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The history of cricket to 1725 traces the sport's development from its perceived origins to the stage where it had become a major sport in England and had been introduced to other countries. The earliest definite reference to cricket occurs in 1598 and makes clear that the sport was being played c. 1550, but its true origin is a mystery. All that can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that its beginning was earlier than 1550, somewhere in south-east England within the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. Unlike other games with batsmen, bowlers and fielders, such as stoolball and rounders, cricket can only be played on relatively short grass, especially as the ball was delivered along the ground until the 1760s. Therefore, forest clearings and land where sheep had grazed would have been suitable places to play. The sparse information available about cricket's early years suggests that it was originally a children's game. Then, at the beginning of the 17th century, it was taken up by working men. During the reign of Charles I, the gentry took an increased interest as patrons and occasionally as players. A big attraction for them was the opportunity that the game offered for gambling and this escalated in the years following the Restoration. By the time of the Hanoverian succession, investment in cricket had created the professional player and the first major clubs, thus establishing the sport as a popular social activity in London and the south of England. Meanwhile, English colonists had introduced cricket to North America and the West Indies, and the sailors and traders of the East India Company had taken it to the Indian subcontinent. ==Origins of cricket as a children's game== The most widely accepted theory about the origin of cricket is that it first developed in early medieval times to the south and south-east of London in the geographical areas of the North Downs, the South Downs and the Weald.〔Underdown, p. 4.〕 The counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey were therefore the earliest centres of excellence and it was from here that the game reached London, where its lasting popularity was ensured, and other southern counties like Berkshire, Essex, Hampshire and Middlesex.〔Altham, ch. 1.〕 As early as 1610, a cricket match was recorded at Chevening in Kent between teams representing the Downs and the Weald.〔 A number of words in common use at the time are thought to be possible sources for the name "cricket". In the earliest known reference to the sport in 1598, it is called ''creckett''. Given the strong medieval trade connections between south-east England and the County of Flanders when the latter belonged to the Duchy of Burgundy, the name may have been derived from the Middle Dutch〔Middle Dutch was the language in use in Flanders at the time.〕 ''krick''(''-e''), meaning a stick; or the Olde English ''cricc'' or ''cryce'' meaning a crutch or staff.〔Birley, ch. 1.〕 In what may be an early reference to the sport, a 1533 poem attributed to John Skelton describes Flemish weavers as "kings of crekettes", a word of apparent Middle Dutch origin. In Samuel Johnson's ''Dictionary of the English Language'' (1755), he derived cricket from "''cryce'', Saxon, a stick".〔 In Old French, the word ''criquet'' seems to have meant a kind of club or stick, though this may have been the origin of croquet.〔 Another possible source is the Middle Dutch word ''krickstoel'', meaning a long low stool used for kneeling in church, the shape of which resembled the two stump wicket used in early cricket.〔Bowen, p. 33.〕 According to Heiner Gillmeister, a European language expert of the University of Bonn, "cricket" derives from the Middle Dutch phrase for hockey, ''met de (krik ket)sen'' (i.e., "with the stick chase"). Gillmeister believes the sport itself had a Flemish origin but "the jury is still out" on the matter. Cricket was probably devised by children and survived for many generations as essentially a children's game.〔Altham, p. 24.〕 Possibly it was derived from bowls, assuming bowls is the older sport, by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball reaching its target by hitting it away. Playing on sheep-grazed land or in clearings, the original implements may have been a matted lump of sheep's wool (or even a stone or a small lump of wood) as the ball; a stick or a crook or another farm tool as the bat; and a gate (e.g., a wicket gate), a stool or a tree stump as the wicket. The invention of the game could have happened in Norman or Plantagenet times anytime before 1300; or even in Saxon times before 1066.〔John Arlott and Fred Trueman, ''On Cricket'', BBC Books, 1977.〕 All acknowledged subject experts and authorities agree that there is no evidence of cricket having evolved from another bat-and-ball sport and, equally, no evidence that any other bat-and-ball sport evolved from cricket. The authorities include writers Harry Altham, John Arlott, Derek Birley, Arthur Haygarth, David Underdown, Roy Webber and Peter Wynne-Thomas. Their consensus view is that the only thing that can definitely be said about the origin of cricket is that its earliest record is in a late 16th-century court case in Surrey which proves it was played by children in southeast England in the middle of that century.〔Birley, p. 5.〕〔Altham, p. 21.〕〔Major, p. 17.〕〔Underdown, p. 3.〕 There have been alternative theories of origin but these have been dismissed or ignored by authorities. For example, the writer Andrew Lang claimed in 1912 that cricket evolved from a bat-and-ball game which may have been played in Dál Riata as early as the 6th century and this claim has been dismissed in terms of "Lang's idiosyncratic belief in the Celtic origin of cricket". It is true that cricket is one of many bat-and-ball sports existing worldwide which have no known origin. Others are the definitely Celtic sports of hurling and shinty. Golf and hockey are other British ball games involving a club or stick while croquet was apparently imported from France and globally there are games such as Sweden's brännboll, Italy's lippa, India's gilli-danda, Finland's pesäpallo and Samoa's kilikiti. However, it is generally believed that cricket essentially belongs to the same family of bat-and-ball games as stoolball, rounders and baseball but whether it evolved from any of these, or ''vice versa'', cannot be determined.〔 There is a 1523 reference to stoolball at a designated field in Oxfordshire; this may then have been a generic term for any game in which a ball is somehow hit with a bat or stick.〔 18th century references to stoolball in conjunction with cricket clearly indicate that it was a separate activity.〔McCann, paragraphs 98, 361 and 377.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of cricket to 1725」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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