Asked by
harsha
in
Cricket & Other Sports
at
12:18 AM on October 13, 2008
Manoj Gajraj's Answer
Well Harsha,
Cricket was firstly played in Australia but officially played in England.......
it is difficult to say a single person invented this game ........
i think No one knows when or where cricket began but there is a body of evidence, much of it circumstantial,
that strongly suggests the game was devised during Saxon or Norman times by children living in the Weald, an area of dense woodlands and clearings in south-east England that lies across Kent and Sussex.
In medieval times, the Weald was populated by small farming and metal-working communities. It is generally believed that cricket survived as a children's game for many centuries before it was increasingly taken up by adults around the beginning of the 17th century
It is quite likely that cricket was devised by children and survived for many generations as essentially a children’s game.
Adult participation is unknown before the early 17th century. Possibly cricket was derived from bowls,
assuming bowls is the older sport, by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball reaching its target by hitting it away.
Playing on sheep-grazed land or in clearings, the original implements may have been a matted lump of sheep’s wool (or even a stone or a small lump of wood) as the ball;
a stick or a crook or another farm tool as the bat; and a stool or a tree stump or a gate (e.g., a wicket gate) as the wicket
A number of words are thought to be possible sources for the term "cricket". In the earliest known reference to the sport in 1597 it is called creckett.
The name may have been derived from the Old Flemish, krick(-e), meaning a stick; or the Old English cricc or cryce meaning a crutch or staff .
Another possible source is the Old Flemish word krickstoel, meaning a long low stool used for kneeling in church and which resembled the long low wicket with two stumps used in early cricket.
Despite many prior suggested references, the first definite reference to the game is found in a 1597 court case concerning dispute over a school's ownership of a plot of land.
A 59-year old coroner, John Derrick, testified that he and his school friends had played creckett on the site fifty years earlier.
The school was the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, and Mr Derrick's account proves beyond reasonable doubt that the game was being played in Surrey c.1550
The first reference to it being played as an adult sport was in 1611, when two men in Sussex were prosecuted for playing cricket on Sunday instead of going to church [5]. In the same year, a dictionary defines cricket as a boys' game and this suggests that adult participation was a recent development ....
A number of references occur up to the English Civil War and these indicate that cricket had become an adult game contested by parish teams, but there is no evidence of county strength teams at this time. Equally, there is little evidence of the rampant gambling that characterised the game throughout the 18th century. It is generally believed, therefore, that village cricket had developed by the middle of the 17th century but that county cricket had not and that investment in the game had not begun .
After the Civil War ended in 1648,
the new Puritan government clamped down on "unlawful assemblies", in particular the more raucous sports such as football.
Their laws also demanded a stricter observance of the Sabbath than there had been previously. As the Sabbath was the only free time available to the lower classes, cricket's popularity may have waned during the Commonwealth.
Having said that, it did flourish in public fee-paying schools such as Winchester and St Paul's. There is no actual evidence that Oliver Cromwell's regime banned cricket specifically and there are references to it during the interregnum that
Answered at
5:22 PM on October 14, 2008
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