From Lads to Lord's
The History of Cricket: 1300–1600 | The History of Cricket: 1701–1730 | Index
The History of Cricket: 1601–1700
Cricket and other games in the 17th century
1601 – 1611 | 1612 – 1620 | 1621 – 1627 |
1628 – 1635 | 1636 – 1640 | 1641 – 1645 |
1646 – 1652
1653 – 1655 | 1656 – 1660 | 1661 – 1670 |
1671 – 1684 | 1685 – 1692 | 1693 – 1696 |
1697 – 1700
How cricket came to South Africa | English colonisation of the West Indies
Cricket following the Restoration | Richmond Green |
The two-stump wicket | Cricket at the end of the 17th century
The 17th century saw the transition of cricket from a children's game to a professional game via the evolutionary processes of village cricket and county cricket, the key developments being the interest taken by the gentry as patrons and occasionally as players; and their recognition of the opportunities for gambling that the game affords. This escalated in the years following the Restoration, when investment in cricket created the professional player and the first major clubs, thus establishing the sport as a popular social activity in London and the south of England. Meanwhile, English colonists had introduced cricket to North America and the West Indies; and the sailors and traders of the East India Company had taken it to the Indian subcontinent.
Queen Elizabeth I died to end the Tudor dynasty. She was succeeded by James VI and I (1566 – 1625), the first Stuart king of England. His claim to the English throne was via his descent from Edward IV. Edward’s daughter Elizabeth of York (1466 – 1503) married Henry VII in 1486, thereby uniting the Lancaster and York factions. Her eldest daughter was Margaret Tudor (1489 – 1541), who married James IV (1473 – 1513) of Scotland. The line continued via Margaret’s son James V (1512 – 1542) and granddaughter Mary I Queen of Scots (1542 – 1587) to James VI and I.
James VI and I was a keen sportsman himself, but he was a golfer. It was during his reign that golf became popular in England.
Dutch navigator Willem Jansz (c.1570 – 1630) became the first European to sight Australia (i.e., the coast of Western Australia).
James VI and I chartered the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock corporation for the purpose of trading in and colonizing North America. The following year, the company organised the first permanent settlement at Jamestown. It is believed that cricket was introduced to America at a very early date.
Shakespeare produced Macbeth, one of his greatest plays.
The first English settlement in the West Indies was on Bermuda by shipwrecked colonists originally bound for Virginia. The settlement became permanent in 1612.
The first definite mention of cricket in Kent comes from a court case in 1640 which records a "cricketing" of "Weald and Upland" versus "Chalkhill" at Chevening "about thirty years since". This particular case concerned the land on which the game was played.
The East India Company established its first factories, or trading posts, in the provinces of Madras and Bombay. It is possible that cricket was first played on the sub-continent at this time.
The first definite mention of cricket in Sussex relates to ecclesiastical court records which state that Bartholomew Wyatt and Richard Latter, two parishioners of Sidlesham in West Sussex, failed to attend church on Easter Sunday because they were playing cricket. They were fined 12d each and made to do penance.
A French-English dictionary was published by Randle Cotgrave. The noun crosse is defined as "the crooked staff wherewith boys play at cricket". The verb form of the word is crosser, defined as "to play at cricket".
It is interesting that cricket was defined as a boys’ game in the dictionary, as per the Guildford schoolboys of the 16th century, but that adults were playing it in Sussex at the beginning of the 17th century. It almost seems as if Mr Cotgrave was "overtaken by events" here. No sooner did he publish his dictionary than his definition was updated by the involvement of adults in cricket.
There are social reasons (see ''Start of Play'' by David Underdown) why cricket would have expanded in the latter part of the 16th century. It was a time when parishioners began to pay poor rates instead of holding "church ales" to raise money. Church ales were largely activities within each parish. Churches in medieval times brewed and sold their own ales. Sometimes it was to commemorate a particular festival such as Whitsuntide or it might be done on a seasonal basis. The point is that the sales were a significant means of raising church funds. It was done on a similar basis to modern fetes which are themselves a genteel continuation of the practice. But the ale sales were known for provoking rowdiness and their demise in the late 16th century owed much to pressure from the Puritans, who were beginning to make their presence felt in no uncertain terms.
With the suppression of church ale sales, inter-village sport developed and there were competitions between parishes from the 1590s at football, Morris dancing. cudgeling and wrestling. It is likely that cricket matches were arranged too, though there is no actual evidence of them.
The English East India Company established a trading post at Surat following a naval battle with Portuguese ships in the nearby Gulf of Khambhat. Surat was the first firmly established English base in India and it was from there that English activity and influence began to spread.
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Oliver Cromwell. Although his Puritan Parliament burned the Declaration of Sports in 1643, they did not ban cricket, probably because Cromwell himself used to play it as a young man. |
A court case recorded that someone was assaulted with a "cricket staffe" at Wanborough, near Guildford.
