Origins and the first Laws

In 1597 old style a Guildford land dispute recorded John Derrick swearing he had played "creckett" on the plot as a boy around 1550, and scholars treat this deposition as the earliest reference that cannot be argued away.

Source: Birley, A Social History of English Cricket · applied

Derrick placed his own boyhood games near 1550, so the sworn words push the game back another half-century but describe only schoolboys at play, not a codified adult contest.

Source: Birley, A Social History of English Cricket · applied

Candidates include Middle Dutch "krick" for a stick and Old English "cryce" for a staff, and after generations of argument no single derivation has been established.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, on the origins of the game · recall

Cotgrave glossed the word "crosse" as the bent staff with which boys play at cricket, an early printed mention that also hints the implement was still curved.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, on the origins of the game · recall

The wooded south-eastern Weald produced the earliest parish records and the first datable match, its clearings and sheep downs giving villages room to play.

Source: Birley, A Social History of English Cricket · recall

The Chevening witness put the contest "about thirty years since," and taking that back from 1640 sets it around 1610, the oldest match between organised sides that can be dated.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the game's early history · applied

The 1646 Coxheath entry shows money riding on results a century before the first code, though this particular wager ran only to a dozen candles rather than the fortunes staked later.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the game's early history · recall

Labourers were summoned before church courts for missing service to play, which shows the game reaching well below the level of the patrons who later ran the great matches.

Source: Birley, A Social History of English Cricket · applied

Wealthy backers settled bespoke articles covering stakes, pitch and disputes, so each contest ran to its own contract until the 1744 code gave every match one shared set of rules.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · applied

The Finsbury ground drew London's gambling crowds to the leading fixtures of the 1740s, decades before Hambledon's downs or Thomas Lord's grounds became the game's centre.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the game's early history · recall

Club references are firm by 1768 and a parish side was already meeting Dartford in 1756, so a formation in the mid-1760s is the accepted estimate rather than a recorded fact.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · applied

Thomas Land, a local squire, ran the parish side through the 1750s and early 1760s until Nyren and the gentlemen backers built the club that came to dominate the game.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · recall

Nyren led the side and ran its business while holding the licence of the Bat and Ball and later the George, making his inn the club's dining room and headquarters.

Source: John Nyren, The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833) · recall

The gentlemen supplied money, patronage and the wagers while employing the strongest cricketers available, so renown gathered around paid players who never ran the club.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · applied

Broadhalfpenny Down, high and wind-scoured above the inn, staged the club's cricket from the 1750s until 1782, when the side shifted to the calmer Windmill Down.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · recall

Broadhalfpenny Down was punishingly exposed, and the 1782 switch to Windmill Down, nearer the village and out of the worst of the weather, gave players and spectators a far easier ground.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · applied

Aylward batted on into a second day for 167, carrying Hambledon to a win by an innings and 168 runs that became the club's most quoted result.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · applied

Harris was prized for a high, repeatable underarm action that dropped a testing length ball after ball, the very delivery Hambledon's batsmen sharpened their defence against.

Source: John Nyren, The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833) · recall

The entry for 21 September 1796 shows almost no attendance and the single line that no gentlemen came, a quiet close as members drifted to the new Marylebone club.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on the Hambledon club · recall

John Nyren, Richard's son, dictated his recollections decades afterward to Charles Cowden Clarke, and that 1833 book supplies the portraits and atmosphere the bare records never kept.

Source: John Nyren, The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833) · applied

The 1744 agreement is preserved only through a 1755 printed text headed as the game "settled by the Cricket-Club in 1744," so the rules are dated to 1744 while the wording is read from the later edition.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · recall

The men behind the code were the aristocratic and gentry members of the London Cricket Club that played at the Artillery Ground, acting for themselves and not for any wider body.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · recall

The 1744 Laws set twenty-two yards between the stumps, and that length has outlasted every later revision while stump height, ball weight and bat width were all altered.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · applied

The early wicket was low and narrow, two stumps about six inches apart standing 22 inches tall beneath a single six-inch bail, until the middle stump was added after 1775.

Source: MCC, on the history of the Laws · recall

In place of a single figure the 1744 rule gave a five-to-six-ounce band, and only the 1774 revision narrowed it to the tight range of five and a half to five and three-quarter ounces.

Source: MCC, on the history of the Laws · applied

The four-ball over of 1744 held until 1889, when it went to five and then six, while the eight-ball over was a much later and short-lived experiment.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · recall

The code gave each side an umpire and made their judgement absolute, so a player could put the question but was bound to accept whatever answer came back.

