Contents
Approach
I need to make two key points:
(1) While there has been a lot of research in early cricket, most of this has been from the point of view of the gathering of match records in as much detail as can be imagined. Additionally, David Underwood has written a book called Start of Play which tackles the question of the Social context of early cricket. Other books have been written which cover the wider history of cricket and devote perhaps a chapter or two to this period. With this site, I am have wider ambitions. I want to to breath a little life into the early game by considering how it was played, who by and where. This is not always easy, but I will be my best.
(2) Wittgenstein said, in a different context “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”. He had a point. There is unquestionably a huge amount of cricket history that was never recorded and is irretrievably lost. In addition, much of early cricket is only recorded in a perfunctory manor, perhaps just a one line announcement in a newspaper, often we are lucky to get that much. So – any consideration of the period is going to have to concentrate on those aspects for which records exist which inevitably leads to an unwanted bias, in class terms to the aristocracy, in playing terms towards the best players and and in geographic terms towards London. For the most part all we can say for the silent majority is yes, we know you were there and that your part in cricket history is vast but, in the most literal sense, incalculable.
That being said, this is what the site sets out to do:
Objectives of the site
1. To promote knowledge and understanding of the history of cricket before 1800
2. To explore the experience of playing or watching cricket in the Eighteenth Century
3. To use the functionality of the internet of a web-site to present a multi-dimensional virtual museum of Eighteenth Century cricket to allow users to explore the subject in an individual way.