Although it could not be foreseen as a significant event at the time, the wedding of Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, to Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI and I, was a key marriage in British history as it led ultimately to the Hanoverian Succession. Frederick V was to become famous as the "Winter King" of the Thirty Years War.
James I issued the Declaration of Sports (also known as The Book of Sports) which listed the sports that were permitted on days of worship, particularly Sundays. Cricket is not mentioned, although its near relation bowling is on the prohibited list. The Declaration of Sports was strongly opposed by the Puritans, then an increasingly influential sect, and the manuscript was publicly burned by order of the Puritan Parliament in 1643.
But in 1617, the future leader of the Puritans, 18-year old Oliver Cromwell, was reportedly playing cricket and football in London.
The "Defenestration of Prague". During a protest against Habsburg Catholic rule, Bohemian (Czech) Protestants hurled imperial councillors out of a high window in Prague Castle (they survived). The incident was the flashpoint which began the Bohemian Revolt, first in a series of conflicts which would become known as the Thirty Years War.
Despite its name, the Thirty Years War consisted essentially of five separate wars and a number of issues which complicated matters so that ultimate settlement was difficult to achieve. The main wars were: Bohemian Revolt (1618 – 1620); Danish War (1625 – 1629); Swedish War (1630 – 1648); Franco-Habsburg Wars (1635 – 1648); and a major civil war in Germany (1619 – 1648). Germany suffered enormous loss of life and as late as the 20th century, a historian would state that Germany’s population had never recovered from the ravages of the Thirty Years War.
Fortunately, England managed to stay out of it apart from providing some economic aid to its allies. Many English soldiers enlisted in foreign armies as mercenaries.
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Jamestown, Virginia. Founded on Jamestown Island in the Virginia Colony on 14 May 1607, Jamestown is believed to have been the first permanent English settlement in North America. It was probably here that cricket was first played in the New World. |
The first meeting of an American parliament took place at Jamestown.
The first negro slaves arrived in Virginia. A Dutch frigate landed twenty kidnapped African people at Jamestown who were "sold" like livestock to the English colonists.
The earliest known English newspaper was published in Amsterdam on 2 December. Printing was subject to serious constraints in England. The paper reported on "Corrant (sic) out of Italy, Germany, etc."
October. It is said that stoolball was among the games played by the Pilgrim Fathers at the first Thanksgiving Day in Plymouth, Massachusetts but, as we have seen, this game is "not cricket"! Even so, as we shall see, cricket arrived in America very early.
The Dutch West Indies Company was founded.
Several parishioners of Boxgrove, near Chichester in west Sussex, were prosecuted for playing cricket in a churchyard on Sunday 5 May.
There were three reasons for the prosecution: one was that it contravened a local bye-law; another reflected concern about church windows which may or may not have been broken; the third was the now legendary charge that "a little childe had like to have her braines beaten out with a cricket batt"!! This latter situation was because the rules at the time allowed the batsman to hit the ball twice and so fielding near the batsman was very hazardous, as two later incidents drastically confirm.
This is the earliest reference to the cricket bat. The use of a "batt" in cricket was peculiar to Kent and Sussex where coastal smugglers were known as "batmen", because of the cudgels they carried. The earliest reference to a "flat-faced" bat (i.e., with a flat surface at the bottom of the stick in ice hockey style) also occurs in 1622 in the files of the Sussex Records Society (see Terry, note 23). The term "bat" remained comparatively rare until about 1720. The terms in more general use were "staff", "stave" or "stick". These tended to have regional usage: for example, "stave" was used in the Gloucester area and "batt" in the south-east; while "staff" and especially "stick" were more widely used. "Bat" is derived from the French battledore, shaped like a table tennis bat, which was used by washerwomen to beat their washing with! (See OED re "battledore").
On 23 May, a newspaper called Weekly Newes from Italy, etc. became the first news book published in England and to carry date of publication on the title page. It was published by Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer.
The first English colony in the Caribbean was established at St Kitts in the Leewards. A few years later, a French colony was established there too.
A fatality occurred at Horsted Keynes in east Sussex when a fielder called Jasper Vinall was struck on the head by the batsman who was trying to hit the ball a second time to avoid being caught. Mr Vinall is thus the earliest recorded cricketing fatality. The matter was recorded in a coroner’s court, which returned a verdict of misadventure.
An interesting point arising from the court record is that both Jasper Vinall and the batsman Edward Tye came from West Hoathly, another village, which indicates that games involving teams from different parishes were already being played.
Virginia became a Crown Colony. After repeated instances of incompetence and corruption, the Virginia Company’s charter was revoked and the colony at Jamestown became a Royal Province under the control of officers appointed by the Crown.
After the colonial government subsequently removed controls on the production of tobacco, there was a major expansion in the economy and in the English population of the Chesapeake Bay region. The incessant demand for labour to grow tobacco created a harsh system of indentured servitude. Much later, in the last quarter of the 17th century, it became prohibitively expensive to import English labourers. The colonists therefore followed the lead of European nations and increased the import of Africans kidnapped from their native lands. These African slaves were to become the predominant agricultural labour force in the southern USA.
