Kitabı oku: «More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years», sayfa 2

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The Lost Century of Cricket

But we don’t know how long. The search for the birth of cricket has been as fruitless as the hunt for the Holy Grail: neither can be found.

What is cricket, at its most basic? It is a club striking a ball: so are golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. So are the ancient games of club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, stob-ball, each of which some scholars have been keen to appropriate as ‘early cricket’. The nineteenth-century pioneer historian the Reverend James Pycroft asserts, without proof, that ‘Club-ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for cricket in the thirteenth century.’* His case, however, collapses in the light of later evidence, and the great mid-nineteenth- century cricketer Nicholas Felix (a pseudonym – his real name was Nicholas Wanostrocht) was more likely right when he wrote: ‘Club ball is a very ancient game and totally distinct from cricket.’

The paucity of early mentions of cricket has led to some farfetched assumptions about games that might have been cricket, but probably are not. The poet and scholar Joseph of Exeter is said to have written in 1180:

The youths at cricks did play

Throughout the merry day.

If they did so, no one else noted it for hundreds of years. This claim has other defects, too: the couplet sounds more eighteenth-century than twelfth, and all Joseph’s known writing is in Latin. In any event, in 1180 Joseph was onhis way to the Third Crusade as an official chronicler, and thoughts of ‘youths’ and ‘merry days’ may not have been uppermost in his mind.* We can dismiss Joseph of Exeter. Even less likely is the evidence of an eighth-century monk, Eustatius Constacius, that cricket was played in Florence for the entertainment of Parliament.

Much ink has been spilled by historians over an entry, in 1300, in the wardrobe accounts of King Edward I referring to the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future Edward II, playing ‘creag’ and other sports with, as some have suggested, his childhood friend the lamentable and doomed-to-a-bad-end Piers Gaveston. It is evident that ‘creag’ is a game, but it requires a mighty leap of faith to claim that it was cricket; the kindest judgement that can be made upon this romantic assumption is ‘not proven’. In any event, could the villainous Gaveston have been a forefather of cricket? I hope not, and fortunately I think not.

Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of history that ‘It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.’** In the absence of concrete evidence, of documentary proof, of contemporary records, his maxim holds true of the genesis of cricket. It may have been played under another name earlier than we know, but since its birth is shrouded in legend and mystique, we cannot be certain. The silence of antiquity suggests that the game was not played in ancient times, but does not prove that it was not. It is probable that games such as club-ball were ancestors of cricket, but they cannot be acknowledged as the game itself, and should not be assumed to be so. As the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam wrote: ‘Things not known to exist should not be postulated as existing.’ This is a good principle for soundly-based history. Although the mists and myths are enticing, the truth is more prosaic: cricket evolved from instincts and games as old as man himself.

But when? Here we may be on firmer ground. 1598 was a memorable year. The weather was foul that winter, and on 21 December, in a mini-ice age, the Thames froze. A week later, in a snowstorm, men of the Chamberlain’s Company of Actors, led by Richard Burbage and armed in case of unwelcome interruptions, dismantled a theatre in Shoreditch, loaded it onto wagons and transported it through Spitalfields and Bishopsgate to a waterfront warehouse. From there it was ferried across the Thames to be rebuilt on a new site. They called the new theatre the Globe, and the players’ favourite son, William Shakespeare, had part-ownership of it.

That Christmas Shakespeare had a new play, Much Ado About Nothing, which the players performed at Court for Queen Elizabeth I. A similar view might have been held about a contemporary court case over land ownership. Mr John Derrick, otherwise a forgotten English gentleman, testified to a Guildford court that: ‘Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies.’* W.G. Grace cast doubt on this in his Cricket (1891), and suggested that a local historian may have inadvertently substituted ‘cricket’ for ‘quoits’. It is not clear why he thought this. As Mr Derrick was a coroner, it is likely that his deposition was accurate. And as he was then nearly sixty years of age, he would have been a young scholar around 1550–60, thus giving us a precious date by which cricket was being played.

It is not surprising that cricket attracted little contemporary attention, for greater matters were afoot. Within a few years of the death of Henry VIII in 1547 a mighty struggle for souls was raging as the religion of the state swung from Protestant (under Edward VI) to Catholic (under Mary), and back to Protestant once more (under Elizabeth I). Henry VIII had been sufficiently even-handed to persecute Protestants and Catholics alike, but his children were more discriminating, 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 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.