Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

11 Pre-Victorian Society; ‘Gentle And Simple’ Tudor equivalent of your back garden. 3 Because that, in the main, was what, for the multitude of the population, outdoor activities - a few youths perhaps knocking a ball about for a brief spell - amounted to until well into the 19 th century. Several factors were at work that ensured this. The first of these was the atomised nature of community life. England and Wales was constituted of no less than 15.000 parishes and, outside of the few large towns, these were relatively isolated and indeed some of them were quite widespread themselves as to housing. The population of the UK, after a period of decline, had struggled to 7m in 1731 and grown to 9m in 1801, the beginnings of the major demographic leap allied with the industrial revolution. Outside the relatively few good-sized towns, most of those 15,000 parishes, with 300 inhabitants some kind of rough average, housed scarcely enough in most cases for any serious sporting development. Even by the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, over half of the work-force were still devoted directly to agriculture or to its associated activities and mostly living in small village communities. Even as late as the 1880s, as Flora Thompson reveals in her pastoral reminiscence, it was eight miles from Lark Rise to Candleford and a matter of excitement among neighbours, when Laura aka Flora went to work in the post office there. ‘Come the summer, we’ll...all go over to Candleford, their father said for the ten millionth time. Although he had said it so often they had never been. They had not been anywhere farther than the market town for the Saturday shopping.’ That was three miles away. Oxford, the nearest city, was a distant nineteen miles, XIX on a milestone no more than a magical sign of some legendary and mysterious land. 4 This, of course, was a vestige of a dying past but it demonstrates how secluded, over a hundred years after the industrial era had first began to stir, most of life was. Back in the 18 th century with farming the chief occupation, the labouring population was tied to the agrarian economy socially as well as financially. The vast majority of people had not the time, nor the money nor perhaps the inclination to reach outside their families and neighbours for what snatches of opportunity they had for recreation. As late as 1830 the average number of public transport journeys undertaken annually was only four per head. This amounted to 75m trips. On a normal weekday just 220,000 such journeys were undertaken, no less than 95,000 of them in London. The remainder was made up of 20,000 on longer distance coach rides, 20,000 on minor, provincial road services and, perhaps, surprisingly, 85,000 on the newly developed steamboats. 5 And this was all a vast improvement brought about by some betterment in the roads system from the dreadful potholes and other impediments of most of the 18 th century. There were at least some ‘flying’ coaches, and maybe some wagon or carrier services, on the trunk roads, some ‘short- stage’ coaches and a few horse-drawn buses in the big towns, as well as coastal and river steam-boats. Before the advent of the Turnpike Trusts and the Macadamised roads, water transport had been very important. It had often been easier to travel by river and sea from London to Brighton