A similar story of indentured labour followed by slavery developed in the Caribbean, where the main crop was sugar.
A significant year in English and European politics.
First came the death of James VI and I (1566 – 1625), King of Scots (since 1567) and England (since 1603). He was humorously described as the "wisest fool in Christendom". He was succeeded by his son Charles I (1600 – 1649), who really was a fool, for he believed absolutely in the "divine right of kings" and lost his head as a result.
Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642) had become chief minister and virtual ruler of France. Although an ardent Catholic, his main policy was "to arrest the progress of Spain and to halt the advance of the House of Austria". In other words, like the late Henri IV, he was anti-Habsburg and was concerned about France being hemmed in by Spain and Austria (Spain in the south; the Spanish territory of Franche Comte in the east with Austria beyond; Italy to the south east, much of it under Spanish control; and the Spanish Netherlands in the north). Like Henri IV, Richelieu saw that to engage the Habsburgs immediately would not be to his advantage: he too preferred to subsidise the enemies of the Habsburgs. These are "Cold War" tactics of the sort first used by Louis XI against Burgundy in the 15th century.
Towards this end, Richelieu in 1625 arranged an "unholy alliance" of France with Britain via the marriage of Charles I to Henrietta Maria (1609 – 1669), the sister of Louis XIII. English policy was also anti-Habsburg.
Meanwhile, the Thirty Years War continued to rage with Catholic League armies under Wallenstein overrunning northern Germany and provoking Danish intervention on the Protestant side.
An ecclesiastical case is preserved that relates to a game at East Lavant, near Chichester in western Sussex, being played on a Sunday. Two defendants, Edward Taylor and William Greentree, were charged with playing cricket at the time of evening service. Taylor argued that he had not played during evening prayer time but only before and after. It did him no good as he was fined the statutory 12d and ordered to do penance. Doing penance involved confessing his guilt to the whole East Lavant congregation the following Sunday.
English colonists began to settle on Barbados which had been uninhabited. Sugar plantations were soon developed and large numbers of African slaves were brought in to work them.
Another English colony was established on Nevis.
The Duke of Buckingham (1592 – 1628), chief minister of both James I and Charles I, was assassinated at Portsmouth as he was about to embark with an expedition to La Rochelle in France, where Britain’s erstwhile ally Richelieu had besieged France’s remaining Huguenot dissenters. The incident has earned latterday fame through its description in The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Buckingham’s death caused widespread jubilation outside royal circles.
Oliver Cromwell entered Parliament.
Henry Cuffin, a curate at Ruckinge in Kent, was prosecuted by an Archdeacon’s Court for playing cricket on Sunday evening after prayers. He claimed that several of his fellow players were "persons of repute and fashion". This may indicate that cricket had achieved popularity among the well-to-do.
Sweden entered the Thirty Years War on the Protestant side. An army under Gustav II Adolf, known as the "Lion of the North" (a nickname that was later bestowed upon Notts batsman George Parr), crossed the Baltic to Pomerania. Sweden’s action followed the defeat of Denmark and the Habsburg conquest of northern Germany, which represented a direct threat to Swedish strategic and commercial interests in the Baltic. It was also believed that a Habsburg attack on Sweden itself was imminent. Sweden was a powerful military state in the 17th and 18th centuries so this was a significant intervention that caused a massive escalation of hostilities.
Meanwhile, England made peace with both France and Spain. This meant that England took no official part in the Thirty Years War, although many English Protestants fought as mercenaries against Spain and Austria.
1633Galileo. In 1633, Galileo was prosecuted by an ecclesiastical court in Rome. He was charged with committing heresy by expounding his theory of heliocentrism. Many early cricketers had to face these courts for "breaking the Sabbath" by playing the noble game on a Sunday. This nonsense continued in England until after the Restoration in 1660. |
English colonies were established on Montserrat, Antigua and Barbuda.
In a court case concerning a tithe dispute, a witness called Henry Mabbinck testified that he played cricket "in the Parke" at West Horsley in Surrey.
Another ecclesiastical case records parishioners of Midhurst, west Sussex, playing cricket during evening prayer on Sunday 26 February (Julian).
On the advice of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles I made his fateful decision to impose the English prayer book on all Scottish churches. The Presbyterians refused to accept it and denounced it as "Popery". They drew up a Covenant demanding no interference with their religion. This decision led inexorably to Civil War and the execution of the king.
In Scotland, there was widespread support for the Covenant. Charles I responded with a threat to impose his will by force. The Covenanters defied him and formed their own army under Alexander Leslie.
The Honourable Artillery Company obtained the land in Finsbury that would eventually become known as the Artillery Ground.
The First "Bishops’ War". Charles I sent a scratch force to the Border Country but it was easily beaten by the Scots and a temporary truce was signed at Berwick (the Pacification of Dunse). The Covenanters continued to denounce Charles, accusing him of Popery; he accused them of treason.
