Flannelled Fools

It's  nearly the end of summer and I haven't posted about cricket. Very remiss of me, considering the England team's terrific performances in the Ashes in Australia last winter and against India at home this summer.

Cricket is not just a game of physical skill and stamina. The most successful captains are those with the best tactical skills. And then the most careful plans can be undone by the English weather.



Cricket seems to have originated in south east England. The earliest known documented reference is in a court case in Surrey in 1598. A witness recalled playing fifty years before.

In the summer of 1652 several men were indicted for 'playing an unlawful game called crickett' on several occasions in Ballfield in Cranbrook in Kent.

Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 cricket was no longer unlawful, but it could be dangerous.

In April 1662 John Carely ‘being playing at a sport called cricket with David Morgan and others at Goudhurst  .... in striking at the ball thrown against his wicket with [a] cricket bat which he had then in his hand ... did strike the said David Morgan under the ear ... inflicting an injury  from which he died.’

John Carely was indicted for  murder, the charge later being reduced to manslaughter. The jury, however, found that Carely ‘had no malicious intent’ and Morgan died ‘not by any homicide.’

Cricket was played by all social classes. The cricketers at Cranbrook and Goudhurst in the seventeenth century included a gentleman, a clothier, a husbandman and a labourer.

In the mid eighteenth century the Sussex shopkeeper  Thomas Turner often watched, and sometimes played in, matches between parishes in his neighbourhood. He also occasionally had a bet on the results. He seems to have been well informed about the game, recording after one match that ‘Lindfield kept the field best and batted best in general, but could not bowl.’

The game was becoming more organised by the later eighteenth century. Thomas Turner saw a team that purported to represent the whole county of Sussex. The Marylebone Cricket Club was founded in 1787 and a year later the Laws (not Rules) of cricket were laid down.

The best known lines of cricketing poetry are probably those by Sir Henry Newbolt:

There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight -
Ten to make and the match to win -
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

The game is a popular subject for prose writers in both fiction and non-fiction. Lord Peter Wimsey is probably the best known fictional cricketer.

Some cricketing moments have become part of the national memory. Anyone who has any interest in the game will remember where he or she was on the fourth and fifth days of the Headingley Test  in 1981. Or the moment when a large part of the nation was reduced to giggles.

St Bartholomew's Day

24 August is St Bartholomew's Day.

It is the anniversary of the Battle of Sandwich, otherwise the Battle of St Bartholomew's Day, fought in the English Channel between the French and the English in 1217.

The English were led by Hubert de Burgh, who had sixteen or eighteen large ships and twenty smaller ones under his command.

The French fleet was probably twice the size of the English, but since it was carrying reinforcements and supplies for the invading force already in England, the ships were overloaded and not easily manoeuvred.

The French fleet was commanded by Eustace the Monk, a notorious pirate and mercenary who also dabbled in magic. Eustace made his fleet invisible to the English, so that it could slip past them and enter the Thames Estuary and proceed to London.

However, Stephen Crabbe, a Winchelsea man, was also a student of magic. Despite Eustace's enchantment, he could see the French ships. He leapt aboard Eustace’s ship and struck off his head, whereupon the French fleet became visible again.

A storm raised by the intervention of St Bartholomew scattered the French fleet and left the English unharmed.

More plausibly, it is suggested that when the two fleets came to close quarters the English threw barrels of powdered lime onto the decks of the French, blinding them. Then Eustace’s ship was captured and Stephen Crabbe did indeed behead him on the deck. About twenty French ships were captured, the remainder retreating to Calais.

The Chapel and Hospital of St Bartholomew were founded in Sandwich to commemorate the victory.

Bartholomew Fair was held at Smithfield, on the edge of the City of London, from 1133.

As well as cloth merchants and traders in other commodities from all over England and further afield, the Fair attracted ballad sellers, tumblers, gamblers, conjurers, quacks, cheapjacks, doxies, cozeners, coney catchers, cutpurses, pickpockets, rogues and vagabonds. Many travelled long distances to be at the Fair, providing a headache for local authorities.

The Fair was used as the setting of a play by Ben Jonson in 1614.

By the nineteenth century, fairs as centres of large scale trade were becoming obsolete as other methods of distribution developed. The respectable merchants no longer came and Bartholomew Fair became increasingly vulgar and riotous. The last Fair was held in 1854; it was abolished by the City authorities in 1855.

The proceeds of tolls from the Fair went to the Priory and Hospital of St Bartholomew, founded in 1123. The Priory was dissolved in 1539. The Hospital was refounded, endowed, and its administration given to the City of London, in 1547.

The churches of St Bartholomew the Great and St Bartholomew the Less survive from the medieval period, but otherwise the earliest surviving buildings of Barts Hospital date from the eighteenth century.

Barts has now amalgamated with other London hospitals, but continues to operate from its Smithfield site.

In fiction, it is best known for the fact that John Watson met Sherlock Holmes in a laboratory there.
　

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And for something more literary, one great English poet, Kipling, writes about another:

The Coiner

Against the Bermudas we foundered, whereby
This Master, that Swabber, yon Bo'sun, and I
(Our pinnace and crew being drowned in the main)
Must beg for our bread through old England again.

For a bite and a sup, and a bed of clean straw,
We'll tell you such marvels as man never saw,
On a Magical Island which no one did spy
Save this Master, that Swabber, yon Bo'sun, and I.

Seven months among Mermaids and Devils and Sprites,
And Voices that howl in the cedars o'nights,
With further enchantments we underwent there.
Good Sirs, 'tis a tale to draw guts from a bear!

'Twixt Dover and Southwark it paid us our way,
Where we found some poor players were labouring a play;
And, willing to search what such business might be,
We entered the yard, both to hear and to see.

One hailed us for seamen and courteous-ly
Did guide us apart to a tavern near by
Where we told him our tale (as to many of late),
And he gave us good cheer, so we gave him good weight.

Mulled sack and strong waters on bellies well lined
With beef and black pudding do strengthen the mind;
And seeing him greedy for marvels, at last
From plain salted truth to flat leasing we passed.

But he, when on midnight our reckoning he paid,
Says, "Never match coins with a Coiner by trade,
Or he'll turn your lead pieces to metal as rare
As shall fill him this globe, and leave something  to spare...."
                         
We slept where they laid us, and when we awoke
Was a crown or five shillings in every man's poke.
We bit them and rang them, and, finding them good,
We drank to that Coiner as honest men should!