Читать книгу More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years - John Major, John Major - Страница 7

But we don’t know how long. The search for the birth of cricket has been as fruitless as the hunt for the Holy Grail: neither can be found.

What is cricket, at its most basic? It is a club striking a ball: so are golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. So are the ancient games of club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, stob-ball, each of which some scholars have been keen to appropriate as ‘early cricket’. The nineteenth-century pioneer historian the Reverend James Pycroft asserts, without proof, that ‘Club-ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for cricket in the thirteenth century.’* His case, however, collapses in the light of later evidence, and the great mid-nineteenth- century cricketer Nicholas Felix (a pseudonym – his real name was Nicholas Wanostrocht) was more likely right when he wrote: ‘Club ball is a very ancient game and totally distinct from cricket.’

The paucity of early mentions of cricket has led to some farfetched assumptions about games that might have been cricket, but probably are not. The poet and scholar Joseph of Exeter is said to have written in 1180:

The youths at cricks did play

Throughout the merry day.

If they did so, no one else noted it for hundreds of years. This claim has other defects, too: the couplet sounds more eighteenth-century than twelfth, and all Joseph’s known writing is in Latin. In any event, in 1180 Joseph was onhis way to the Third Crusade as an official chronicler, and thoughts of ‘youths’ and ‘merry days’ may not have been uppermost in his mind.* We can dismiss Joseph of Exeter. Even less likely is the evidence of an eighth-century monk, Eustatius Constacius, that cricket was played in Florence for the entertainment of Parliament.

Much ink has been spilled by historians over an entry, in 1300, in the wardrobe accounts of King Edward I referring to the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future Edward II, playing ‘creag’ and other sports with, as some have suggested, his childhood friend the lamentable and doomed-to-a-bad-end Piers Gaveston. It is evident that ‘creag’ is a game, but it requires a mighty leap of faith to claim that it was cricket; the kindest judgement that can be made upon this romantic assumption is ‘not proven’. In any event, could the villainous Gaveston have been a forefather of cricket? I hope not, and fortunately I think not.

Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of history that ‘It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.’** In the absence of concrete evidence, of documentary proof, of contemporary records, his maxim holds true of the genesis of cricket. It may have been played under another name earlier than we know, but since its birth is shrouded in legend and mystique, we cannot be certain. The silence of antiquity suggests that the game was not played in ancient times, but does not prove that it was not. It is probable that games such as club-ball were ancestors of cricket, but they cannot be acknowledged as the game itself, and should not be assumed to be so. As the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam wrote: ‘Things not known to exist should not be postulated as existing.’ This is a good principle for soundly-based history. Although the mists and myths are enticing, the truth is more prosaic: cricket evolved from instincts and games as old as man himself.

But when? Here we may be on firmer ground. 1598 was a memorable year. The weather was foul that winter, and on 21 December, in a mini-ice age, the Thames froze. A week later, in a snowstorm, men of the Chamberlain’s Company of Actors, led by Richard Burbage and armed in case of unwelcome interruptions, dismantled a theatre in Shoreditch, loaded it onto wagons and transported it through Spitalfields and Bishopsgate to a waterfront warehouse. From there it was ferried across the Thames to be rebuilt on a new site. They called the new theatre the Globe, and the players’ favourite son, William Shakespeare, had part-ownership of it.

That Christmas Shakespeare had a new play, Much Ado About Nothing, which the players performed at Court for Queen Elizabeth I. A similar view might have been held about a contemporary court case over land ownership. Mr John Derrick, otherwise a forgotten English gentleman, testified to a Guildford court that: ‘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.’* W.G. Grace cast doubt on this in his Cricket (1891), and suggested that a local historian may have inadvertently substituted ‘cricket’ for ‘quoits’. It is not clear why he thought this. As Mr Derrick was a coroner, it is likely that his deposition was accurate. And as he was then nearly sixty years of age, he would have been a young scholar around 1550–60, thus giving us a precious date by which cricket was being played.