The city of Madras was founded by the East India Company.
Puritan clerics, at Maidstone and at Harbledown near Canterbury, denounced cricket as profane, especially if played on Sunday.
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, became Charles I’s chief political adviser. He took over the campaign against the Covenanters and realised there was an urgent need for funds to increase and re-equip the army. He persuaded Charles to recall Parliament for the first time since 1629 (the "Short Parliament").
Parliament refused to discuss finance until its grievances were addressed.
Meanwhile, the Scots had invaded Northumberland and Durham. Strafford decided to ignore Parliament’s demands and led another scratch force against the Scots (the Second Bishops’ War). He was defeated at Newburn and the Scots captured additional territory in the north of England. At the subsequent Treaty of Ripon, Charles was forced to grant the Scottish army a daily fee pending a permanent settlement.
To meet his obligations, Charles was again forced to consult Parliament and, as before, they would not co-operate till their demands were met. This was the beginning of the "Long Parliament" (until 1660).
The first stagecoach lines began in England
Parliament brought a charge of treason against Strafford. Charles at first would not sign the death warrant. When he finally did, Strafford made his famous comment: "Put not your trust in princes". He was beheaded on 12 May before a huge crowd at Tower Hill.
Parliament now held the upper hand and used its advantage to pass the Triennial Act which decreed that Parliament must be summoned every three years and only dissolved with its own consent. In July, Parliament used its new found power to abolish the King’s Star Chamber and High Commission, which had been his main instruments of power.
The Scottish army was paid off and it withdrew.
Although cricket was still a long way from being mentioned in the newspapers, the abolition of the Star Chamber did bring about a measure of press freedom for the first time in English history with the collapse of the licensing system that controlled printing.
A newspaper called Diurnall Occurrences in Parliament provided the first ever reporting of Parliament.
Though it was little more than cottage industry at this time, the first cotton factories were established in Manchester.
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The Five Members. Charles I failed to arrest the "five members" and his intrusion alienated Parliament, which reacted to his abuse of power by introducing legislation to increase its own power. The Civil War was then inevitable and the Battle of Edgehill soon followed. One of the Acts was an order to close theatres, which the Puritans saw as licentious, but there is no evidence of similar action against cricket. |
Charles I foolishly decided to reassert himself against Parliament. On 3 January he issued his famous order for the arrest of the "Five Members", who escaped. Parliament responded by introducing Bills to increase its powers. Charles rejected the Nineteen Propositions. The Civil War was now inevitable but the catalyst for the actual outbreak came when Charles I refused to ratify the Militia Bill, which would put the army under Parliament’s control. The Scots re-entered the conflict on the parliamentary side. The Battle of Edgehill took place, but it was indecisive.
Parliament passed an Act to close all theatres, which had met with Puritan disapproval. Although similar action would be taken against certain sports, it is not clear if cricket was in any way prohibited, except that players must not "break the Sabbath". References to the game during the time of Oliver Cromwell suggest that it was not widely banned.
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (1603 – 1659) landed on Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and New Zealand. Working for the Dutch East India Company, he had set out from Batavia (now Djakarta) and was supposed to find and explore Australia, which had been sighted by Jansz in 1606, but he sailed along the wrong latitude, too far to the south, and missed it completely, finally sighting Tasmania instead.
Tasman named New Zealand as Staten Landt and sailed north along the west coast. He thought the Cook Strait was a bight and that New Zealand was a single entity, not two islands. He landed somewhere on South Island and was attacked by the Maoris, who killed four of his sailors. He returned to Batavia by way of Tonga and Fiji.
The cricket references thus far indicate that inter-parish matches were being played before the Civil War began but there is nothing to suggest that any teams representative of counties had been formed. There is no evidence of large scale gambling or patronage prior to the war and it was those factors which drove the formation of "representative" teams in the 18th century. It must be concluded, therefore, that the cricket being played before the war was still of a minor, inter-parish standard.
A feature of the Civil War was rivalry between the Royalist and Parliamentarian newspapers that had started since the Star Chamber and its control over printing was abolished. Newspapers of the time included The True Informer and Mercurius Britannicus, which both supported Parliament against the King; and Mercurius Aulicus, which supported the King.
Early royalist success in the English Civil War was halted when Parliament won a key victory at Marston Moor.
In a second voyage out of Batavia, Abel Tasman followed the south coast of New Guinea and, by missing the Torres Strait, accidentally found the north coast of Australia, which he followed westward before returning to Batavia. The Dutch East India Company could not see anything promising in his findings, either for trade or as a naval route, and decided not to fund further exploration of the area. As a result, it was over a century before Europeans mounted any more expeditions to Australia and New Zealand, though a few ships off course did land there from time to time.
Cromwell, by now the most influential general on the parliamentary side, founded his New Model Army which won a decisive victory in the Battle of Naseby.
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The Allman Brothers Band |
The military phase of the English Civil War ended when Charles I surrendered to the Scots at Southwell. He subsequently refused to meet Parliament’s demands and tried to escape.
