Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

18 Pre-Victorian Society And Sport governance and fractious governed, the resultant violence and misbehaviour appeared to justify the strong line taken by the alarmed authorities. Predictably, this aggression was as endemic in sport as in general conduct. Football involved large and motley bands, fighting and struggling for hours. There was bull-baiting and cock-fighting and there was bare-fisted pugilism that lacked any hint of control. Even the primitive forerunners of cricket that were played included, in some versions, charging and the use of the bat to interfere with fielders. Many of the early references to cricket allude to injuries and court cases. Unruly hosts were drawn to such events, most of them associated with or sponsored by taverns, keen to sell their alcoholic beverages to often belligerent crowds. All in all, the prevailing circumstances told against any national or fundamental development of regular or regulated sport. Two historians from differing generations and mind-sets might be quoted. G.M.Trevelyan, of the old school, had this to say: ‘When we try to imagine how the generality of our ancestors disported themselves out of doors, we must remember that most of them lived widely scattered and in the country. For most men the village was the largest unit of their intercourse. A village cricket match, or hurly-burly at football, or races on the green was very different from the ‘organised athletics’ of the modern arena. But most people took their ‘exercise’ as a matter of course in doing their work, in tilling the fields, or on walking or riding in and from their daily task... Few villagers had seen anything of town-life... No city-made newspapers or magazines stamped a uniform mentality on the nation. In this isolation from the world at large, each shire, each hamlet had its own traditions, interests and character...For gossip and sensation they were satisfied with the daily human drama of their own village.’ 1 Writing of these same detached, closeted and tiny leisure activities and representing a more modern echelon of historians, Robert Malcolmson, the leading scholar of the popular pastimes of this time, concluded from his deep study of the subject that ‘it is likely that these routine leisure activities and family festivities were, in terms of the hours involved, more prominent than the large public celebrations and sporting events’. What he terms ‘informal face-to-face encounters’ constituted the bulk of Georgian recreation. 2 One may readily gather how cut off from mainstream flows was the majority of the pre-industrial population - indeed, it might be claimed that there were few mainstream flows. Pleasures, when available, were taken domestically and locally, singly or in small numbers. Folk-games and activities were in the cultural ascendant. Later social commentators would talk in darkened whispers of the anomie of industrial city life, but there was also considerable isolation in rural life with families and knots of people left very much to their own limited devices. One must admire and respect the chroniclers of pre-industrial cricket. 3 They have dredged through countless primary sources to uncover