Cricket to 1600

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.