The earliest record of an organised cricket match is held in the report of a court case. The match took place at Coxheath in Kent on 29 May. The case concerned non-payment of a wager that was made at the game. Curiously, the wager was for twelve candles! The participants included members of the local gentry: further evidence of the sport’s growing affluence. The match has the added interest of being an "odds" game in that Samuel Filmer and Thomas Harlackenden played as a pair, and won, against four of Maidstone (Walter Franklyn, Richard Marsh, Robert Sanders and William Cooper).
Samuel Filmer is an interesting case as he subsequently resided in Virginia, though he returned to England in 1663 (after the Commonwealth). Bowen speculates that he may have introduced cricket into America, but it is likely that it got there before him. One of Filmer’s relations was Sir Samuel Argall, a sort of great uncle, who was born in November 1580 at East Sutton in Kent. He was a mariner and adventurer who became Governor of Virginia, no less. Having been knighted at Rochester in 1622, he died on 24 January 1625 (Julian) on board ship and was buried at sea. He had come to Virginia as a trader in 1609 and, in 1613, was involved in the capture of Pocahontas! She subsequently married John Rolfe and travelled with him to England where she died in 1617, aged only 22.
Bowen also mentions a family connection between Filmer and the 13th President of the USA, Millard Fillmore (1800 – 1874), who held office from 9 July 1850 to 3 March 1853. Fillmore is a variant of the Filmer family name. Though Fillmore was a native of New York State, I am not sure if he gave his name to the Fillmore East theatre in New York City which was famous for appearances by the Allman Brothers Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Grateful Dead and other rock legends!
A fatality was recorded at Selsey, West Sussex, when a fielder called Henry Brand was hit on the head by the batsman Thomas Latter who was trying to hit the ball a second time. The incident was obviously a repeat of the Horsted Keynes incident in 1624. Thomas Latter may have been a relative of Richard Latter, one of the defendants at nearby Sidlesham in 1611.
A Latin poem by Robert Matthew contains a probable reference to cricket being played by pupils of Winchester College on nearby St Catherine’s Hill. If authentic, this is the earliest known mention of cricket in Hampshire.
The first English colony in the Bahamas was established.
Charles I was imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.
The Rump Parliament was formed and it decided to prosecute Charles I for treason.
At the Battle of Zusmarshausen (in south west Germany), the Austrians were heavily defeated by a Franco-Swedish combination. The defeat marked the effective end of Austria’s capability to continue the Thirty Years War.
The Treaty of Westphalia was negotiated to end the Thirty Years War. Switzerland and the (Dutch) Netherlands became independent. France (along the Rhine) and Sweden (on the Baltic) made large territorial gains from the Austrian (aka Holy Roman) Empire. Germany, its population decimated, was in ruins. Even so, war between France and Spain continued and the Dutch stadholder Willem II resolved to support France in the hope of conquering the Spanish (southern) Netherlands (i.e., modern Belgium).
The trial and execution of Charles I.
Parliament established the Commonwealth (to 1660) and England became a republic under the effective rule of Cromwell.
Cromwell ordered the harsh suppression of Catholic rebellions in Ireland.
Roy Webber, in his Phoenix History, states that "the period between 1650 and 1700 seems to be that in which the game took a real grip, and it would seem that cricket was centred mainly in the counties of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire". I would add rural Surrey, if not London, but the point is that the game expanded in earnest during those years and especially after the Restoration in 1660. Webber thinks the game saw "a real development" during the Commonwealth and at first glance this looks unlikely but Webber upholds a theory about the behaviour of the nobility during the Commonwealth. This states, correctly enough, that the nobility withdrew to their country estates until the Restoration enabled them to return to London. While they were living in the country, Webber holds that they watched cricket being played on village greens and some will have taken part, as we have seen above with our "persons of repute and fashion". Then, says Webber, what could be more natural than that they should take their cricket to London with them in the 1660s?
The logic is excellent for, as Webber also points out, several members of the nobility were involved in the earliest matches on record. Harry Altham names them on p.23 of his history as the Sackvilles of Knole Park and the Richmonds of Goodwood but he is premature here for these families originated with Charles II and Webber's generic view of the nobility is to be preferred. But Altham agrees with Webber's view of the return of the aristocrats to London in 1660 and makes the additional point that they would have brought some of their local experts with them (i.e., the first professionals).
For a fuller exploration of the growth of cricket in the later half of the 17th century, see The Origin of Major Cricket.
An English colony was established on Anguilla.
The interests of the East India Company expanded when trading concessions were obtained in Bengal.
A case at Cranbrook against John Rabson, Esq. and others refers to "a certain unlawful game called cricket". It is interesting that the game was described as "unlawful" and that Rabson was evidently a "gentleman" whereas the other defendants were all working class. Cricket has long been recognised as the sport that bridged the class divide.
In another thoroughly English development, it is believed that tea was introduced to the country for the first time.
