Origins of cricket

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 of the spread of cricket from the sparse evidence available.

Webber wrote that in 1960 and 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 Harry Altham, F. S. Ashley-Cooper, Samuel Britcher, G. B. Buckley, Arthur Haygarth, John Nyren, James Pycroft, H. T. Waghorn and a few others. There have been some good contributors since Webber's day but the most 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 confirms that the sport was being played by children around 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.

Club-ball

Several sources are in agreement that cricket is one of several modern sports that evolved from a generic activity which they have named "club-ball". Similar sports are baseball, golf, hockey, and tennis. Arthur Haygarth, writing in 1862, described cricket as a "direct off-shoot" of club-ball. John Major in 2007 says "cricket at its most basic is a club striking a ball".

The theory makes sense but no one knows what club-ball actually was. Derek Birley in 1999 doubted that it was ever a specific game and thought it was, after all, generic. As he put it, "a catch-all term to cover any form of ball-bashing the citizenry were apt to waste their time on". A year later, David Underdown, who was Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, deliberately side-stepped all the debates about cricket's prehistory by dismissing them as speculation. He stated with good reason that, before the first definite reference to the sport in 1597, there is nothing any historian can usefully say about cricket.

The 1597 reference is proof that cricket was being played by children in the south east of England half a century earlier. From that, it is reasonable to assume that it was not a new invention in or around 1550. Also, taking other evidence into account, that it did originate somewhere within the south-eastern counties. When and where may not be important at all, however interesting. Numerous theories have been put forward about the sport's supposed origin but most of them, as per Underdown above, can been dismissed as not worth mentioning. One thing upon which all sources agree is that there is no evidence of cricket having evolved from another sport and, vice-versa, none that any other sport evolved from cricket. The essence of the club-ball theory is that the practice of using a club to hit a smaller object has been around since children first played games, but it is not known if any of those ancient pastimes was the direct ancestor of cricket.

"Creag"

It may be accepted that there is a long inherent human characteristic which predates civilisation itself by millennia and impels children to play games and to use their imagination to develop what games they can from implements readily available. The question here is this. Did a child once invent a game that evolved into modern cricket or was cricket derived from a much earlier club-and-stone pastime?

Several "theories" have been put forward which seek to answer that question but they mostly lack credible evidence. For example, the 1912 writer Andrew Lang insisted that cricket was a Celtic game played in 6th century Dál Riata. It is widely accepted that he was talking rubbish and probably trying to create a "sensation". Anthony Bateman, in his splendid Mightier than the Bat, the Pen, politely but amusingly refers to "Lang's idiosyncratic belief in the Celtic origin of cricket". The Celtic children probably did play a game that involved hitting something like a ball with some kind of stick or club but if that evolved into anything modern then it would be hurling or perhaps shinty. And yet an expert on hurling or on shinty might well say: "No, it did not".

A more interesting case is the activity called "creag". That is specified in a real document written in 1300 when Edward I (Longshanks) was King of England. On Thursday, 10 March 1300 (a Julian date which converts to Friday, 18 March 1301 in the Gregorian calendar), royal wardrobe accounts include reference to a game called creag being played at the town of Newenden in Kent by Prince Edward, then aged 15. He was the future Prince of Wales who went on to become Edward II and die horribly at the hands of enemies who decided to "go medieval" on him.

Creag is probably a variation of craic, a Gaelic word which was part of Middle English and means "fun and games in general". It has been suggested that this creag was an early form of cricket, but there is no evidence to support that view and creag could have been generic or something quite different. The idea that it was cricket is largely based on the Kent location because it is widely believed that cricket developed in the south east of England in medieval times. The Weald is generally held to have been the "cradle of cricket" and one historian Peter Wynne-Thomas even says so in a book's title. John Arlott, long regarded as the doyen of cricket writers and broadcasters, firmly believed that the Weald was the key location.

Other tentative options

Longshanks' grandson Edward III (1312–1377) resurrected his ideals in 1337 by claiming the throne of France and beginning the long series of conflicts that is collectively known as the Hundred Years War. This did not end until the English were finally expelled from most of France (i.e., except Calais) in 1453.

Certain references have been found which some writers have interpreted as a "French Connection" in the origins of cricket, but they have missed a key historical point. As the Hundred Years War progressed, large parts of France including great cities like Paris and Bordeaux were subject to long-term English occupation. Paris, when François Villon was born there in 1431, was described as "an English town". Calais remained an English possession until 1558, a whole century after the end of the Hundred Years War. So, there may well be cricket references in France but they do not indicate a movement of the sport from France to England; they indicate that English soldiers and settlers brought their culture with them across the Channel during the long period of occupation. Cricket has often been described as the quintessential English game that has followed the English everywhere and there is a long-standing joke that if the English had colonised Mars, the Martians would now be members of the International Cricket Council (ICC)!

Another dubious theory is that the sport originated in either Belgium or the Netherlands, from where it was brought to England by refugees who emigrated after the Low Countries were seized by the Habsburgs in 1482. Burgundy is now a province of France that is famous for its wine but, in medieval times, it was a powerful state in its own right that held territory including modern Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands as well as much of north eastern France. It owed its wealth to trade, especially from its great cities of Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, and Amsterdam which were the main centres of European commerce at the time. In 1477, the death of Duke Charles the Bold enabled Louis XI, the notorious "Universal Spider" and the man who invented Cold War, to redraw the map of Europe. Charles was succeeded by his daughter Marie (1457–1482) as Duchess of Burgundy and she married the Austrian Habsburg archduke Maximilian (1459–1519) who later (in 1493) became Holy Roman Emperor. Louis XI took advantage of the confused situation following Charles' death to seize Burgundy itself and its territory in Artois and Picardy. A revolt in the Netherlands was suppressed by Maximilian. The remaining Burgundian lands in Franche-Comte, Luxembourg, Flanders, Belgium and the Dutch Netherlands became Habsburg territory. The suppression of Flanders and the Netherlands under the dead hand of Habsburg autocracy caused many Flemish and Dutch traders to migrate to England, where they seem to have had an impact on the development of cricket, certainly in terms of the sport's name.

A poem called The Image of Ipocrisie, posthumously attributed to John Skelton (c.1460–1529), was apparently published in 1533 and it contains a few lines that could be a reference to early cricket being played by Flemish weavers in southern England. It is an interesting and possibly significant find but really it adds little to the existing theory that there was a Flemish involvement in the sport's development and particularly in the origin of its name.

By 1550, cricket definitely existed, at least as a children's game. Evidence in a 1597 court case confirms that "creckett" was played by schoolboys on a certain plot of land in Guildford around 1550. This is the earliest definite reference to cricket being played anywhere in the world.