Page:Cricket, by WG Grace.djvu/11

Rh females, and says: "All the figures are monks, with their cowls up and down alternately."

In 1477 was mentioned as a kind of cricket, and identical with Club-ball.

The word is said to have been first used in the year 1550. John Parish, an innkeeper in Guildford, enclosed a piece of waste land that year, but was ordered to give it up in 1593. John Derrick, one of Queen Elizabeth's coroners for Surrey, aged fifty-nine, said: "When he was a scholler in the free school of Guldeforde, he and severall of his fellowes did runne and play there at crickett and other plaies." That has been accepted by writers generally on the authority of Russell, a local historian, who transcribed it from the old records of the borough of Guildford; but another and more careful reading has shown that Russell must have, innocently or intentionally, substituted crickett for quoits.

The seventeenth century was half through before the word was again heard of. Bishop Ken, in his thirteenth year, entered Winchester College in 1650, and Lisle Bowles, writing of him, says: "On the fifth day our junior is found attempting to wield a cricket bat." Eight years later Edward Phillips, John Milton's nephew, in his poem entitled "Treatment of Ladies at Balls and Sports," says: "Would that my eyes had been beaten out of my head with a cricket ball the day before I saw thee." In 1670 the British sailor added his testimony. The chaplain on board H.M.S. Assistance wrote to the effect that while they were lying at Antioch, on May the 6th of that year, "Krickett" and other games were played. This is his letter: "This morning early at the least 40 of the English, with his worthy the Consull, rod out of the city about 4 miles to the Greene Platte, a fine valley by a river side, to recreate themselves with such pastimes and sports such