Tuesday, 6 April. European colonisation of southern Africa began when the Dutch East India Company established a settlement called the Cape Colony on Table Bay, near present-day Cape Town.
Some sports evidently were approved by the Puritans as Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler.
Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament and became official head of state as Lord Protector.
Three men were prosecuted at Eltham in Kent for playing cricket on Sunday. As the Puritans were now firmly in power, Cromwell’s Protectorate having been established the previous year, the penalty was doubled to 24d (two shillings).
Any hopes that freedom of the press might increase were dashed when Cromwell restored the licensing system to control printing and suppressed all newspapers except official publications such as Mercurius Politicus. Cricket was as far from publicity as ever.
English forces under Admiral Sir William Penn and General Robert Venables seized the Spanish island of Jamaica, full colonisation commencing in 1661. The cultivation of sugar cane and coffee by African slave labour made Jamaica one of the most valuable possessions in the world for more than 150 years. The colony’s slaves, who outnumbered their white masters 300,000 to 30,000 by 1800, mounted over a dozen major slave conspiracies and uprisings between 1673 and 1832.
The defendants in the 1654 case were charged with "breaking the Sabbath", not with playing cricket. Cromwell’s commissioners in Ireland did ban sport in 1656 but not cricket. They were concerned as always with "preventing unlawful assemblies" in Ireland and sport was held to be that. The sport in question was hurling. Cricket had probably not reached Ireland at this time.
Cromwell ordered the East India Company to be reorganised as the sole joint-stock company with rights to the Indian trade. In 1650 and 1655 the company had absorbed rival companies that had been incorporated by him under the Commonwealth and Protectorate.
The "cricket ball" was first referred to in those terms in a book by Edward Phillips, who was a nephew of John Milton.
Cromwell died and was temporarily succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard, who was not up to the job. Demands for a restoration of the monarchy began.
There was a long-term significance in the key marriage of Sophia (1630 – 1714), daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia and the Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, to Ernest, the Elector of Hanover. Their son became George I of Great Britain in 1714.
Richard Cromwell resigned. The Rump Parliament was restored to power.
The Treaty of the Pyrenees formally ended the Franco-Spanish war that had been ongoing since the time of Richelieu. France settled its borders with Spain and the treaty confirmed the lasting supremacy of France over its neighbour. Spain, economically bankrupt and militarily spent, ceased to be a major power.
The Restoration of the monarchy in England was immediately followed by the reopening of the theatres and so any sanctions that had been imposed by the Puritans on cricket would also have been lifted. Although there are only a few references to the game in the time of Charles II, it is clear that its popularity was increasing and that it was expanding.
The Restoration was effectively completed during the spring of 1660 and it can safely be assumed that, in the general euphoria which both accompanied and followed these historic events, gambling on cricket and other sports was freely pursued. It is logical to assume that the large amounts at stake will have led some investors to try and improve their chances of winning by forming teams that were stronger than your typical parish XI. By 1697, "great matches" were being played with huge sums of money at stake and, although details continued to be conspicuous by their absence, it is reasonable to assume that this scenario first existed in the aftermath of the Restoration.
Following the death of his chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, the young King Louis XIV became sole ruler of France. Styling himself as le roi soleil and famously proclaiming that l’état, c’est moi, Louis XIV became one of the most autocratic despots in history. He ruled France until his death in 1714.
The East India Company acquired Portuguese territory on the west coast of India, including Bombay.
The Printing Act was passed and introduced very stringent controls of the press. Sport was certainly not a subject to be reported.
The Royal (Scientific) Society was chartered in England and Robert Boyle discovered the relationship between gas pressure and volume. This was a great period in the history of scientific research and the growth of rational thought.
Harry Altham says that, within a year or two of the Restoration, "it became the thing in London to make matches and to form clubs" and adds that "thus was inaugurated the régime of feudal patronage which was to control the destinies of the game for the next century and more". By 1662, although you would not read about it in the state-controlled press, cricket was very much in vogue and the nobility were employing professionals for the first time.
A Gambling Act was passed by the "Cavalier" Parliament to try and curb some of the post-Restoration excesses. It limited stakes to £100 which was in any case a fortune at the time. It is known that cricket could attract stakes of 50 guineas by 1697 and it was funded by gambling interests throughout the next century.
In North America, England seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and changed its name to New York. The Dutch colonies of Delaware and New Jersey were also ceded to England.
16 November. The Oxford Gazette was founded. It became the London Gazette in February 1666 and is now the world’s oldest surviving periodical.
There remained no sign of any relaxation in the stringent press controls.
The Great Plague (bubonic fever) broke out in London.
Isaac Newton began his study of gravity.
A letter by Sir Robert Paston of Richmond refers to a game on Richmond Green, which became a noted venue in the 18th century.
The Great Fire of London had a silver lining in that it effectively destroyed the plague.
A scientific development of keen interest to all involved in cricket: Robert Hooke began the science of meteorology with systematic weather records.
The promoter of a match at Maidstone had to obtain a licence to sell ale there.