It is not surprising that cricket attracted little contemporary attention, for greater matters were afoot. Within a few years of the death of Henry VIII in 1547 a mighty struggle for souls was raging as the religion of the state swung from Protestant (under Edward VI) to Catholic (under Mary), and back to Protestant once more (under Elizabeth I). Henry VIII had been sufficiently even-handed to persecute Protestants and Catholics alike, but his children were more discriminating, and burned, hanged or imprisoned only their religious opponents. Predictably, in the midst of the carnage cricket did not get a look-in. Nonetheless, Derrick’s deposition suggests that the game existed, under its current name, during the 1550s, although it cannot have been widespread. It may not have fitted into the lifestyles of the middle and upper strata of society. Behind the mullioned windows men drank beer for breakfast before hunting wildlife on uncultivated heaths and shooting pheasant, duck, partridge and snipe, while their womenfolk gossiped over needlework, wrote letters, read, and supervised the kitchen. Large families were commonplace, but half of all children failed to reach adulthood, and none, it seems, played cricket. The game makes no appearance in Shakespeare,* Jonson or Marlowe, there is no known reference to it in mid- sixteenth-century statutes, nor does it appear in surviving memoirs or letters of the time. Not even Brer Rabbit in his briar patch managed such a low profile. Cricket must have been played only by a minority, probably peasants, and even then spasmodically, to have remained so unnoticed and unrecorded.

Or, sometimes, mis-recorded. A contemporary reference to the England of Queen Mary reads as follows:

They make there, divers sort of puppet works or Babyes, for to bring up children in vanitee. There are made likewyse, many kyndds of Bales, Cut-Staves, or Kricket-Staves, Rackets, and Dyce, for that the foolish people should waste or spend their tyme there-with, in foolishness.

This reference to ‘Kricket-Staves’ is a real trap. The text was written by a Westphalian, Hendrick Niclaes, who lived in England during Queen Mary’s reign, where his name was anglicised to Henry Nicholas. A deeply religious man, a Protestant, who disapproved of pleasure, he founded a sect that gained a foothold in Cambridgeshire and Essex. For this initiative he was imprisoned by Queen Mary and released by Queen Elizabeth, following which he sensed the tenor of the times and wisely returned home to Cologne. Niclaes was theauthor of religious tracts, and it is one of these, Terra Pacis, published in Amsterdam – probably in 1575, but written earlier – and translated from its original Base-Almayn (Low German being his native tongue in Westphalia), which contains the reference to ‘Kricket-Staves’. But it is a mistranslation: the original word was ‘kolven’, meaning ‘clubs’: Niclaes was referring to one of the many forms of club-ball. Despite this, the English version of Terra Pacis does have a legitimate claim to fame. It was thought to have inspired John Bunyan as the former tinker lay in Bedford prison eighty-five years later, when he began The Pilgrim’s Progress, his enduring allegory of travel ‘from this world to that which is to come’. If so, Herr Niclaes deserves an honoured footnote in the histories of religion and of literature – but not of cricket.

As young John Derrick enjoyed his boyhood cricket, England was astir. The mid-1500s were years of peril: England’s relationship with its northern neighbour Scotland had broken down, reawakening the dangers of a Franco–Scottish threat to the realm. The economy was weak, the coinage debased, the Protestant–Catholic dispute unsettled, Puritanism was emerging and there were dangers aplenty on every front. It was an age calling for great men and great deeds, and Elizabeth was lucky: Cecil and Walsingham guided policy, and, when not wreaking havoc on our enemies, Raleigh, Drake and Hawkins stood guard on England’s shores, while Marlowe, Jonson and Spenser joined Shakespeare in pouring genius onto parchment.

In the midst of this tumultuous century an unknown rural genius, somewhere in the Weald of south-east England, tweaked some ancient game and cricket was born. As anonymous as his ancient forebear the inventor of the wheel, he would have gained immortality had his name become known. Alas, it did not, though his shade can rest content that he built a game for all time.

Primitive cricket was a pastime for the grassroots of English life, and was unburdened by the sophistication of years to come. It did not have eleven players a side. Nor were there two umpires. No one wore whites. There were no recognised field placings. Rules of play were haphazard. There were no six-ball overs. Runs were recorded by innumerate peasants who cut notches on a stick. Accepted laws lay far in the future. But the essentials of the game were already evident. A player with a bat, oddly misshapen by today’s standards, defended a crude wicket, squat and without a middle stump, against another player with a ball who ‘bowled’ underarm and attempted to break the wicket to ‘put out’ the batsman.

