often take his wicket; so he began to imitate them, and introduced
his new method into matches, and thus the age of round-arm bowling
was inaugurated. I cannot vouch for the truth of the story, and only
tell it as it was told to me.[12] At any rate Lillywhite was the
father of modern bowling, which would have startled and considerably
puzzled the veteran cricketers in the early part of the present
century.

The proper parent of cricket seems to have been club-ball, which is
a very old game, and of which there is a picture in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford, dated 1344 A.D. It represents a female throwing a
ball to a man who is in the act of raising his bat to strike it.
Behind the woman, at a little distance, appear several other figures
of men and women waiting attentively to catch or stop the ball when
hit by the batsman. There is a still more ancient picture of two
club-ball players, representing the batsman holding the ball also
and preparing to hit it, while the other player holds his hands in
readiness to catch the ball. He has the appearance of a very careful
fielder. Here we have the rudimentary idea of cricket; but how they
scored their game, what rules they had, we cannot determine.
Stool-ball claims also to be an ancestor of cricket, and consists in
one player defending a stool with his hand from being hit by a ball
bowled by another player. Here is a simple form of the modern game,
the stool being used as a wicket, and the hand for a bat.

Trap-ball is a much older game than cricket, and can be traced to
the beginning of the fourteenth century. The modern game differs
little from that which the old pictures describe, except in the
shape of the trap which holds the ball. But the most ancient of all
games of this nature is golf, or goff (as it used to be spelt),