Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

17 Chapter Two Pre-Victorian Society And Sport Under the veneer of Georgian grandeur of architecture, arts and fashion, the country was more a heaving mass of often impoverished despair, simmering with lawlessness and violence. The authorities’ attitude to games playing was antagonistic. This was no new-found enmity. From early in the 14 th century onwards there is a lengthy roster of royal proclamations and edicts prohibiting the playing of games by the lower orders. For example, in 1541 a statute of Henry VIII’s reign forbade the playing of games, the prohibition expressly listing artificers, labourers, apprentices and servants. The law allowed games only at Christmas and then only under the beady eye of one’s master and at his home. That decree was not repealed until 1845, just at the beginning of cricket’s epoch of success, although, of course, the 1541 and subsequent similar legislation had long been largely ignored. Such efforts at social control weremotivated by both political and economic arguments. In 1555 Queen Mary I legislated against sports because they might be used as a screen by ‘treasonable Protestants’ to conspire against her Popish rule. In the 1650s the Puritan ban on games during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate was in part influenced by anxieties that renegade Royalists might similarly be plotting a Stuart restoration. The playing and watching of games was also judged to be a distraction from honest toil. In 1793 the Gentleman’s Magazine was alarmed by the gathering of people for leisure purposes which ‘propagates a spirit of idleness at a juncture when, with most industry, our debts, taxes and decay of trade will scarcely allow us to get our daily bread’. The religious gloss on social control was also featured in the Hanoverian approach. Compared with and possibly as a reaction against the acrimony of religious conflict in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, the 18 th century church was lax and complacent, with the nation’s theological energy sapped. Indeed, ‘enthusiasm’ was now frowned upon in terms of religious profession. Henry Fielding’s Reverend Mr Thwackum in his novel The History of Tom Jones (1749) Jane Austen’s Reverend William Collins in Pride and Prejudice and Emma’s Reverend Philip Elton are splendidly comic examples of Anglican pomposity and lassitude at that time. In so far as they were active, the clergy generally backed the local squirearchy in the protection of its rights. The denial of outdoor leisure opportunities was shrouded in moralistic proscriptions in regard of the wickedness of idleness. Sanctions against playing games on the Sabbath, the only free day for most people, was the crux of this tactic. As is so often the case where there is a cyclic confrontation of stern