Source: MCC, on the history of the Laws · applied

The toss and the popping crease were both in the first code, but leg before wicket came only in 1774, along with a maximum bat width, after a freakishly broad bat forced the point.

Source: MCC, on the history of the Laws · applied

The first code already carried much of cricket's core vocabulary, so terms like over, no ball, toss and umpire read as current even though the rules wrapped around them have all moved on.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · applied

Where each big contest had been negotiated in its own articles, the 1744 code let sides meet on agreed terms without haggling first, the role the MCC's revisions later filled on a larger stage.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The measurements of cricket · applied

A committee of noblemen and gentlemen from the leading cricket counties met at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall and revised the code there, thirteen years before the MCC or Lord's existed.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of the lbw · recall

Thirty years of pitched bowling had shown a batsman could simply block the stumps with his pad, so 1774 made him out for deliberately stopping the ball with his leg.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of the lbw · recall

The original law asked the umpire to judge intention, out only where the batsman had placed his leg in the way "with a design" to stop it, so a pad hit while playing a real stroke was not out.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of the lbw · applied

In 1771 "Shock" White of Reigate walked out against Hambledon with a blade the full width of the wicket, and the protest that followed set the four-and-a-quarter-inch limit still in force.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, on the evolution of the cricket bat · recall

At the Artillery Ground Stevens sent three balls clean between Small's two stumps without disturbing the bail, and the unfairness of a wicket a ball could pass through brought in the third stump.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of the lbw · recall

The Earl of Winchilsea and other White Conduit members wanted somewhere less public than their Islington field, so their paid player Thomas Lord took a Marylebone lease and the club re-formed as the MCC.

Source: MCC, Our History · recall

The 1787 ground lay at Dorset Fields in Marylebone, built over within a generation and marked today by Dorset Square; the St John's Wood site came only after two more moves.

Source: MCC, Our History · recall

Rising rents and a canal driven through the second ground moved Lord on twice more, and he carried his own turf with him to the third and final ground that opened in 1814.

Source: MCC, Our History · applied

The MCC's 1788 wording stopped asking the umpire to read the batsman's mind and instead required the ball to have pitched in line, moving LBW toward the geometric test still used today.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of the lbw · applied

From 1788 the MCC published and revised the Laws and other clubs deferred to it, so a private London club, not any public body, held the game's rule-making pen for the next two centuries.

Source: MCC, Our History · applied

Single-wicket put small matched teams, often one to six a side, against each other at a single wicket, each side batting and then taking the field in turn until one had the higher total.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on single-wicket cricket · recall

With so few fielders a stroke played behind the popping crease could not be run, which pushed batsmen to hit straight and in front and made the game largely a driving contest.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on single-wicket cricket · recall

Far from a novelty, single-wicket drew the best players and the heaviest betting of the 1740s to 1760s, with fixtures such as the 1748 match ranking among the events of the season.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on single-wicket cricket · recall

Noblemen made matches by staking large sums against one another, from a hundred guineas up to a thousand a side, and that betting money, not admission fees, kept the teams and grounds going.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on 18th-century patrons · applied

The prince formed the Prince of Wales's XI, backed matches and handed out prizes from his own purse, one of the royal and aristocratic patrons whose money drove the eighteenth-century game.

Source: Wisden Almanack, on 18th-century patrons · recall

The early blade curved outward at the bottom because the ball came along the turf, and a hooked shape met that low delivery far better than an upright bat would.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, on the evolution of the cricket bat · recall

Once bowlers such as Lumpy Stevens landed the ball on a length it could climb toward the stumps, and only a straight, vertical bat let a batsman meet that bounce and guard the wicket.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, on the evolution of the cricket bat · applied

Small built his defence around the new upright bat, was reckoned the first truly scientific batsman, and sold gear from a shop whose rhyming trade card is quoted to this day.

Source: John Nyren, The Young Cricketer's Tutor (1833) · applied

Length bowling made blocking with the pad and squeezing balls through a two-stump gate real problems, so the change that reshaped the bat also pushed the game toward a third stump and a leg-before rule.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, The evolution of the lbw · applied

A straight bat, a rising ball, a third stump and the leg-before law between them rewarded judgement, footwork and shot selection, so a batsman now had to build an innings rather than swing at all of it.

Source: ESPNcricinfo, on the evolution of the cricket bat · applied