History Of Cricket.
Cricket, if it was played at all, did not have sufficient
popularity to be subjected to any kind of specific sanction, unlike
some other games. For example, a statute of King Edward IV in 1477
made the playing of handyn and handoute illegal because it
interfered with the compulsory practice of archery.
In 1597 there was a dispute over a school's ownership of a plot
of land in which a 59-year old coroner, John Derrick, testified that
he and his school friends had played kreckett on the site
fifty years earlier. This is generally considered to be the first
definite mention of cricket in the English language. Mr. Derrick's
account proves beyond reasonable doubt that the game was being
played in 1550.
In the following year John Florio, in his Italian-English
dictionary defined the verb sgillare as to make a noise as
a cricket, to play cricket-a-wicket, and be merry. Until the
17th Century, cricket may have developed primarily as a boy's game.
The first reference to it being played as an adult sport was in
1611, when two men in Sussex were prosecuted for playing cricket
instead of going to church. There are other mentions of cricket
prosecutions in the years that followed and even of two fatalities.
In 1646 an organized game for a bet of a dozen candles gave rise to
a lawsuit.
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