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 mention of the noble game. It were strange indeed if this great word first dropped from the pen of an Italian! The quotation is ‘sgrittare, to make a noise as a cricket; to play cricket-a-wicket, and be merry.’ I have no doubt myself that this is a mere coincidence of sound. The cricket (on the hearth) is a merry little beast, or has that reputation. The term ‘cricket-a-wicket’ is a mere rhyming reduplication of sounds like ‘hob-nob’ or ‘tooral-ooral,’ or the older ‘Torelore,’ the name of a mythical country in a French romance of the twelfth century. It is an odd coincidence, no doubt, that the rhyming reduplication should associate wicket with cricket. But, for all that, ‘cricket-a-wicket’ must pair off with ‘helter-skelter,’ ‘higgledy-piggledy,’ and Tarabara to which Florio gives cricket-a-wicket as an equivalent.[14]
‘Miss Wicket.’ (From an old print, 1770.)
Yet cricket was played in England, by boys at least, in Florio’s time. The proof of this exists, or existed, in the ‘Constitution Book of Guildford,’ a manuscript collection of records once in the possession of that town. In the ‘History of Guildford,’ an anonymous compilation, published by Russell in the Surrey town, and by Longmans in London (1801), there are extracts from the ‘Constitution Book.’ They begin with a grant anno li. Ed. III. For our purpose the only important passages are pp. 201, 202. In the thirty-fifth year of Elizabeth one William Wyntersmoll withheld a piece of common land, to the extent of one acre, from the town. Forty years before, John Parvishe had obtained leave to make a temporary enclosure there, and the enclosure had never been removed. In the fortieth year of Elizabeth this acre was still in dispute, when John Derrick, gent, aged fifty-nine, one of the Queen’s Coroners for the county, gave evidence that he ‘knew it fifty years ago or more. It lay waste and was used and occupyed by the inhabitants of Guildeford to saw timber in and for saw-pitts.... When he was a scholler in the free school of Guildeford he and several of his fellowes did run and play there at crickett and other plaies.’
This is the oldest certain authority for cricket with which I am acquainted. Clearly it was a boy’s game in the early years of Elizabeth. Nor was it a very scientific game if it could be played on a wicket agreeably diversified by ‘saw-pitts.’ William Page may have played cricket at Eton and learned to bat as well as ‘to hick and hack, which they will do fast enough of themselves, and to cry horum.’ It has already been shown that, in 1611, ‘boyes played at crickett,’ with a crooked bat or ‘cricket-staffe.’
In 1676 we get a view of a summer day at Aleppo, and of British sailors busy at the national game.