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Investigations by historians into the origins of cricket occasionally go back as far as Saxon times. Despite various speculations they are all agreed on one point, that the first definite reference occurs in 1597 during a court case involving a land dispute in Guildford when a witness indicated that children were playing “creckett” on this space around 1550.
The first half of the 17th century brought several mentions of schoolboys and adults playing the game, including Oliver Cromwell playing cricket at 18 years of age, plus a number of references to adults being fined for missing church on the Sabbath to play cricket, a game which was predominately being played in counties to the south of London, and eventually in the capital itself.
The Restoration (of the monarchy) in 1660 saw members of the nobility and the landed gentry becoming interested in the game, although it was borne more of the gambling opportunities that it offered, rather than cricket itself. They eventually became patrons of the game, retaining players who had learned their trade playing in village matches. These “employees” were the game’s first professionals.
The first recorded games in and around London appear in the early 1700s. But only around the middle of that century we begin to hear of individual players, most of the publicity before that being limited to the noble patrons and to the large amounts of money that was being wagered on matches. Around the same period, the first written laws of cricket appear.
Hambledon in East Hampshire was the first celebrated club to appear outside London. It was effectively a social club whose membership included the nobility, clergymen and gentlemen. The club funded the cricket team whose players were recruited from surrounding villages and towns.
Meanwhile, patrons and players in London, using the Artillery Ground in Finsbury, gravitated to Thomas Lord’s new ground in 1787, forming the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) a revised version of the laws of cricket in the following year.