Cricket

CRICKET.

CHAPTER I.
THE HISTORY OF CRICKET.
(By Andrew Lang.)
Archæology of the Game.

Hundreds of pages have been written on the origin and early history of Cricket. The Egyptian monuments and Holy Scriptures, the illuminated books of the Middle Ages, and the terra-cottas and vases of Greece have been studied, to no practical purpose, by historians of the game. Outside of England,[1] and before the fortieth year of the reign of Elizabeth, there are no documents for the existence of cricket. Doubtless in rudimentary and embryonic forms, it may have existed. Of those forms we still possess a few, as 'rounders' and 'stool-ball,' and we can also study degraded shapes of cricket, which naturally revert to the early germs of the pastime as degenerate human types throw back to the monkey. There is a sport known at some schools as 'stump-cricket,' 'snob-cricket,' or (mysteriously and locally) as 'Dex,'[2] which is a degenerate shape of the game, and which is probably very like the rudimentary shapes. These degradations are reversals or returns to primitive forms.

A ball, more or less light and soft, is bowled or tossed at any fixed object, which, in turn, is defended by a player armed with a stick, stump, hair-brush, or other instrument. The player counts as many points as he can run backwards and forwards, after hitting the ball, between the object he defends and some more or less distant goal, before the ball is returned. He loses his position when the object he defends is struck by the ball, or when the ball is caught, after he has hit it, before touching the ground. Such is the degraded form of cricket, and such, apparently, was its earliest shape. Ancient surviving forms in which a similar principle exists are 'rounders' and 'stool-ball.' The former has been developed in America into the scientific game of 'base-ball,' the name being Old English, while the scientific perfection is American. It is impossible to trace cricket farther back than games in which points are scored in proportion to the amount of ground that the hitter can cover before the return of the struck ball. Now other forms of ball-play, as tennis, in different guises, can be found even among the ancient Aztecs,[3] while the Red Indians practised the form which is hockey among us, and the French and Walloons have sports very closely corresponding to golf; but games with the slightest analogy to cricket are very rare. Stool-ball is the most important foreshadowing of cricket. As early as 1614, Chapman, in his translation of the sixth book of the 'Odyssey,' makes Nausicaa and her girls play stool-ball. Chapman gives certain technical terms, which, of course, have nothing corresponding to them in Homer, but which are valuable illustrations of the English game.

Nausicaa seems to have received a trial ball-

Nausicaa, with the wrists of ivory,

The liking-stroke struck.

Again,

The Queen now, for the upstroke, struck the ball

Quite wide of th' other maids, and made it fall

Amidst the whirlpools.

thereby, doubtless, scoring a lost ball. He describes this as 'a stool-ball chance.' Chapman does not say whether the ball was bowled to Nausicaa. Everything shows that Dr. Johnson was writing at random when he described stool-ball as a game 'in which a ball is driven from stool to stool.' Chapman conceives Nausicaa as making a 'boundary hit.' There would be no need of such hitting if balls were only 'driven from stool to stool.'

Strutt's remarks on stool-ball merely show that he did not appreciate the importance of the game as an early form of cricket. 'I have been informed,' he says, 'that a pastime called stool-ball is practised to this day in the northern parts of England, which consists simply in setting a stool upon the ground, and one of the players takes his place before it, while his antagonist, standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of striking the stool, and this it is the business of the former to prevent by beating it away with his hand, reckoning one to the game for every stroke of the ball,' apparently without running. 'If, on the contrary, it should be missed by the hand and strike the stool, the players change places.' Strutt adds, in a note, that he believes the player may be caught out. He describes another game in which stools are set as 'bases' in a kind of base-ball. He makes the usual quotations from Durfey about 'a match for kisses at stool-ball to play.'[4]

Brand's notes on stool-ball do no more than show that men and women played for small wagers, as in Herrick,

At stool-ball, Lucia, let us play

For sugar, cakes, and wine.[5]

