War of CricketOrigin of Cricket
Cricket's earliest firmly dated reference is a 1598 court case in Guildford, Surrey, in which a coroner named John Derrick testified that he had played the game as a schoolboy around 1550. Everything before that date is informed guesswork about who invented cricket and where; everything after it is a documented line running through the Hambledon Club to the 1787 founding of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).
The 1598 Guildford record
The deposition is dated 17 January 1597 in the Old Style calendar then in use, equivalent to 27 January 1598 by the modern New Style reckoning. It concerns a dispute over a parcel of land near Guildford's Free School; giving evidence, John Derrick said he and his schoolfellows had played "creckett" on the plot roughly fifty years earlier. That single sentence is the oldest unambiguous proof that the sport existed. Its true origin is unknown, but historians agree it predates 1550 and most likely developed in the southeastern English counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey.
A contested name, an undecided birthplace
Where the word "cricket" comes from is still argued. One theory traces it to the Middle Dutch krick(-e), meaning a stick, carried over via the wool trade between southeast England and Flanders. Another points to the Old English cricc or cryce, meaning a crutch or staff; Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary favoured this Saxon root. The Old French criquet also meant a kind of club, though most etymologists now think that word fathered croquet rather than cricket. What historians reject outright is the old claim that cricket travelled to England from the Indian subcontinent by way of Persia: there is no evidence any bat-and-ball game evolved into cricket, or it into one. As the historian David Underdown put it, the only certain fact is that the earliest record is a courtroom memory of children playing in Surrey in the mid-16th century.
From children's pastime to a gambling man's sport
The game is known to have been played by children through the 16th century; by around 1610 it had become an adult pursuit, and another definite reference survives from 1611. Between then and 1725, fewer than thirty matches are recorded at all — cricket had no newspaper coverage until the very end of the 17th century, so almost everything known about this period comes from court records and private diaries. That began to change under Charles I, when the gentry took an interest as patrons and occasional players, drawn largely by the betting opportunities cricket offered. After the Restoration, wealthy patrons in London and the southeast staged lucrative eleven-a-side matches and paid the earliest professional players. English colonists carried the game to North America in this period, and sailors of the East India Company took it to the Indian subcontinent. By 1725, patrons such as the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Gage fielded teams of county strength in Kent and Sussex, and the earliest laws were drafted in 1744, decades before any club claimed ownership of them.
The Hambledon Club, cricket's mid-century cradle
The Hambledon Club, based in rural Hampshire, grew out of a parish team that was already competing seriously by 1756, when it played a three-match series against the established Dartford club. The Hambledon Club itself had certainly formed by 1768, and by the late 1770s it had become the foremost cricket club in England — a private society of noblemen and country gentry who employed professional players and staged high-stakes matches that drew crowds from well beyond the village. For roughly two decades, Hambledon was where the game's best players and most serious competition were found, before a London-based institution took over that role.
1787: the Marylebone Cricket Club and the Laws
Thomas Lord opened a private ground at Dorset Fields in Marylebone, London, and the Marylebone Cricket Club was founded there in 1787. The following year, MCC assumed custodianship of the Laws of Cricket — first drafted in 1744, long before the club existed — and issued its own revised code, a role it has held ever since; MCC has since re-coded the Laws six times, most recently in 2017. MCC served as cricket's overall governing body from 1788 until 1909, when the Imperial Cricket Conference (the forerunner of today's International Cricket Council) was formed; MCC continued to administer that body through its secretary and president until finally handing over global governance in 1993. Lord's Cricket Ground itself relocated to its current St John's Wood site in 1814 and remains, to this day, cricket's most symbolically important ground.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1598 | Earliest definite reference to cricket (Guildford court case) |
| 1611 | Earliest reference to cricket played as an adult sport |
| 1744 | Earliest known code of the Laws of Cricket drafted |
| 1768 | Hambledon Club in existence, Hampshire |
| 1787 | Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) founded |
| 1788 | MCC takes ownership of the Laws and issues a revised code |
| 1814 | Lord's Cricket Ground relocates to St John's Wood |
The line from that 1598 Guildford deposition to the modern game is unbroken but slow: two centuries separate Derrick's schoolboy memory from the moment cricket acquired a permanent headquarters and a custodian of its Laws. What happened to the game after that point — through the 19th century's codification and the 20th century's crises — is covered on this site's Cricket in the 19th Century and Cricket in the 20th Century pages.