cricket

KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE CRICKET HISTORY
Written and pictorial records of cricket may go back to the Plantagenet period, although it is impossible to distinguish between what may be cricket and its brothers, cat and dog, stool-ball, rounders etc., and even at times its cousins, hockey and golf. The firmest, though still not secure, pictorial evidence is an illustration apparently of a man demonstrating a stroke with a stump to a boy holding a straight club and a ball in a Decretal of Pope Gregory IX that was illuminated in England; while in the Wardrobe Accounts of the Royal Household for the year 1300 the sums of 100 shillings and 6 pounds are mentioned as being spent on "creag" and other sports of Prince Edward (the grandfather of the Black Prince).In the Tudor period there are references to boys playing "creckett" and in the seventeenth century there are many references such as that by Sir William Dugdale that Oliver Cromwell played cricket in his youth, while in 1653 Sir Thomas Urquhart even makes Gargantua play cricket in his translation of Rabelais. At the very end of this century cricket makes its appearance in the newspapers, a trend that grows rapidly in the eighteenth century but is concerned with announcements of matches, the wagers involved and, occasionally, the ensuing riots rather than with descriptions of matches. Rather different is the "Code of 1744" that contains at least two strata, one of which, wherein for instance the ball is referred to as "she" rather than "it", is clearly rustic rather than metropolitan and may be of considerable antiquity. All this, however, cannot be classed as literature.The measurements of most sports are in round numbers, except for a few of those that have been converted to metric equivalents. The welter of precise measurements in cricket seems distinct, but in fact some have quite a simple origin.The earliest known Laws of Cricket, the "Code of 1744", give the length of the pitch as 22 yards. Over the centuries the often vague and regionally differing Saxon linear measurements becaine standardized to give a mile (a survival of the old Roman measurement of 1,000 double paces) as equal to 8 furlongs (i.e. "furrow long") or 320 perches (also called rods or poles) or 1,760 yards (from the Old English gyrd that meant stick or twig) or 5,280 feet or 63,360 inches or 190,080 barley corns (e.g. in the thirteenth century a royal Assize of Weights and Measures prescribed "the Iron Yard of our Lord the King" at 3 feet of 12 inches or 36 barley corns). It will thus be seen that 22 yards is in fact one tenth of a furlong or length of a furrow. There was an equally vague Saxon square measurement of land, the hide (called also carucate, from the Latin for a plough, and ploughland) which was the area required by one free family with dependents and that could be ploughed with one plough and 8 oxen in one year. This was in turn divided into four yardlands or 100 acres, the definition of which was the amount of land that could be ploughed by one yoke of oxen in one day. In Norman times the acre became precisely defined as 40 by 4 perches, thus preserving the shape of the Saxon strip-acre, i.e. one furlong by one tenth of a furlong. The cricket pitch is therefore simply the breadth of the Saxon strip-acre.It would be a mistake, however, to assume that cricket, which is believed to have had its origins on the Weald that was used primarily as grazing ground for sheep rather than ploughland, necessarily took the length of its pitch directly from this source, although the largest Saxon mete-wand or measuring rod, the gad, continued in use into the early days of cricket and was one perch in length, i.e. one quarter of the breadth of a furrow. In 1610 Edmund Gunter, an Oxford trained mathematician, now Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, invented as an instrument of measurement the chain, taking its length from the breadth of the furrow and dividing it into 100 links of 7.92 inches each (i.e. 4 perches [not 40 as stated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 19, p. 729, which is the length of the furrow]; By 1661 use of this chain had become sufficiently popular for the word to be used to designate the measurement itself}. This chain became the common measuring tool for land surveyors. We do not know when cricketers first wished to standardize their pitch, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at least pitches were often physically marked out with the use of Gunter's chain.The distance between the bowling crease and the popping crease (i.e. the crease over which the bat could be popped for safety) is given by the "Code of 1744" as 46 inches (increased to 48 inches sometime before 1821). Before creases were marked in whitewash in 1865 they were cut into the earth and were, as W.G. Grace remembered from his early days, one inch deep and one inch wide. With allowance made of 1/2 inch from the centre of each crease the distance between the inner edges of the creases was thus 45 inches, that is the length of an ell. This was another Saxon measurement that had been standardized by the time of Edward I who required that there should be an exact copy of his ell-wand in all the towns of his realm. It was used regularly for measuring cloth (hence its later name of clothyard), and indeed the king's alnager had the duty of checking that all cloth for sale was one ell in width. It was thus a measurement that would have been very familiar to the cricketing folk of the sheep-rearing Weald.