Club-ball sports
Several sources are in agreement that sports like cricket, baseball, golf, hockey and tennis evolved from a generic activity which they have named "club-ball".
Theories
Desmond Eagar, the former Hampshire captain, wrote the first three chapters of Barclays World of Cricket (1986) and mentioned the eighteenth century historian Joseph Strutt, who was the first to declare cricket to be a descendant of club-ball.[1] John Nyren in 1833 agreed with Strutt.[2] 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.[1] 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".[3]
Groups
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.[4]
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. With tennis, there are four groups which involve hitting a ball with some kind of bat, club, racquet or stick.
John Major says 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.[5]
Practicalities
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".[6]
David Underdown, who was Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, deliberately side-steps the debates about cricket's prehistory and dismissed them as speculation. He doesn't mention club-ball at all except to concede that young people probably did always play whatever forms of the numerous bat-and-ball games were popular in their localities. Underdown states with good reason that, before the first definite reference to the sport in 1597, there is nothing any historian can usefully say about cricket.[7]