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.
Even in the midst of Church and state persecution cricket began to take root, although, as with the earlier John Derrick case, it is sometimes only legal action that preserves a record of it. In May 1640,as the Civil War drew nearer, civil disputes still exercised the courts. A suit of trespass was brought in the King’s Bench Division in which the plaintiff, Robert Spilstead, alleged trespass on his land near Chevening, Kent, during which cattle did ‘bite the sprouts and young shootes thereof and … tread and consume his grasse’, and the defendants, Robert Shell and Michael Steavens, ‘did spoile and subverte his ground with carriages’ as well as ‘take and carry away 400 of hoppoles’. In response, the defendants pleaded that the rector of Chevening owned the tithes of all the woods growing in the parish, and that they were merely farming them for him. A complicated argument about boundaries and jurisdiction then followed in which, to support his case that the damaged coppice was within his ownership, Spilstead gave evidence that ‘about 45 years since there was a football playing and about 30 years since a cricketting* betweene the Weald and Upland and the Chalkehill’.
There is evidence that cricket may have begun climbing up the social scale by the 1640s, notwithstanding the distractions of the Civil War. On 29 May 1646 four gentlemen of ‘prophane’ Maidstone – William Cooper, Richard Marsh, Robert Sanders and Walter Francklyn – lost a game of cricket on the open common at Cox Heath, three miles south of the town, to two young Royalists, Thomas Harlackenden and Samuel Filmer. The nature of the game – and the politics of the victors – must have brought the Reverend Thomas Wilson close to apoplexy but it aroused great excitement in Maidstone. A bet on the outcome was laid – cash for candles, and when the loser failed to hand over the candles, court action followed.
Early fiction began to notice cricket, and it is one of ‘the games of Gargantua’ in an English translation of the works of Rabelais. But fiction can mislead as well as inform, and it did so with confident assertions that cricket was played in venerable colleges by the mid- seventeenth century. Although it is possible that it may have been, it is by no means certain. A reference to cricket at Winchester College in 1647 is based on an undated Latin poem, ‘De Collegio Wintoniensi’, by Robert Mathew, a scholar who left the college that year. It relates how boys climbed a hill to play a game involving a ball (‘pila’) and bat (‘bacillo’) which may have been cricket, but he makes no mention of that name. A later reference to cricket at Winchester, circa 1665, is total fiction. It derives from a purely conjectural account of a boy’s schooldays in W.L. Bowles’s The Life of (Bishop) Thomas Ken, published in 1830, which imagines how
our junior, ‘the tear forgot as soon as shed’, if it has ever for a moment been on his youthful cheek, is at ease among his companions of the same age; he is found, for the first time, attempting to wield a cricket bat; and, when his hour of play is over …
This piece of nineteenth-century fiction was seized on as evidence that cricket was played at Winchester and Eton in the mid- seventeenth century. This could be so, but fiction cannot be accepted as bona fide evidence.*
Nor can faulty memory. Writing about the genesis of club cricket, the Cricketer Spring Annual of 1933 records: ‘Fifty years ago, an aged villager, close on 90 years … recollected seeing an old print, then hanging in a wayside cottage, showing “Cricket on ye old Green”, and giving an approximate date of 1685.’ This cannot be correct, since prints of cricket matches became available only in the 1740s, so even if this unlikely tale has a basis in fact, the picture referred to could not date before the middle of the eighteenth century.**
I am puzzled, too, by Altham’s assertion in The History of Cricket that ‘with the restoration [of Charles II in 1660], in a year or two it became the thing in London society to make matches and to form clubs’. If Altham is right I can find no evidence of it. So far as I can determine there is no record of a cricket match being played in London before the 1700s, and no mention of a club until 1722, sixty- two years after the Restoration.
Not that life was dull during the reign of Charles II. Popular history recalls the King as a merry monarch, easy-natured and lascivious, and a welcome antidote to the pious Puritans. Charles would have agreed with the American George Nathan that ‘Women and Englishmen are actors by nature,’ since he lifted an old prohibition and permitted women to act on the stage. Prior to his edict, women’s roles had been played by soft-featured young men, fearful that their voices would break and their careers be over. The way was open for Margaret Hughes, probably the first legitimate professional actress, who became mistress to Charles I’s nephew Prince Rupert, and went on to gamble away a fortune.
More famous names soon followed, including ‘a mighty pretty woman’ (according to Dr Johnson, a keen observer), who had probably had a relationship with the notorious libertine and poet Lord Rochester when very young. ‘Nelly, my life, tho’ now thou’rt full fifteen’, rhymed Rochester, before becoming more explicit. Nell Gwynne made her debut in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor at the King’s Theatre in 1665, and was soon to catch the King’s eye. Cricketers should be grateful she did, for as we shall see, descendants of Charles II and Nell were to play an important part in the history of the game.
By 1660 the Puritans were universally loathed, and the bells rang to welcome home the King. An ultra-Royalist
