More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years

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Cricket remained largely an amusement of village peasants. There are mere glimpses of the game through the lost seventeenth century. In 1611, Randle Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary translated ‘crosse’ as ‘a cricket staffe’ and ‘crosser’ as ‘to play at cricket’, thus fuelling the occasional claim, surely erroneous, that ‘criquet’ is of French origin. Nor is it the case, as often claimed, that ‘criquet’ was played in France in 1478 before spilling across the Channel. There is no medieval text identifying ‘criquet’ as a game, since it was not: ‘criquet’ was, and is, the French name for an insect similar to a grasshopper, just as ‘cricket’ is in English. Moreover, an examination of the original text that has misled historians shows that the word ‘criquet’ was not actually used at all: it was in fact ‘etiquet’, meaning a ‘small stick’. The text reads: ‘une lieu où en jouoit a la boulle pred’une ataché ou etiquet’ (‘a place where people were playing at boulle near a stake or peg’ – ‘boulle’ probably being the game of boulles, or a forerunner of it, which to this day remains so popular in France).* (#ulink_dd813299-64f3-5a2f-9596-dc2b3f4daf9d) A further indication that cricket did not originate in France comes from a Swiss visitor, César de Saussure, one hundred years later, who reported, ‘The English are fond of a game they call cricket.’** (#ulink_5e96d5ea-c732-5d85-b9a0-a43e0920d61b) The English, not the French.

Even in the midst of Church and state persecution cricket began to take root, although, as with the earlier John Derrick case, it is sometimes only legal action that preserves a record of it. In May 1640,as the Civil War drew nearer, civil disputes still exercised the courts. A suit of trespass was brought in the King’s Bench Division in which the plaintiff, Robert Spilstead, alleged trespass on his land near Chevening, Kent, during which cattle did ‘bite the sprouts and young shootes thereof and … tread and consume his grasse’, and the defendants, Robert Shell and Michael Steavens, ‘did spoile and subverte his ground with carriages’ as well as ‘take and carry away 400 of hoppoles’. In response, the defendants pleaded that the rector of Chevening owned the tithes of all the woods growing in the parish, and that they were merely farming them for him. A complicated argument about boundaries and jurisdiction then followed in which, to support his case that the damaged coppice was within his ownership, Spilstead gave evidence that ‘about 45 years since there was a football playing and about 30 years since a cricketting* (#ulink_0f166dc2-e086-5818-930b-a1cde27d43ee) betweene the Weald and Upland and the Chalkehill’.

There is evidence that cricket may have begun climbing up the social scale by the 1640s, notwithstanding the distractions of the Civil War. On 29 May 1646 four gentlemen of ‘prophane’ Maidstone – William Cooper, Richard Marsh, Robert Sanders and Walter Francklyn – lost a game of cricket on the open common at Cox Heath, three miles south of the town, to two young Royalists, Thomas Harlackenden and Samuel Filmer. The nature of the game – and the politics of the victors – must have brought the Reverend Thomas Wilson close to apoplexy but it aroused great excitement in Maidstone. A bet on the outcome was laid – cash for candles, and when the loser failed to hand over the candles, court action followed.

Early fiction began to notice cricket, and it is one of ‘the games of Gargantua’ in an English translation of the works of Rabelais. But fiction can mislead as well as inform, and it did so with confident assertions that cricket was played in venerable colleges by the mid- seventeenth century. Although it is possible that it may have been, it is by no means certain. A reference to cricket at Winchester College in 1647 is based on an undated Latin poem, ‘De Collegio Wintoniensi’, by Robert Mathew, a scholar who left the college that year. It relates how boys climbed a hill to play a game involving a ball (‘pila’) and bat (‘bacillo’) which may have been cricket, but he makes no mention of that name. A later reference to cricket at Winchester, circa 1665, is total fiction. It derives from a purely conjectural account of a boy’s schooldays in W.L. Bowles’s The Life of (Bishop) Thomas Ken, published in 1830, which imagines how

our junior, ‘the tear forgot as soon as shed’, if it has ever for a moment been on his youthful cheek, is at ease among his companions of the same age; he is found, for the first time, attempting to wield a cricket bat; and, when his hour of play is over …

