History of Cricket Part 1

The history of the game

Cricket literature - the 18th century

AR Littlewood

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Written and pictorial records of cricket may go back to the Plantagenet period, although it is impossible to distinguish between what may be cricket and its brothers, cat and dog, stool-ball, rounders etc., and even at times its cousins, hockey and golf. The firmest, though still not secure, pictorial evidence is an illustration apparently of a man demonstrating a stroke with a stump to a boy holding a straight club and a ball in a Decretal of Pope Gregory IX that was illuminated in England; while in the Wardrobe Accounts of the Royal Household for the year 1300 the sums of 100 shillings and 6 pounds are mentioned as being spent on "creag" and other sports of Prince Edward (the grandfather of the Black Prince).

In the Tudor period there are references to boys playing "creckett" and in the seventeenth century there are many references such as that by Sir William Dugdale that Oliver Cromwell played cricket in his youth, while in 1653 Sir Thomas Urquhart even makes Gargantua play cricket in his translation of Rabelais. At the very end of this century cricket makes its appearance in the newspapers, a trend that grows rapidly in the eighteenth century but is concerned with announcements of matches, the wagers involved and, occasionally, the ensuing riots rather than with descriptions of matches. Rather different is the "Code of 1744" that contains at least two strata, one of which, wherein for instance the ball is referred to as "she" rather than "it", is clearly rustic rather than metropolitan and may be of considerable antiquity. All this, however, cannot be classed as literature.

Literature begins, for cricket, suddenly, unexpectedly and fully grown, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, in a Latin poem of 95 lines on a rural cricket match that was written by William Goldwin and published in his Musae Juveniles in March 1706. Little is known of the author: he left Eton for King's College Cambridge in 1700 and subsequently became Master of Bristol Grammar School and then was Vicar of Saint Nicholas, Bristol, until his death in 1747. His poem, In Certamen Pilae (On a Match at Ball), has been translated into English verse by Harold Perry in Etoniana in 1922 and, with copious scholarly notes, again into verse by H.P.-T. (P.F. Thomas) in Early Cricket the following year. In early spring "a chosen cohort of youths, armed with curved bats, ...descends rejoicing to the field". Each team tries to impose its own laws, until a grey-haired Nestor composes the squabble. They mark the pitch and on the stumps place the bail which "cries out for good defence" against "the leathern sphere". Two umpires stand "leaning on their bats" while the scorers "sit on a hummock ready to cut the mounting score on sticks with their little knives". The game begins and a batsman "propels the strident ball afar ...but a clearsighted scout (fieldsman) prepares his ambush in the deep and with outstretched palms joyfully accepts it as it falls ...and grief overwhelms those who silently mourn their friend's disaster". The tale of misfortune continues, and one batsman in going for a second run "falls headlong at the very foot of the wicket. (as) the shaken earth groans beneath his great weight" and the rustic throng exult in laughter". The other side fares better and "Victory , long striven for, noisily flaps its wings and fills the sky with the shouts and roars of success".