It is plain enough that stool-ball was a game for girls, or for boys and girls, and Herrick and Lucia. As at present played stool-ball is a woman's game; but no stool is used: what answers to the wicket is a square board at a certain height on a pole, much as if one bowled at the telegraph instead of the stumps. Consequently, as at base-ball, only full pitches can be tossed. However, in stool-ball we recognise the unconscious beginnings of better things. As much may be said for 'cat-and-dog.' This may be regarded either as a degraded attempt at early cricket, played by economists who could not afford a ball, or as a natural volks-kriket, dating from a period of culture in which balls had not yet been invented. The archæologist will prefer the latter explanation, but we would not pedantically insist on either alternative. In Jamieson's 'Scotch Dictionary,'[6] cat-and-dog is described as a game for three.[7] Two holes are cut at a distance of thirteen yards. At each hole stands a player with a club, called a 'dog.' A piece of wood,[8] four inches long by one in circumference, is tossed, in place of a ball, to one of the dogsmen. His object is to keep the cat out of the hole. 'If the cat be struck, he who strikes it changes places with the person who holds the other club, and as often as the positions are changed one is counted as won in the game by the two who hold the clubs.' Jamieson says this is an 'ancient sport in Angus and Lauder.' A man was bowled when the cat got into the hole he defended. We hear nothing of 'caught and bowled.'[9]

Cat-and-dog, or, more briefly, cat, was a favourite game with John Bunyan. He was playing when a voice from heaven (as he imagined) suddenly darted into his soul, with some warning remarks, as he was 'about to strike the cat from the hole.' The cat, here, seems to have been quiescent. 'Leaving my cat on the ground, I looked up to Heaven,' and beheld a vision. Let it be remembered that Bunyan was playing on Sunday. The game of cat, as known to him, was, apparently, rather a rude variety of knurr and spell than of cricket. This form is mentioned by Strutt.[10] Both stool-ball and cat-and-dog have closer affinities with cricket than club-ball as represented in Strutt's authorities.[11] Perhaps we may say that wherever stool-ball was played, or cat-and-dog, there cricket was potentially present. As to the derivation of the word 'cricket,' philologists differ as much as usual. Certainly 'cricket' is an old word for a stool, though in this sense it does not occur in Skeat.[12] In Todd's 'Johnson,' we find, 'Cricket: a low seat or stool, from German kriechen, to creep.' In Scotland we talk of a 'creepy-stool.'

It's a wise wife that kens her weird,

What though ye mount the creepy!

says Allan Ramsay, meaning the stool of repentance. If, then, stool-ball be the origin of cricket, and if a cricket be a stool, 'cricket' may be merely a synonym for stool-ball. Todd's 'Johnson,' with ignominious ignorance, styles cricket 'a sport in which the contenders drive a ball with sticks or bats in opposition to each other.' Johnson must have known better. In the 'Rambler,' No. 30, he writes, 'Sometimes an unlucky boy will drive his cricket-ball full in my face.' Observe, he says 'drive,' not 'cut,' nor 'hit to leg.'

Professor Skeat says nothing of this derivation of 'cricket' from cricket, a stool. He thinks 'et' may be a diminutive, added to the Anglo-Saxon cricc, a staff. If that be so, cricket will mean club-play rather than stool-ball. In any case, Professor Skeat has a valuable quotation of 'cricket' from the French and English Dictionary compiled in 1611, by Mr. Randle Cotgrave. He translates the French crosse, 'a crosier, or bishop's staffe, also a cricket staffe, or the crooked staffe wherewith boies play at cricket.' Now the name of the club used in French Flanders at the local kind of golf is la crosse. It is a heavy, barbaric kind of golf-club.[13]

Thanks to Cotgrave, then, we know that in 1611 cricket was a boy's game, played with a crooked staff. The club, bat, or staff continued to be crooked or curved at the blade till the middle of the eighteenth century or later; and till nearly 1720 cricket was mainly a game for boys. We may now examine the authorities for the earliest mentions of cricket.

People have often regarded Florio's expression in his Italian Dictionary (1598) cricket-a-wicket as the first...