Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

19 Pre-Victorian Society And Sport whatever scrap of reference to cricket might be found. The exhausting hours spent on this research has been commendable and it is safe to aver that we have a record of most cricket played before, say, 1840. It does not add up to much. The arduous prospecting should act as a warning that the occasional glints of gold in the muddy dross are rare and the hope of striking it rich is a vain one. How the cricket historian might envy, say, the criminologist researching 18 th century law and order; there the testimony is huge and overwhelming. The secluded and separated playing of games that so dominated the 18 th and early 19 th century sporting landscape has led to a further error in interpretation. Like an old fire-horse pricking its ears at the sound of the bell, the mention of ‘cricket’ in a newspapers or court return immediately throws up for the cricket addict the image of a recognisable cricket match. Unluckily, and certainly until well into the 18 th century, there is really no detailed description of what the players were actually doing. There may have been hundreds of varying types of cricket, just as there may well have been scores of other cricketing games which were called something else. To the modern mind, concentrated on the feature of fixtures and conformity to an agreed formula, such kaleidoscopic variety seems unreal. A year or so ago the question was raised in the press of ‘if Blackheath were the first rugby club, who did they play against?’ Allowing for the truth of the premiss raised, the simple answer is ‘one another’. Rather like the golf or badminton club today, these were groups of people playing for an hour so among themselves. Except on special occasions and very limited in regional incidence, there was no need for a grand design of rules. It was no one else’s concern but that of the immediate group at play – and if they changed their rules the following evening, that was strictly their business. Flora Thompson again, remembering that she was writing of a time toward the end of the 19 th not the 18 th century: ‘A few of the youths and younger men played cricket in the summer. One young man was considered a good bowler and he would sometimes get up a team to play one of the neighbouring villages.’ As late as that and a game was still an occasional rather than a regular occurrence on some parts of the Northants-Oxfordshire border. Once the historian attunes him or herself to this pivotal truth, much of the rest of pre-modern cricket history falls into place. If cricket deserves to be included in the silver treasures of civilisation, then it follows that it might be newly interpreted by the same recent and advanced theories about the origins of agriculture, writing and the like. Modern studies assert that, rather than emulation and imitation of a single root, there has been spontaneous combustion, with human groups autonomously discovering or developing these basic civilising devices. 4 Similarly with ‘play’, what Johan Huizinga, the Dutch cultural theorist, happily defined as the essential ‘interlude’ or respite from work and other heavy responsibility, which has evolved seamlessly in all human groupings. 5 Hence it is unnecessary, even wasteful, to attempt to trace modern sports, such as football or cricket or hockey, back to some birthright, even if