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The unusual death of Jasper Vinall playing cricket four hundred years ago holds vital clues to the origins of the game that have only now come to light.
On August 28 1624, during a game at the village of Horsted Keynes in West Sussex, the smallholding farmer received a blow to the forehead from the batsman as he went in to catch the ball. When he succumbed to his injuries days later he became the first recorded fatality in the history of the sport.
Next week Horsted Keynes is celebrating a renaissance of village cricket in the bucolic corner of the Sussex weald where Vinall played in the first known organised match, four hundred years ago.
Members of the cricket club are also commemorating his death by reclaiming the part played by Sussex shepherds and smallholders in establishing the sport before the squires of Hambledon in neighbouring Hampshire staked their claim to its invention.
“There are two histories of cricket,” said Bob Willard Watts, a left-arm spin bowler in the Horsted Keynes team, who unearthed the four-century-old Latin manuscript that documented Vinall’s death from the National Archives at Kew.
“There’s the Hambledon version of gentlemen and cucumber sandwiches where cricket appears fully formed in the 18th century . . . then there’s the earlier one of local people playing a game that was already well established,” he said.
The true origins of cricket have always been somewhat shrouded in mystery. Vinall’s death, deemed an accident in the assizes court, had received fleeting mention in the past, showing that a version of the game was played in scattered hamlets and clearings in the Sussex woodland more than a century before Hampshire’s landed gentry took it up.
Hambledon, where the rules of the sport were formalised in the mid-18th century, has laid claim to being the “cradle of cricket” ever since.
“That’s all a bit of a myth,” said Simon Hughes, a former first-class bowler, author and editor of the Cricketer magazine, who has endorsed Horsted Keynes’ claim in a celebration booklet published by the village cricket club this week.
Hughes said the new details that have emerged from Willard Watts’s research “proves that there was already a proper structure to the game, with organised teams”, in the Sussex weald in the early 17th century. The raw ingredients of the sport — bat, ball and pitch — were all there.
Willard Watts had the court manuscript relating to Vinall’s death translated from the Latin by a Canadian scholar via a post on online social network Reddit.
“What it says that’s interesting in the history of cricket is that the game was well established here in 1624. People were travelling from village to village to play and it was already known as the “common game of cricket”.
“They paid a halfpenny for their bats (indicating the game was already a going concern) — they weren’t just using shepherd crooks,” said Willard Watts, who said the manuscript also provided evidence that the ball was roughly fist-sized then, as it is today.
Willard Watts’s house gives on to the picturesque village green where Vinall met his fate. His back garden opens on to the cricket pitch where the club plays today.
Ten seasons ago, there were only eight ageing members. But a younger committee took over and has succeeded in re-establishing the sport at the heart of the community, bucking a trend that has seen clubs close in other parts of England.
There are now 80 paying members, 55 of them playing and 40 of them juniors between the age of five and 12. The age range of the main team is between 13 and 69 and the club says its next aim is to get more women and girls playing.
Oli Wright, the club’s chair attributes this transformation to the encouragement given to people of all ages and levels of experience. “You can be the best player in the world or the worst,” he said.
Unearthing the clubs history has also played its part.
With too much time on his hands during lockdown, Wright, who in his day job runs the IT department at East Sussex County Council, digitised a mound of score sheets and other documents that had been gathering dust at the back of the pavilion.
These give a record of the club’s volatile fortunes on the pitch over more than a century. They also show farmers lending out barns for indoor practice during winter, famous names, such as former prime minister Harold Macmillan, playing on the pitch, and an early record of a match between married and unmarried men from the village opening the season. The former won.
“They didn’t go out the night before,” said Wright.
Something about the origin story, and the work that Wright has done to flesh out the social history of the club since, has contributed to a cricket revival in one of the villages where it all began.
“Once you have a story you start to draw people back in,” said Wright.
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