We can conjecture more. The ‘batsman’ faced the bowler more square-on than side-on, with the ‘bat’ held well away from his unprotected legs; with that stance he must have hit the ball mainly on the leg side. The theory of ‘side-on’ batting, with the left elbow pointing down the wicket, was far away – as indeed was side-on overarm bowling, with the lead arm used for balance and as a direction-finder. Such refinements were over two hundred years away from this crude sixteenth-century forerunner of the game we know today.

The Elizabethan age died in the early hours of 24 March 1603, and James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I. It was a turbulent time, during which resistance to the absolute rule of kings was to grow, and with it the demand for greater liberty. Some antipathy had begun to emerge in Elizabeth’s reign, but she was wise enough to know when to offer what was desired before it was forced from her – on the question of monopolies, for example. James had no such gift, and his errors of judgement paved the way for revolution. He was graceless and merciless towards his opponents, among whom were the adherents of the infant sect of Puritanism, which had plagued him in Scotland. His response was to persecute them,* but they grew in strength and he grew in unpopularity. A cinder was smouldering that would lead to revolution.

The new Stuart age of the seventeenth century opened a lost century for cricket. Other interests prevailed. Wigs were coming into fashion. Hamlet, the greatest of all ghost stories, made its debut in 1600, and the East India Company was founded, to become in time a building block of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Nonetheless, cricket was spreading slowly. Its cradle was Kent, Sussex and Surrey, but it rarely merited public attention, and what scraps we know of it come from court hearings, inquests, church records and the pitiful number of letters and diaries that have survived the years.

It was a bloody age for the birth of a graceful game. Two years into the new reign of James I, in 1605, Guy Fawkes and his coconspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered for conspiring to blow up Parliament: it was thought not to be cricket. Or, more likely, cricket was not thought of at all, for the game is not even mentioned in the Book of Sports (1618). It was known to the authorities, however, and frowned upon, although playing it at the wrong time attracted only minor penalties. But penalties there were.

The Church, refreshed by the new King James Bible (1611), was severe on defaulters. Sunday was for worship, and perhaps a day of rest. It was not a day for enjoyment. Cricket, when the Church was not condemning it as ‘profane’, was deemed to be fun, and fun was not to be had on the Sabbath. A string of cases in Sussex and Kent opens a window on seventeenth-century attitudes and casts a searchlight on the infancy of cricket.

On Easter Sunday, 1611, Bartholomew Wyatt and Richard Latter chose cricket in preference to divine service at Sidlesham church in Sussex, outraging the churchwardens. The Archdeacon too was furious. Such a heinous sin merited punishment, and at a consistory court held in Chichester Cathedral the two men admitted their guilt, and were fined twelve pence and ordered to pay penance. They did so, but a greater penalty was to come. A year later, both men were married in Sidlesham on successive days, but for one of them there was to be no happy ever after: the new Mrs Latter died within three months, and Richard Latter by 1616. It was, thought the faithful, divine retribution.

The unfortunate Richard Latter was very likely related to the Latters of the adjoining parish of Selsey, and thirty-one years later the travails of young Thomas Latter provide a further indication that the game was passed down the generations. Thomas had hit Henry Brand of Selsey on the head ‘with a cricket batt’, testified Henry’s sister Margaret at Arundel quarter sessions in January 1648. It is unclear whether the cause of the fatal injury was malicious or accidental, but since Margaret accepted twenty-six shillings’ compensation for her brother’s death it is likely that it was no more than a mishap. It is not known if the episode dampened the Latter family enthusiasm for cricket, but it would not be surprising if it had. It must have been terrifying to face the quarter sessions accused of causing a death.

This was not a unique case. Twenty-four years earlier, at nearby Horsted Keynes in 1624, Jasper Vinall died in a bizarre accident. He and his friend Edward Tye were playing cricket when Tye hit the ball straight up in the air and attempted to hit it again as it fell. As he did so, Vinall, seeking to catch the ball, ran in behind his back and was struck heavily on the forehead by the flailing bat (value ½d, as the inquest noted). The coroner’s jury acquitted Tye of malice and brought in a verdict of misadventure – proper in law, no doubt, but death by enthusiasm would have been more apt. The moment of taking a catch at cricket is one of total absorption and pure joy, and in that exultant mood poor Jasper was robbed of life.

