Let us trace these Hambledonians in all their contests, from the date mentioned (1786 to 1800), the eventful period of the French Revolution and Nelson’s victories; and let us see how the Bank stopping payment, the mutiny of the fleet, and the threatened invasion, put together, did not prevent balls from flying over the tented field, in a far more innocent and rational way on this, than on the other side, of the water.
Now, what were the matches in the last century—“eleven gentlemen against the twelve Cæsars?” No! these, though ancient names, are of modern times. Kent and England was as good an annual match in the last, as in the present century. The White Conduit Fields and the Artillery Ground supplied the place of Lord’s, though in 1787 the name of Lord’s is found in Bentley’s matches, implying, of course, the old Marylebone Ground, now Dorset Square, under Thomas Lord, and not the present by St. John’s Wood, more properly deserving the name of Dark’s than Lord’s. The Kentish battlefields were Sevenoaks—the land of Clout, one of the original makers of cricket-balls,—Coxheath, Dandelion Fields, in the Isle of Thanet, and Cobham Park; also Dartford Brent and Pennenden Heath: there is also early mention of Gravesend, Rochester, and Woolwich.
Next in importance to the Kent matches were those of Hampshire and of Surrey, with each of which counties indifferently the Hambledon men used to play. For it must not be supposed that the whole county of Surrey put forth a crop of stumps and wickets all at once: we have already said that malt and hops and cricket have ever gone together. Two parishes in Surrey, adjoining Hants, won the original laurels for their county; parishes in the immediate vicinity of the Farnham hop country. The Holt, near Farnham, and Moulsey Hurst, were the Surrey grounds. The match might truly have been called “Farnham’s hop-gatherers v. those of Kent.” The former, aided occasionally by men who drank the ale of Alton, just as Burton-on-Trent, life-sustainer to our Indian empire, sends forth its giants, refreshed with bitter ale, to defend the honour of the neighbouring towns and counties. The men of Hampshire, after Broadhalfpenny was abandoned to docks and thistles, pitched their tents generally either upon Windmill Downs or upon Stoke Downs; and once they played a match against T. Assheton Smith, whose mantle has descended on a worthy representative, whether on the level turf or by the cover side. Albeit, when that gentleman has a “meet” (as occasionally advertised) at Hambledon, he must unconsciously avoid the spot where “titch and turn”—the Hampshire cry—did once exhilarate the famous James Aylward, among others, as he astonished the Farnham waggoner, by continuing one and the same innings as the man drove up on the Tuesday afternoon and down on the Wednesday morning! This match was played at Andover, and the surnames of most of the Eleven may be read on the tombstones (with the best of characters) in Andover Churchyard. Bourne Paddock, Earl Darnley’s estate, and Burley Park, in Rutlandshire, constituted often the debateable ground in their respective counties. Earl Darnley, as well as Sir Horace Mann and Earl Winchelsea, Mr. Paulet and Mr. East, lent their names and patronage to Elevens; sometimes in the places mentioned, sometimes at Lord’s, and sometimes at Perriam Downs, near Luggershal, in Wiltshire.
Middlesex also, exclusively of the Marylebone Club, had its Eleven in these days; or, we should say, its twenty-two, for that was the number then required to stand the disciplined forces of Hampshire, Kent, or England. And this reminds us of an “Uxbridge ground,” where Middlesex played and lost; also, of “Hornchurch, Essex,” where Essex, in 1791, was sufficiently advanced to win against Marylebone, an occasion memorable, because Lord Frederick Beauclerk there played nearly his first recorded match, making scarce any runs, but bowling four wickets. Lord Frederick’s first match was at Lord’s, 2nd June, 1791. “There was also,” writes the Hon. R. Grimston, “‘the Bowling-green’ at Harrow-on-the-Hill, where the school played: Richardson, who subsequently became Mr. Justice Richardson, was the captain of the School Eleven in 1782.”
Already, in 1790, the game was spreading northwards, or, rather, proofs exist that it had long before struck far and wide its roots and branches in northern latitudes; and also that it was a game as popular with the men of labour as the men of leisure, and therefore incontestably of home growth: no mere exotic, or importation of the favoured few, can cricket be, if, like its namesake, it is found “a household word” with those whom Burns aptly calls “the many-aproned sons of mechanical life.”