This piece of nineteenth-century fiction was seized on as evidence that cricket was played at Winchester and Eton in the mid- seventeenth century. This could be so, but fiction cannot be accepted as bona fide evidence.* (#ulink_bfa70452-9596-570a-b3f2-d9aef626a20c)

Nor can faulty memory. Writing about the genesis of club cricket, the Cricketer Spring Annual of 1933 records: ‘Fifty years ago, an aged villager, close on 90 years … recollected seeing an old print, then hanging in a wayside cottage, showing “Cricket on ye old Green”, and giving an approximate date of 1685.’ This cannot be correct, since prints of cricket matches became available only in the 1740s, so even if this unlikely tale has a basis in fact, the picture referred to could not date before the middle of the eighteenth century.** (#ulink_84572135-0d35-5a20-9381-1997c79a091a)

I am puzzled, too, by Altham’s assertion in The History of Cricket that ‘with the restoration [of Charles II in 1660], in a year or two it became the thing in London society to make matches and to form clubs’. If Altham is right I can find no evidence of it. So far as I can determine there is no record of a cricket match being played in London before the 1700s, and no mention of a club until 1722, sixty- two years after the Restoration.

Not that life was dull during the reign of Charles II. Popular history recalls the King as a merry monarch, easy-natured and lascivious, and a welcome antidote to the pious Puritans. Charles would have agreed with the American George Nathan that ‘Women and Englishmen are actors by nature,’ since he lifted an old prohibition and permitted women to act on the stage. Prior to his edict, women’s roles had been played by soft-featured young men, fearful that their voices would break and their careers be over. The way was open for Margaret Hughes, probably the first legitimate professional actress, who became mistress to Charles I’s nephew Prince Rupert, and went on to gamble away a fortune.

More famous names soon followed, including ‘a mighty pretty woman’ (according to Dr Johnson, a keen observer), who had probably had a relationship with the notorious libertine and poet Lord Rochester when very young. ‘Nelly, my life, tho’ now thou’rt full fifteen’, rhymed Rochester, before becoming more explicit. Nell Gwynne made her debut in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor at the King’s Theatre in 1665, and was soon to catch the King’s eye. Cricketers should be grateful she did, for as we shall see, descendants of Charles II and Nell were to play an important part in the history of the game.

By 1660 the Puritans were universally loathed, and the bells rang to welcome home the King. An ultra-Royalist House of Commons, eager to restore power to Charles, invited him home from exile. The loyal populace lined the streets in welcome, and soon cheered and roared as thirteen regicides of Charles I were brutally done to death. To satisfy the mob the half-rotted corpses of Cromwell and Thomas Ireton were dug up to be spat on and hanged. Three of the regicides had been captured in Holland, and handed over to face execution by one of the most unprincipled adventurers in English history. George Downing, an itinerant preacher, became a chaplain in Sir Thomas Fairfax’s Puritan army before worming his way into Cromwell’s favour. As Scoutmaster General– Cromwell’s top spy – in Scotland he was well paid, and he invested his money wisely. He married well, too, into the powerful Howard family, and was appointed British ambassador to The Hague, to which his Letter of Credence was written by Milton: ‘A person of eminent Quality, and after a long trial of his Fidelity, Probity and Diligence, in several and various negotiations, well approved and valued by us.’

In The Hague Downing spied on Royalists, including the future Charles II and his sister, the Princess of Orange. But his loyalties were elastic, and upon Cromwell’s death this Puritan favourite turned coat and became an avid Royalist. The cynical and worldly Charles exploited him as his own spy, and later, for services rendered, appointed him a Baronet. But nothing was ever straightforward with Downing. After a while he fell out of favour, was committed to the Tower of London, released, and then turned to speculative building. One street, on the edge of what was once known as Thorney Island, near Whitehall, still carries his name – Downing Street.

