which I have already mentioned, although it had some fairly old
parents, simple and humble-minded folk, who would have been greatly
astonished to see the extraordinary development of their precocious
offspring.

Kent and Sussex were the ancestral homes of cricket, which is thus
described by an old writer--"A game most usual in Kent, with a
cricket-ball bowled and struck with two cricket-bats between two
wickets. The name is derived from the Saxon word _cryc_, baculus, a
bat or staff; which also signifies fulcimentum, a support or prop,
whence a cricket or little stool to sit upon. Cricket play among the
Saxons was also called _stef-plege_ (staff-play)."

I fear that our old writer must have made a great mistake if he
imagined that the Saxons ever played cricket, and I believe that the
word was not known before the sixteenth century. In the records of
Guildford we find that a dispute arose about the enclosure of a
piece of land in the time of Elizabeth; and in the suit that arose
one John Derrick stated in his evidence that he knew the place well
"for fifty years or more, and that when he was a scholar in the free
school at Guildford he and several of his companions did run and
play there at cricket and other plays." Also in Cotgrave's French
Dictionary, published in 1611, the word _crosse_ is translated "a
cricket-staff, or the crooked-staff wherewith boys play at cricket."

In the eighteenth century allusions to the game become more
frequent, although it was still a boy's game. It had its poet, who
sang--

"Hail, cricket, glorious, manly, British game,