays World of Cricket, 3rd edition. Willow Books (1986).
• Terry, David: The Seventeenth Century Game of Cricket. The Sports Historian No. 20. Sports Library (2000).
• Underdown, David: Start of Play. Allen Lane. (2000).
• Webber, Roy: The Phoenix History of Cricket. Phoenix (1960).