The nation’s fondness for the King did not last once his greed and self-indulgence became common knowledge. Within a few years the great diarist Samuel Pepys was noting of an alliance formed with Holland and Sweden that it was ‘the only good public thing that hath been done since the King came into England’. Nor did anything match it in the years that followed, and it is fortunate that the nation never learned that its dissolute King was willing to take a pension from its arch-enemy, the King of France. Yet even without that knowledge, faithful Royalist support began to crumble. Events did little to help the King. For the average Londoner life was miserable. Grime was everywhere, as every household, shop and factory burned coal. Clothes, rarely changed, went grey, then black. The plague of 1664 – the fifth in under fifty years – and the Great Fire of London two years later devastated the City.

To public dismay, in 1673 the King’s brother James married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. In 1678 Titus Oates developed the fantasy of a Popish plot by Jesuits to murder the King and burn London. The dissolute Parliament, in which Members were bribed and corrupted, was finally dissolved after eighteen years and a new Commons, hostile to the King, elected. Thrice dismissed, it was thrice re-elected. Charles died in 1685, muttering, ‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ but with no words of comfort for his country, and his brother came to the throne as James II.

In the midst of these dramas there are mentions of cricket, which was now beginning to attract spectators. The quarter sessions in Maidstone on 28 March 1668 were attended by Sir Roger Twysden, who observed in his notebook: ‘there was no great matter of consequence. A question was started whether an excise man could exact money from a poor person [who] at an horse-race or kricketing sold a bushel or two of malt made into drinks.’ The Justice waived the excise duty on ‘kricketing’, which must have brought more agony to the Thomas Wilson school of morality – as must a further decision to allow the sale of ale to spectators. Sport and alcohol were about to begin a long-term relationship. So too were sport and gambling. In July 1697 ‘a great match at cricket was played in Sussex; they were eleven of a side, and they played for fifty guineas apiece’. In the seventeenth century that was a large sum of money – but it would soon be dwarfed.

The game was growing more popular. Thomas Lennard, who became Lord Dacre just before his eighth birthday, was an early spectator. In 1674 he married Anne Palmer, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II and the Duchess of Cleveland, and as son-in-law to the King was further ennobled as Earl of Sussex. His wife, only twelve years old at the time of her marriage, had such a wild temperament that by the age of fifteen her husband had removed her from Court to Hurstmonceaux Castle in Sussex. In June 1677, no doubt seeking a few quiet hours, the Earl drew £3 from his accounts to attend ‘the crekitt match at Ye Dicker’, a stretch of common land near to the castle.

It seems the young Countess was not seduced by cricket, because later that same year she deserted her husband to join her mother in Paris. Here life looked up for her when she was seduced by the British ambassador, the future Duke of Montagu. In the early 1680s she returned to her husband, with whom she had little in common. A few years later Sussex supported William of Orange in the 1688 Revolution, while she sided with her uncle, the deposed King, James II, then in exile at St-Germain. It must have been a real Jack Spratt marriage, for their views differed on every matter. Nor would she have been pleased when the Earl’s extravagance and gaming losses compelled him to sell his estates.

But, so far as we know, their relationship never led to ‘riot and battery’. This was the conviction obtained against Thomas Reynolds, Henry Gunter and a widow, Eleanor Lansford, for battering Ralph Thurston while ‘being only spectators at a game of cricket’. The cause of the assault is not known, but it is most likely to have been a dispute over a bet: if so, they would have been wiser to have paid up, as did Sir John Pelham, Bart, who lost 2s.6d. in ‘a wagger about a cricket match at Lewis’ in 1694.

Five years later, philosophers were muscling in on the game. The text in 1699 of The World Bewitched, by Edward Ward, contains a dialogue between two Astrologers and the Author, in which it is asserted that: ‘Quoits, cricket, nine-pins, and trap-ball will be very much in fashion, and more tradesmen may be seen playing in the fields, than working in their shops.’

As the seventeenth century came to a close, the British navy was carrying traders, missionaries and the game of cricket to many parts of the world – a naval chaplain on HMS Assistance, Henry Teonge, recorded a game of ‘crickett’ near Aleppo as early as 6 May 1676. In England, the game was widening its appeal. Cricket was moving beyond its base camp around the Weald. London, then the greatest city in Europe, was beginning to appreciate it. Noble families were beginning to patronise the game. Spectators, gamblers and publicans welcomed it as a vehicle for their interests. The press – then, as now, with a London bias – newly freed from censorship, was on hand to publicise it, or more typically the antics of prominent supporters and the size of their bets on matches.

