Cricket, nimble boy and light,
In slippers red and drawers white,
Who o’er the nicely measured land
Ranges around his comely band,
Alert to intercept each blow,
Each motion of the wary foe.
This passage gives us the costume—white drawers and red slippers. The contemporary works of art, whereof see a little gallery on the walls of the pavilion at Lord’s, show that men when they played also wore a kind of jockey cap. In a sketch of the Arms of Shrewsbury School, little boys are playing; the bat is a kind of hockey-stick as in the preceding century. There are only two stumps, nor more in Hayman’s well-known picture engraved 1755. The fields are well set for the bowling, and are represented with their hands ready for a catch. There are umpires in their usual places; the scores are kept by men who cut notches in tally-sticks. Such ‘notches’ were ‘got’ by ‘[Miss Wicket]’ a sportive young lady in a somewhat later caricature (p. 7). The ball (1770) has heavy cross-seams. But a silver ball, about a hundred years old, used as a snuff-box by the Vine Club at Sevenoaks, is marked with seams like those of to-day. Miss Wicket, also, carries a curved bat, but it has developed beyond the rustic crooked stick, and more nearly resembles some of the old curved bats at Lord’s, with which a strong man must have hit prodigious skyers. We may doubt if bats were ever such ‘three-man beetles’ as the players in an undated but contemporary picture at Lord’s do fillip withal. The fields, in this curious piece, are all in a line at square-leg, and disappear in a distance unconscious of perspective.
After a Picture by Hayman, R.A., belonging to the M.C.C.
Cricket had even before this date reached that height of prosperity which provokes the attention of moralists. ‘Here is a fine morning: let us go and put down some form of enjoyment,’ says the moralist. In 1743 a writer in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ was moved to allege that ‘the exercise may be strained too far.... Cricket is certainly a very good and wholesome exercise, yet it may be abused if either great or little people make it their business.’ The chief complaint is that great and little people play together—butchers and baronets. Cricket ‘propagates a spirit of idleness at the very time when, with the utmost industry, our debts, taxes, and decay of trade will scarcely allow us to get bread.’ The Lydians, according to Herodotus, invented games to make them forget the scarcity of bread. But the gentleman in the magazine is much more austere than Herodotus. ‘The advertisements most impudently recite that great sums are laid’; and it was, indeed, customary to announce a match for 500l. or 1,000l. Whether these sums were not drawn on Fancy’s exchequer, at least in many cases, we may reasonably doubt. In his ‘English Game of Cricket’ (p. 138) the learned Mr. Box quotes a tale of betting in 1711, from a document which he does not describe. It appears that in 1711 the county of Kent played All England, and money was lost and won, and there was a law-suit to recover. The court said, ‘Cricket is, to be sure, a manly game and not bad in itself, but it is the ill-use that is made of it by betting above 10l. on it that is bad.’ To a humble fiver on the University match this court would have had no kind of objection to make. The history of betting at cricket is given by Mr. Pycroft in the ‘Cricket Field’ (chap. vi.). A most interesting chapter it is.