In 1791 Eton, that is, the old Etonians, played Marylebone, four players given on either side; and all true Etonians will thank us for informing them, not only that the seven Etonians were more than a match for their adversaries, but also that this match proves that Eton had, at that early date, the honour of sending forth the most distinguished amateurs of the day; for Lord Winchelsea, Hon. H. Fitzroy, Earl Darnley, Hon. E. Bligh, C. Anguish, Assheton Smith—good men and true—were Etonians all. This match was played in Burley Park, Rutlandshire. On the following day, June 25th, 1791, the Marylebone played eleven yeomen and artisans of Leicester; and though the Leicestrians cut a sorry figure, still the fact that the Midland Counties practised cricket sixty years ago is worth recording. Peter Heward, of Leicester, a famous wicket-keeper, of twenty years since, told me of a trial match in which he saw his father, quite an old man, with another veteran of his own standing, quickly put out with the old-fashioned slow bowling a really good Eleven for some twenty runs—good, that is, against the modern style of bowling; and cricket was not a new game in this old man’s early days (say 1780) about Leicester and Nottingham, as the score in [page 41] alone would prove; for such a game as cricket, evidently of gradual development, must have been played in some primitive form many a long year before the date of 1775, in which it had excited sufficient interest, and was itself sufficiently matured in form, to show the two Elevens of Sheffield and of Nottingham. Add to this, what we have already mentioned, a rude form of cricket as far north as Angus and Lothian in 1700, and we can hardly doubt that cricket was known as early in the Midland as in the Southern Counties. The men of Nottingham—land of Clarke, Barker, and Redgate—next month, in the same year (1791) threw down the gauntlet, and shared the same fate; and next day the Marylebone, “adding,” in a cricketing sense, “insult unto injury,” played twenty-two of them, and won by thirteen runs.
In 1790, the shopocracy of Brighton had also an Eleven; and Sussex and Surrey, in 1792, sent an eleven against England to Lord’s, who scored in one innings 453 runs, the largest score on record, save that of Epsom in 1815—476 in one innings! “M.C.C. v. twenty-two of Nottingham,” we now find an annual match; and also “M.C.C. v. Brighton,” which becomes at once worthy of the fame that Sussex long has borne. In 1793, the old Westminster men all but beat the old Etonians: and Essex and Herts, too near not to emulate the fame of Kent and Surrey, were content, like second-rate performers, to have, though playing twenty-two, one Benefit between them, in the shape of defeat in one innings from England. And here we are reminded by two old players, a Kent and an Essex man, that, being schoolboys in 1785, they can respectively testify that, both in Kent and in Essex, cricket appeared to them more of a village game than they have ever seen it of late years. “There was a cricket-bat behind the door, or else up in the bacon rack, in every cottage. We heard little of clubs, except around London; still the game was played by many or by few, in every school and village green in Essex and in Kent, and the field placed much as when with the Sidmouth I played the Teignbridge Club in 1826. Mr. Whitehead was the great hitter of Kent; and Frame and Small were names as often mentioned as Pilch and Parr by our boys now.” And now (1793) the game had penetrated further West; for eleven yeomen at Oldfield Bray, in Berkshire, had learned long enough to be able to defeat a good eleven of the Marylebone Club.
In 1795, the Hon. Colonel Lennox, memorable for a duel with the Duke of York, fought—where the gallant Colonel had fought so many a less hostile battle—on the cricket ground at Dartford Brent, headed Elevens against the Earl of Winchelsea; and now, first the Marylebone eleven beat sixteen Oxonians on Bullingdon Green.
In 1797, the Montpelier Club and ground attract our notice. The name of this club is one of the most ancient, and their ground a short distance only from the ground of Hall of Camberwell.
Swaffham, in Norfolk, is now mentioned for the first time. But Norfolk lies out of the usual road, and is a county which, as Mr. Dickens said of Golden Square, before it was the residence of Cardinal Wiseman, “is nobody’s way to or from any place.” So, in those slow coach and packhorse days, the patrons of Kent, Surrey, Hants, and Marylebone, who alone gave to what else were “airy nothing, a local habitation and a name,” could not so easily extend their circuit to the land of turkeys, lithotomy, and dumplings. But it happened once that Lord Frederick Beauclerk was heard to say, his eleven should beat any three elevens in the county of Norfolk; whence arose a challenge from the Norfolk men, whom, sure enough, his Lordship did beat, and that in one innings; and a print, though not on pocket-handkerchiefs, was struck off to perpetuate this honourable achievement.