For cricket, money was to be the root of all progress. As the eighteenth century dawned, most of the wealth of England was in the hands of a small number of families, who by and large had few time-consuming responsibilities and ample leisure in which to enjoy their good fortune. The age of the patron was not far away.

* (#ulink_b8aab15c-f274-5df8-a697-033125073920) In this he echoes the eighteenth-century historian Joseph Strutt, who suggested that ‘the manly exercise of cricket’ originated from club-ball.

* (#ulink_912bb838-1bf5-5712-b986-8eb9e0b14ecc) He later produced an epic on the Crusade entitled Antiocheis.

** (#ulink_78cc45eb-4500-54a4-953a-5f2c4cf0f59f) Macaulay was never short of opinions. When he was a precocious toddler, his aunt enquired after a minor ailment and drew the reported response: ‘I thank you, Madam, for your solicitous inquiry. The agony has somewhat abated.’

* (#ulink_928cff20-abd6-53be-91a7-d9f0742db22b) The relevant extract from the deposition is shown in full, as the works of some early historians, notably H. S. Altham’s classic A History of Cricket (1926), contain errors of transcription. Altham also refers to Derrick as ‘Denwick’.

* (#ulink_a5ed5c70-24e7-54a5-b300-d45bdc9078f0) But see Coriolanus, Act I, Scene I: ‘What’s work, my Countrymen in hand?, Where go you, with bats and clubs?’ The game is unlikely to be cricket.

* (#ulink_4d928c7b-3e4b-5455-8ae3-5f8a5607a646) At a conference at Hampton Court between Anglicans and Puritans in January 1604, James backed the Anglican bishops. Shortly afterwards, a hundred Puritan ministers were dismissed from their livings.

* (#ulink_9fe04b60-906e-5935-8f1c-11f701753583) The children were William Martin, Richard Martin Junior and Raphe West, playing with two friends, Edward Hartley and Richard Slaughter.

* (#ulink_3e1409ae-2a0a-5bd1-bc02-e4ef2ea58cb4) Some historians mistakenly attribute the damning of Maidstone to Wilson himself rather than Swinnock, for example David Underdown in Start of Play (2000), and Derek Birley in The Willow Wand (1979) and A Social History of Cricket (1999).

** (#ulink_553f2937-19fc-582c-aa5f-798dddcf39aa) If he was imprisoned for libel, the offending denunciation should have been written. However, I can find no record of it: possibly ‘libel’ was used sloppily, and the offence was actually slander.

* (#ulink_6db3f02f-7834-560d-ba60-7491970d5fe4) For example, in 1637 the Star Chamber sentenced three Puritan writers to imprisonment and to have their ears cropped for libelling bishops.

* (#ulink_6b28921f-9f9c-5b66-a8e7-6b4b0716f9f8) In Ireland, the Major-General banned ‘krickett’. ‘Sticks’ and ‘balls’ were ordered to be burnt by the common hangman; the players were not.

* (#ulink_53536f86-110b-590b-b94d-207c588c3905) See Leonard Hector, ‘The Ghost of Cricket Walks the Archives’, Journal of theSocietyof Archivists, Vol. IV, No. 7, 1973, pp.579–80.

** (#ulink_53536f86-110b-590b-b94d-207c588c3905) Quoted in, for example, Derek Birley’s excellent The Willow Wand (1979).

* (#ulink_e9a9bb17-db4b-5650-ad75-8ed4cc21cba0) A term especially associated with the Sevenoaks–Tonbridge area until the nineteenth century.

* (#ulink_82d06167-9e8a-5635-87d7-8a40be73f489) Although it has been, for example in H.S. Altham’s The History of Cricket and Ashley Mote’s The Glory Days of Cricket (1997).

** (#ulink_74ba7b98-6f75-5943-8027-dba183954b7a) Nonetheless, the date of 1685 appears in David Underdown’s Start of Play.