Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

8 Chapter One Boyhood I suppose the proper way to begin an article like this is to tell you where I was born. Well, that’s easy enough. I was born in a little Leicestershire village called Ratby. So begins William Ewart Astill in an article that he wrote at the age of 37 for a weekly series entitled ‘How I Got Into County Cricket’ in the magazine The Boys’ Realm of Sport and Adventure . 9 What sort of place is this ‘little Leicestershire village called Ratby’, which lies in slightly rolling land just outside both the Soar Valley and the pre- Cambrian outcrops of Bradgate and Charnwood Forest, some five miles north-west of Leicester and sundered from the latter’s spreading suburbia these days by the never-ceasing roar of the M1 motorway? Palaeolithic traces have been found in the area to indicate human occupation anterior to the Anglian Glaciation of about 450,000 years ago, and more substantial remains prove occupation in the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, with cereal cultivation being practised in the last millennium BC. The area was occupied by the Corieltauvi 10 when the Romans arrived in the 40s AD, from which period the outstanding surviving artefact is the Iron Age/Romano earthworks, known today as Bury Camp, on the modern village’s south-western outskirts. 11 Under Roman rule the larger area was known for the raising of horses and the production of iron and building-stone. The name of what became the village of Ratby is first recorded as the Anglo-Saxon Rotebie, and may either be derived from the Celtic ‘rath’ (‘ramparted fortification – Bury Camp?) and Danish ‘by’ (‘village’) or mean simply ‘farmstead or village of a man called Rota. 12 Alternatively, it may possibly have come from the name of the Romans’ nearby cantonal capital, Ratae Corieltauvorum (now Leicester). 13 The earliest post-Roman reference to a community here is afforded by the Domesday Book, which informs that in Guthlaxton Wapentake Hugh de Grantemaisnil ‘holds in Rotebie 6 carucates of land less 3 bovates. There is land for 6 ploughs. In demesne are 2 ploughs 9 In the issue for 11 July 1925. For the following week W.R.Hammond was due to pen his contribution. 10 Until recently known as the Coritani after the reference in Ptolemy, an Alexandrian writer of the second century AD ( Geographia 2.3.20). 11 For further details see D.Harwood, Ratby Walks in the National Forest , Ratby Local History Group, 2008. 12 A.D.Mills, Dictionary of English Place-Names , Oxford, 1991. 13 It has been suggested, however, that Ratae was so called after Bury Camp, since no traces of any Iron Age ramparts have been discovered in Leicester itself.