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

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.