Although the Church was generally prickly about cricket, there were exceptions. The ‘old churchwardens’ of Boxgrove, Sussex – Richard Martin Senior and Thomas West – were in hot water in 1622 for ‘defending and mayntayning’ the playing of cricket by their children.* Their arraignment in the church was clearly the end of a long saga, for the children had apparently been given ‘sufficient warning’ to desist and had ignored it; even worse, they played in the churchyard and ‘used to break the church windowes with the ball’. It was also contended that ‘a little childe had like to have her braynes beaten out with a cricket batt’, although there was no evidence that such an incident had occurred. Nonetheless, a zealot thought it might, and the charge sheet was lengthened. The intriguing element of this case is the fathers’ encouragement of the game, which suggests that they too had played cricket as children – probably around 1580–90.

The Church authorities continued to look on with disapproval. It seemed evident to them that not only was the game a thoroughly bad influence on godliness, it was thoroughly dangerous as well. Miscreants continued to be punished. In 1628, East Lavant in Sussex was a hotbed of mischief. At an ecclesiastical court in Chichester on 13 June, Edward Taylor and William Greentree were charged with ‘playing at cricket in tyme of divine service’. Their defences differed. Taylor admitted that he was ‘at a place where they played at cricket both before and after evening prayers but not in evening prayer time’. It did him no good: he was fined twelve pence for non-attendance at church and ordered to confess his guilt before the entire congregation of East Lavant church on Sunday, 22 June, in the following terms:

Whereas I have heretofore highly displeased Almighty God in prophaning his holy Sabbath by playing at Crickett thereby neglecting to come to Church to devine service. I am now hartily sorry for my said offence desiring you here present to accept of this very penitent submission and joyne with me in prayer unto Almighty God for the forgiveness thereof saying Our Father which art in heaven …

Greentree was more brazen. He denied the offence until the court heard evidence to the contrary from the churchwarden. Faced with this deposition, Greentree offered a partial confession that ‘he hath bene some tymes absent from Church upon the Sabbath day in tyme of divine service and hath bin at cricket with others of the parishe’. He was sentenced to return to court on 20 June, but no further records survive.

The ritual of apology must have made some members of the congregation very uncomfortable, for eight other men from the same village faced a similar charge only one month later. All received similar sentences, and the rigmarole of public penance was repeated, although the evidence suggests that it was not very effective.

By the 1630s the joyless spirit of Puritanism began to creep over the land. Its nature is exemplified in the life of the Reverend Thomas Wilson, an extreme Puritan who was appointed to the living of Otham, near Maidstone, in 1631. Forty-one years later his biography was written by an admirer, George Swinnock, who wrote of Maidstone: ‘Maidstone was formerly a very prophane town, insomuch that I have seen Morrice dancing, Cudgel-playing, Stool-ball, Crickets, and many other sports open and publickly on the Lords Day … the former vain sinful customes of sports were reformed before his coming.’* The Reverend Wilson’s career was mixed. He was suspended from his living in 1634 by the vehement anti-Puritan Archbishop Laud (1573–1644), and left Otham for Maidstone, accompanied by some of his flock. The warm welcome he received from like-minded souls suggests that Maidstone was not entirely populated by ‘prophane’ lovers of fun.

A further biography of another Puritan, Richard Culmer, by his son, also named Richard, reveals that he was suspended as Rector of Goodnestone, Kent, in 1634 for refusing to read the Book of Sports. Known as ‘Blue Dick’ for his eccentric habit of wearing a blue gown, the vengeful Reverend Culmer denounced the alleged informant who caused him to be suspended at Goodnestone so fiercely that he was imprisoned in the Fleet Prison for libel.** Around 1639 this joyless cleric was made assistant to the Reverend Austin of Harbledown parish, near Canterbury, where he rapidly became detested for seeking to suppress Sabbath sports and drunkenness. The parishioners of Harbledown were made of sterner stuff than those who had issued apologies so lamely in other places. In Harbledown, instead of penance, the cricket-loving parishioners provoked ‘Blue Dick’ by ‘crickit playing before his door, to spite him’. I daresay they succeeded.

But ‘Blue Dick’ was not easily swayed from his convictions. He reproved the cricketers privately, and then – since this had no effect – publicly. The cricketers remained defiant, but cunning replaced provocation and they moved their game to ‘a field near the woods’ in a remote part of the parish that was well away from prying eyes. It did not work. A suspicious Culmer sent his son to investigate, but Richard Junior was forced to retreat rapidly, followed by a hail of stones thrown at him by the irate cricketers. Time draws a veil over how, or whether, the stand-off was resolved.