Cricket was again mentioned in a court case as being played at Shoreham in Kent.
It has been reported in some books that the Clerkenwell Rate Book rated the landlord of the Ram Inn, Smithfield, Middlesex for a cricket field but later investigation has established the meaning was otherwise and that this is not a cricket reference.
Perhaps a sign that the times, post-Restoration, they were a-changing. A man called Edward Bound was charged with playing cricket on the Sabbath and was exonerated! The case was reported in Shere, Surrey.
The East India Company arranged a trading treaty with the Maratha Kingdom that had recently been founded by Shivaji Bhonsle in central India.
Saturday, 6 May. A diarist called Henry Tonge, who was part of an English mission at Aleppo in Turkey, recorded that "at least forty of the English" left the city for recreational purposes and, having found a nice place to pitch a tent for dinner, they "had several pastimes and sports" including "krickett". At six they "returned home in good order".
Roy Webber, in his Phoenix History, comments that "the mere fact that this match took place at all shows that cricket must have been popular in England".
Accounts of Thomas Lennard, 1st Earl of Sussex, 15th Baron Dacre (1654 – 1715) include an item which refers to £3 being paid to him when he went to a cricket match being played at "ye Dicker", which was a common near Herstmonceux in East Sussex.
This work has been used to supply Wikipedia with nearly all of its early cricket information but on this occasion I am indebted to Wikipedia. Two Wikipedia members John Hall and Jim Hardie did some research into the Earl of Sussex and came up with some useful information about him, including his correct name (I had called him Thomas Dacre after seeing that name in Harry Altham's book). Wikipedia has its problems but it can deliver too.
Mention of cricket as "a play" (presumably in the sense of a sport that is played) in a Latin dictionary published by Dr Adam Littleton.
The Act of Habeas Corpus was passed in England, forbidding imprisonment without trial.
A lapse of the Licensing Act produced a flood of unlicensed newspapers, which were all later suppressed.
Opposition to the Roman Catholic Duke of York (later James II) intensified. The petitioners became known as Whigs and their opponents as Tories. These became the two main political parties in Britain for the next 200 years.
The first entry in GB18 is a reference dated 1680 "that is quite unfit for publication nowadays". It contains, nevertheless, a clear reference to "the two umpires" and this is the earliest mention of the umpire in what seems to be a cricket connection. As Mr Buckley says, the reference also strongly suggests that the double wicket form of the game was already well known in London.
GB18 = Fresh Light on 18th century Cricket by G B Buckley.
Lines written in an old bible invite "All you that do delight in Cricket, come to Marden, pitch your wickets". Marden is in west Sussex, north of Chichester, and interestingly close to Hambledon, which is just across the county boundary in Hampshire. This is the earliest known reference to wickets.
6 February. Death of Charles II (1630 – 1685), King of Great Britain since 1660. He was succeeded by his brother the Duke of York (1633 – 1701) as James VII and II (to 1688).
James VII and II was a Catholic and his succession was viewed with alarm by many Protestants, especially in the light of events in France where the autocratic Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes and passed laws to deprive the Huguenots of civil rights. Persecution increased and many Huguenots, including much-needed skilled craftsmen, left France. The loss of manpower and skills was a major contributory factor to the economic crisis that beset France through the 18th century and caused the French Revolution in 1789.
September. The first organised street lighting was introduced in London. Oil lamps were to be lit outside every tenth house on moonless winter nights.
A group of exiled French Huguenots settled in the recently established Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. Using their native skills, they established the first South African vineyards.
Spring. James VII & II ordered his Declaration of Indulgence, suspending penal laws against Catholics, to be read from every Anglican pulpit in the land. The Church of England and its staunchest supporters, the peers and gentry, were outraged.
10 June. The birth of an heir, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688 – 1766; later to become known as the Old Pretender) increased public disquiet about a Catholic dynasty. The fears were confirmed when the baby was baptised into the Roman faith.
June. Opposition to James crystallised when a small group of Whig peers invited William of Orange, James VII & II’s son-in-law, to "defend the liberties of England".
November. William of Orange landed at Torbay in Devonshire with a multinational force of 15,000 mercenaries. He made no claim to the Crown, saying only that he had come to save Protestantism, and began a march on London. James led his army to Salisbury but was deserted by his troops and forced to flee to France. The so-called "Glorious Revolution" was a bloodless success.
Edward Lloyd opened the London coffee house that soon became a popular meeting place for shipowners, merchants, insurance brokers and underwriters. In time the business association they formed was to outgrow the coffee house premises and become Lloyd’s of London.
Outbreak of the War of the League of Augsburg (to 1697) following a French invasion of the Palatinate. The original league, which was a convention of nations opposed to Louis XIV, was joined later in the year by England and the Netherlands.
January. A hastily summoned Parliament declared the throne vacant.
February. William of Orange and his wife Mary, the Protestant daughter of King James, were proclaimed joint sovereigns as William III and Mary II. Mary’s younger sister Anne, also a Protestant, was designated heiress-apparent.
