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