The Reverend Culmer does not disappear from history – nor does his fanaticism. In 1643, in true Puritan style, he was appointed to destroy ‘irreligious and idolatrous’ monuments in Canterbury Cathedral. This was a task to his taste, and he set to with a will and wrecked much of the fifteenth-century stained glass with his own hands. Later, he conspired to have the rector of Minster ejected from his living and was himself appointed to it: at once he began to squabble with his new parishioners. His behaviour became ever more eccentric, and on one occasion he swarmed up the church steeple by night and removed the cross from the spire. The local parishioners were by now used to the exploits of their rector, and simply observed that to finish the job properly he should have pulled down the entire church, since its ground shape was itself a cross. The Reverend Culmer may stand forever as an icon of religious intolerance, and given the tenor of the times, his cricket-loving parishioners were lucky that he proved so ineffective.

The Puritan ambition, even pre-Cromwell, to create a devout nation gave power to the Church that was too often misused by fanatics. Social conditions added to the influence of the clerics. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the entire population of England was a mere 4 to 4½ million, of whom nearly 80 per cent lived south of the Humber, mostly in parishes of four to five hundred souls. The members of these small communities looked to their cleric and their squire for social and moral guidance, and rarely travelled beyond their own village. Most people were poor. Incomes were low and rents were high. Hardship was a daily reality. But where life was wretched, an early Poor Law existed to bring relief from distress. The Privy Council encouraged justices of the peace to find work for the poor so that the worst poverty was confined to the anciens régimes of Continental Europe.

In 1638 the Honourable Artillery Company was presented with land at Finsbury in London that would in time become one of the most famous of the early cricket grounds. Intriguing mentions of cricket abroad now begin to appear from time to time: Adam Olearius’ Voyages and Travels of Ambassadors (1647; English translation 1662) suggests that in Persia (now Iran) a form of cricket was played. If so, it has yet to enter the sporting bloodstream of the nation, and it is hard to imagine Mullahs and Ayatollahs looking any more kindly on the game than did seventeenth-century Puritans. It is more likely to be a confusion in the translation.

In England, cricket-lovers continued to be prosecuted, the court hearings they faced being among the handful of mentions of the game during the seventeenth century. More Sabbath-breakers faced the archdeaconry court in Midhurst, Sussex, in 1637, when eight players were fined and ordered to make public penance. It is a tribute to cricket that it survived such disapproval.

If the misbehaviour of parishioners shocked the Church elders, they were dumbfounded when one of their own, the Reverend Henry Cuffin, was charged in 1629. Cuffin, a young curate of Ruckinge, Kent, and presumably as godly as his cloth, was censured for playing cricket ‘in very unseemely manner with boyes and other very meane and base persons of our parrishe to the great scandal of his Ministerie and offence of such as sawe him play at the said game’. His defence was a stiletto in the ribs of those who peppered the charge with the unsuitability of the curate consorting with ‘very meane and base persons’. Not so, said Cuffin, he had been playing with ‘persons … of repute and fashion’. And moreover, he added that he ‘doth diligentlie serve the Cure of Ruckinge’. It is not clear whether Reverend Cuffin would have accepted the charge meekly if he had been playing with the peasantry, but the presence among his fellow cricketers of ‘persons of repute’ made him belligerent in his defence. There is no record that he was censured, fined or ordered to make public penance, but the whole episode, apart from casting a light on the class-consciousness of the time, tells us that the peasants’ game was moving upmarket.

A few years earlier, in 1625, an ill and near senile King James I had died unlamented, and his son, more talented and fitted for the throne in every way but one, succeeded him as Charles I. But his one defect was fatal – a stubborn determination to exercise absolute rule in an age when the spirit of the nation was for greater democracy. Charles did not seem to care, or perhaps even to notice, that his behaviour was draining support from the monarchy. He caused offence to friend and foe alike, making no effort to humour Parliament or people. He courted widespread disapproval by marrying a Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France, agreed only reluctantly to the Petition of Right, and declined to address grievances. He made promises only to break them. He persecuted the Puritans, who were mutilated, imprisoned and forced to flee the country.* But the cropping of ears, branding of bodies and slitting of noses increased dissent rather than deterring it. The struggle became severe, culminating in the Civil War, the execution of the King in 1649 and the birth of the Commonwealth with Cromwell at its head and Puritanism as its faith.

