Where cricket came from: the theories and the first firm record.

The theories

Every account of cricket's beginnings is a theory. The sources set out four, and none of them has firm documents behind it:

• Children in the Weald. The ICC's history page reports a broad view among experts that cricket may have been invented by children in Saxon or Norman times in the Weald, the wooded country of south-east England.
• A descendant of bowls. The same ICC page offers a second idea: that cricket grew out of bowls, with a batter knocking the ball away to stop it reaching its target.
• A shepherds' game. Britannica, which we saw only as a search summary, suggests the game may reach back to the 13th century, with country boys bowling at a tree stump or at the gate of a sheep pen; on this account the gate's crossbar was called the bail and the whole gate the wicket. We could not confirm this from Britannica itself.
• Flemish weavers. In March 2009 Heiner Gillmeister of the University of Bonn and Paul Campbell of the Australian National University proposed that Flemish weavers brought the game to England, and Gillmeister linked the word cricket to a Flemish phrase about chasing a ball with a curved stick.

The case against the Flemish theory

Michael Quinion examined the Flemish proposal in World Wide Words on 14 March 2009. Its main new evidence was a poem reported as Skelton's from 1533. Quinion pointed out that Skelton died in 1529, that the reports misquoted the poem, and that its words most likely referred to gates and latches. He concluded there was no compelling evidence for a Flemish origin, and noted that the Oxford English Dictionary had already listed the Flemish word link as a suggestion. Belgian tourism and news websites repeat the weavers' theory as established fact; we saw those pages only in search results, and they are one side of an open argument.

Wikipedia, seen only as a search summary, says claimed references from before the 1590s exist, one of them dated 1301, but that they are treated as weak or doubtful. A 1598 Italian-English dictionary entry sometimes cited as an early mention is thought, by the same secondary sources, to mean the insect rather than the game. Neither point is confirmed.

The first firm record: Guildford, January 1598

The earliest generally accepted reference to cricket, according to Wikipedia, is a statement given in a court case in Guildford, Surrey, over the use of a plot of land. It is dated 1597 in the Old Style calendar then used in England, which is January 1598 by modern reckoning.

The witness was John Derrick, a coroner aged 59. He said that as a pupil at the free school in Guildford, about fifty years before, he and his friends had played "creckett" on that land. Wikipedia and Michael Quinion both give this account, which puts children playing cricket in Guildford around 1550. CricketArchive, which we saw only as a search summary, identifies the school as the Royal Grammar School, Guildford.

The exact day is not settled. Secondary summaries give 17 January 1597 in the old calendar and, separately, 27 January 1598 in the modern one. We found no copy of the original record online, so this site gives the date as January 1598 (1597 in the calendar of the time).

From a children's game to an adult sport

The ICC dates the first reference to adults playing cricket to 1611, the same year a dictionary still described it as a boys' game. By the ICC's account, village cricket had developed by the middle of the 17th century, county teams formed in the second half of it, and the village experts those teams hired were the first professionals. The ICC dates the first known match played under county names to 1709.

The MCC's preface to the current Laws, the 2017 Code 4th Edition (2026), says cricket was recognised as early as 1700. In the first half of the 18th century, the ICC says, cricket became a leading sport in London and the south-east, and spread more slowly elsewhere because travel was hard. After about 1760 bowlers began to pitch the ball instead of rolling it along the ground, and the straight bat replaced the old curved bat shaped like a hockey stick.

Hambledon, Thomas Lord and MCC

The ICC calls the Hambledon Club in Hampshire the centre of the game for about thirty years, until MCC was formed and Lord's opened in 1787. Britannica, in a search summary we could not check, places the club on Broadhalfpenny Down and credits it with the change from curved to straight bats.

The MCC's own history says gentlemen of the White Conduit Club in Islington wanted a more private ground. The Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke of Richmond promised to cover Thomas Lord, a former bowler and an attendant at White Conduit Fields, against any losses if he found one. In 1787 Lord laid out a ground at Dorset Fields in St Marylebone, today's Dorset Square, and the MCC says the club was founded in connection with it that year. A search summary of Britannica says Lord's moved to its present site in St John's Wood in 1814, which we could not confirm.

Two disputed details

• The first match at the new ground. The MCC dates it to 31 May 1787, with Middlesex beating Essex by 93 runs and Lord opening the batting for Middlesex. Wikipedia's article on the club, and Westminster Guides in a search summary, give 21 May 1787.
• Who founded MCC. The ICC's page says members of the Star and Garter Club, who had drawn up the Laws, later founded MCC at Lord's in 1787. The MCC's own page links its founding to the White Conduit Club gentlemen and Lord's new ground.

Cricket goes overseas

The ICC says English colonists took cricket to North America as early as the 17th century, colonists took it to the West Indies, and sailors of the British East India Company took it to India. It reached Australia almost as soon as colonisation began in 1788, and New Zealand and South Africa early in the 19th century.

The ICC dates the first international match to 1844, the United States against Canada at the St George's Cricket Club in New York. The first overseas tour, by a team of leading English professionals, went to North America in 1859, and the first English team toured Australia in 1862. In 1868 a team of Aboriginal Australian cricketers toured England, the first Australian side to travel overseas.

The 19th-century game at home

The ICC's account of the century runs as follows. The Napoleonic Wars starved cricket of money early on, and recovery began in 1815. Sussex, the first English county club, dates from 1839, and the travelling All-England Eleven from 1846. Railways let teams and crowds travel further, and British army units abroad encouraged local people to play. The first Wisden Cricketers' Almanack appeared in 1864, the year W.G. Grace began his career.

Organised competitions followed: the Currie Cup in South Africa in 1889-90, the official County Championship in England in 1890, and Australia's Sheffield Shield three years after the County Championship (the ICC page gives no exact season). The ICC calls the years from 1890 to the First World War the "Golden Age", naming W.G. Grace, Wilfred Rhodes, C.B. Fry, Ranjitsinhji and Victor Trumper among its players.

How the first written rules came about is on the early Laws, and every date on this page is in the timeline.