CRICKET DATES BACK TO MIDDLE OF 12th CENTURY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 21, 5 August 1949, Page 7

CRICKET DATES BACK TO MIDDLE OF 12th CENTURY

Cricket as a sport is not particularly strong in the Bay of Plenty but interest in the game has quickened of late because of the remarkable success of the present tour of England by the New Zealand team. Even though most people have a fair idea of the game, it is surprising how few know its history. It is common knowledge that a schoolboy at Rugby Public School started the idea of rugby, hence the name of the sport, but few men, Englishmen included, can tell how and where the game of cricket originated and from where the name is derived. The word “cricket” comes from the Saxon crvc, meaning a clubbed staff, but the earliest record of a pastime resembling the most English of games dates from the middle of the 12th century. ■ There Was No Wicket There was, however, no wicket, and Miss Christina Hole, distinguished social historian, who has gone into the matter thoroughly in her latest book, English Sports and Pastimes, says that the forerunner of cricket as we know it today was stoolball, in which a ball was thrown or bowled towards a stool set in the ground. “They smite the ball,” wrote a 17th century Wiltshire historian, “stuffed very hard with quills and covered with soale leather, with a stafie commonly made of withy about three feet and a half long.

. . . A stobbal ball is of about four inches diameter, and as hard as stone.”

The original wickets were ordinary milking stools, but, Miss Hole tells us, these were later replaced by flat wooden .boards mounted m stakes. Honour To Hampshire

But to Hampshire may go the honour and the glory of being the birth-shire of modern cricket, for it was not until the Hambledon Men, those genial giants of Broad Halfpenny Down, formed their club that the game as we know it today had its beginnings and definite rules were drawn up for the first time. Though it was not until towards the end of the century that three stumps became usual and the size of bats, “hitherto governed only by the fancy of the individual, was regulated”; and eventually the bat itself was, in the words of the immortal Farmer Nyren, “made straight in the pod”; in consequence of which a total revolution, it may be said a reformation too, ensued in the style of play.”