BEGINING

No one knows when or where cricket began but there is a body of evidence,
much of it circumstantial, that strongly suggests the game was devised during
Saxon or Norman times by children living in the Weald, an area of dense woodlands
and clearings in south-east England that lies across Kent and Sussex.
In medieval times, the Weald was populated by small farming and metal-working
communities. It is generally believed that cricket survived as a children's game
for many centuries before it was increasingly taken up by adults around the

beginning of the 17th century.

It is quite likely that cricket was devised by children and survived for many
generations as essentially a children’s game. Adult participation is unknown before
the early 17th century. Possibly cricket 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 stool or a tree stump or a gate (e.g., a wicket gate) as the wicket