Page:Cricket, by WG Grace.djvu/10

2 even at that age I realised the duty resting on every cricketer who desires to add a page or two to cricket history.

This much, then, may be safely accepted, that not a year has passed since 1850 in which I have not, in some form or other, played the game. That must be my justification for giving my experiences to the cricket-reading public.

But I have been asked to say something about the history of cricket; to touch upon the remote past, about which every writer has an opinion of his own, and upon which very few agree. Where wiser and more learned heads have failed I cannot be expected to succeed. I am a player pure and simple, and have been all my life more interested in the doings of players than in reading this and the other account of how the game began and where it was first played. I would rather read a hundred pages of Frederick Lillywhite's Scores and Biographies any day than half a dozen pages which try to prove it is absolutely untrue that the game had its origin in Rome, or Greece, or indeed anywhere but in England.

was played in the thirteenth century, and the Rev. J. Pycroft, author of The Cricket Field, and a friend of my own family, has little doubt of it being single-wicket cricket in its earliest form. He also quotes from Strutt, who wrote to this effect, fifty years later :— "In the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a MS., No. 264, and dated 1344, in which a female figure is represented bowling a ball of the size of a cricket-ball to a man who is raising a bat to strike it; behind the bowler are figures, male and female, waiting to catch the ball. The game is called Club-ball, and the score is made by running and hitting as at Cricket." A modern writer, who examined the MS. also, takes exception to Strutt's assertion that some of the figures in the picture are