March. With French support, the former King James landed in Ireland, where there was a Catholic majority, hoping to use it as the base for a counter-coup. However, many Irish Catholics saw him as an agent of Louis XIV and would not support him.
The Battle of Killiecrankie took place near Pitlochry in Perthshire. It was won by the Highland supporters of King James but their leader Viscount Dundee was killed and the Scottish rebellion faded away.
The Bill of Rights was enacted to introduce constitutional monarchy into Britain but with Roman Catholics barred from the throne. Parliament also passed the Toleration Act to grant freedom of worship.
During the reign of Charles II, we saw that the East India Company acquired sovereign rights in addition to its trading privileges. In 1689, with the establishment of administrative districts called presidencies in the Indian provinces of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, the company began its long period of political rule in India.
October. The Honourable Artillery Company banned the playing of games on their property. The ban was lifted by the 1720s and the Artillery Ground became cricket's feature venue for the next 30 years.
An Anglo-Moghul treaty allowed English merchants to establish a trading settlement on the Hooghly River, which became Calcutta.
A match in Sussex was the occasion of crowd trouble and three people were charged with riot and battery. it is known about it because of a later petition by the defendants to Queen Anne (who did not succeed until 1702) in which they pleaded for remission of fines imposed, they having been "mere spectators" at the game. The defendants were Thomas Reynolds, Henry Gunter and Eleanor Lansford. They were guilty of assaulting one Ralph Thurston at the game but the cause of the affray is unrecorded. John Major opines that it was due to a bet, which is definitely a likely suspect in the prevailing social climate.
Accounts of Sir John Pelham record 2s 6d paid for a wager concerning a cricket match at Lewes.
July. The Bank of England was founded by the Whig-dominated Parliament to raise capital by offering safe and steady returns of interest guaranteed by future taxes. A total of £1.2 million was raised for the war effort against Louis XIV by the end of the year to establish the first-ever National Debt.
December. Queen Mary II (1662 – 1694) died of smallpox and William III continued to rule alone but without a heir. Since he was also without a royal hostess, Mary’s sister Princess Anne was summoned back to court. She had been banished after an unseemly row with the queen, but was now confirmed as the official heiress. Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark. They had a five-year-old son, William, the only realistic hope for the continuation of the Stuart dynasty.
Parliament decided against a renewal of the Licensing Act and so cleared the way for a free press on the Act’s expiry in 1696.
Freedom of the press was granted by the English government which had already relaxed censorship in the aftermath of the Bill of Rights in 1689. Technically, freedom of the press came about because Parliament decided in 1695 not to renew its Licensing Act and this removed the barrier to a free press.
It was from this time that cricket matters could be reported in the newspapers, but it would be a very long time before the newspaper industry adapted sufficiently to provide frequent, let alone comprehensive, reports.
The Treaty of Ryswick was signed by France and the Grand Alliance to end the war. The conflict had been inconclusive and the treaty was proposed because the combatants had exhausted their national treasuries. Louis XIV recognised William III as King of England & Scotland and both sides returned territories they had taken in battle. In practice, the treaty was little more than a truce.
A cricket match was reported in the press for the first time. Unfortunately, only limited details were given in the report but there is at last some real evidence to support the view that "great matches" played for high stakes were in vogue in the years following the Restoration.
''A Great Match in Sussex''
Sussex, exact venue unknown
c. Wednesday, 30 June 1697
result unknown (TJM)
TJM = Sussex Cricket in the Eighteenth century by Timothy J McCann.
The earliest known newspaper report of a match proclaimed to be "great" (or a similar adjective) was in the Foreign Post dated Wednesday 7 July 1697. It describes "a great match at cricket" that was played "the middle of last week" in Sussex with "eleven of a side" and "they played for fifty guineas apiece". The stakes on offer indicate the importance of the fixture and the fact that it was eleven a side suggests that two strong and well-balanced teams were assembled.
It is reasonable to make three assumptions about this match in the light of events reported during the next ten years. One is that it was a game between two strong teams, perhaps of near-county strength, and could have involved a team from Sussex and one from another county: surely Kent or Surrey. The second is that it was organised by Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond (1672 – 1723), who was the first great patron of cricket. His son, the famous 2nd Duke, inherited his interest. The third, much bolder assumption is that it was the earliest known match that deserves the appellation of "significant".
A series of matches, to be held on Clapham Common, was pre-announced on Saturday, 30 March by a periodical called The Post Boy. The first was to take place on Easter Monday and prizes of £10 and £20 were at stake. The prizes seem low and we should perhaps classify these as minor matches, especially as they were ten a side. No match reports could be found so the results and scores remain unknown. Interestingly, the advert says the teams would consist of ten "Gentlemen" per side but the invitation to attend was to "Gentlemen and others". This clearly infers that cricket had acquired both the patronage that underwrote it through the 18th century and the spectators who demonstrated its lasting popular appeal.
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