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