Oliver Cromwell is one of the great figures of English history, and he held a special fascination for me as by far the most illustrious Member of Parliament for my own constituency of Huntingdon. He and I are the only Members from that seat – thus far – to head a government. Cromwell became leader after a civil war in the country; I became leader as a civil war erupted within the Conservative Party. In each case, our enemies were implacable. Cromwell, General of the New Model Army and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, was said by his foes to have enjoyed a boisterous youth. Whether this is true or not, his adult life was uneventful until, in his forties, he was propelled to the forefront of English life. As a private man he was commonplace. As a General, he was superb. As Lord Protector, his virtues and failings were on a grand scale; he can be mentioned with justice alongside Caesar and Napoleon.

The downside of Puritanism was that it robbed the Church of charity and put a premium on cant and piety. The prigs were in control. Lives were disrupted. Theatres were closed. Drama was stigmatised. The arts were restrained, and an anti-clerical feeling took root that would one day welcome the restoration of the monarchy. During the years of the Commonwealth poetry was the only art that prospered, thanks to the mighty imagination of Milton. It is an anomaly that Milton was a supporter of Puritanism: he was so by default, in his opposition to the excesses of an autocratic King. But neither his blindness, nor his gout, nor his many disappointments and hardships, could dim his advocacy of the liberty of the press and the elimination of prejudice, or his belief in taxation by the people, not the crown. He did not advocate the freedom to play cricket, or even deign to notice the game. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillipps was, however, familiar with cricket. In a poem written in 1658, entitled ‘Treatment of Ladies as Balls and Sports’, he wrote: ‘would that my eyes had been beaten out of my head with a cricket ball the day before I saw thee’. He was not always so averse to women, his preferred recreation being more basic: ‘Ellen, all men command thy eyes/ Only I command thy thighs,’ he wrote in ‘The Art of Wooing and Complementing’ (1655).

The Church, in its rigorous crackdown on Sunday cricketers, was a mild pre-echo of a Puritan ethic that sank deep into the British soul. It is, after all, not all that many years ago that professional cricket was prohibited on Sunday, as the spirit of the Lord’s Day Observance Society held sway with much of contemporary opinion. Puritanism was tough on recreation, and it is unsurprising that cricket was targeted: the austere piety of the Puritans’ beliefs, and their determination to make people devout, was bound to be in conflict with the exuberant joy of a ball game.*

But the courts did not always convict. At the Kent assizes held at Maidstone on 27 July 1652, six men of Cranbrook were accused of playing ‘a certain unlawful game called cricket’, but were acquitted as, to the horror of the Church, the justices ruled that the game was not unlawful. It was a rare blemish for the killjoys that was soon to be corrected at Eltham, Kent, in 1654, when seven players were fined two shillings each by the churchwardens for playing on the Sabbath. Four parishioners of Hunton, Kent, were similarly charged in 1668. Even after the restoration of Charles II and the end of Puritan government in 1660, some of the old attitudes still prevailed. In May 1671 Edward Bound was held to be ‘in contempt of the law of England’ and ‘a bad example to others’ for playing cricket on a Sunday. However, he was luckier than earlier miscreants, and was exonerated under the General Pardon Act.

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 pre d’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).* 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.’** 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* 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.*

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.**

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.

* In this he echoes the eighteenth-century historian Joseph Strutt, who suggested that ‘the manly exercise of cricket’ originated from club-ball.

* He later produced an epic on the Crusade entitled Antiocheis.

** 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.’

* 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’.

* 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.

* 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.

* The children were William Martin, Richard Martin Junior and Raphe West, playing with two friends, Edward Hartley and Richard Slaughter.

* 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).

** 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.

* For example, in 1637 the Star Chamber sentenced three Puritan writers to imprisonment and to have their ears cropped for libelling bishops.

* In Ireland, the Major-General banned ‘krickett’. ‘Sticks’ and ‘balls’ were ordered to be burnt by the common hangman; the players were not.

* See Leonard Hector, ‘The Ghost of Cricket Walks the Archives’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. IV, No. 7, 1973, pp.579–80.

** Quoted in, for example, Derek Birley’s excellent The Willow Wand (1979).

* A term especially associated with the Sevenoaks–Tonbridge area until the nineteenth century.

* 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).

** Nonetheless, the date of 1685 appears in David Underdown’s Start of Play.