unassisted, to a higher standard of batting? But they were not left unassisted, for the masterly elevens from the south began to come among them, and taught them many things, no doubt, both by example and by precept.
This was in 1791. 1793 brings a wider ray of light on the scene of cricket history. Essex and Herts come on the scene as cricketing counties—of second class, as we should call them now, to Kent and Surrey, but players and lovers of cricket all the same. They combined elevens apparently, and played twenty-two against an eleven of England, which beat them in a single innings. Mr. Pycroft has a specially interesting note in this connection. He was told by two old cricketers, one a Kent man and the other an Essex man, that when they were boys, cricket in both these counties was a game of the village, rather than of clubs. "There was a cricket bat behind the door, or else up in the bacon rack, in every cottage." Of course in London it was a game played in clubs, for they only could find the spaces where land was valuable. It was in the year of 1793 that "eleven yeomen at Oldfield Bray, in Berkshire, had learned enough to be able to defeat a good eleven of the Marylebone Club."
I am scandalised by the wholesale way I have to steal early history from Mr. Pycroft's book. The only excuse is that I do not know where to go to better it, though probably I may supplement it from chance sources.
In 1795 he tells us of matches in which the
