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RECREATIONS 629
trated by the French word for a crosier, crosse, which today is
used to mean a hockey/stick; but the word is explained by
Randle Cotgrave in his French-English dictionary, published
in 1 6 1 1, as 'the crooked stafFe wherewith boyes play at cricket*.
The word 'cricket* is first mentioned in 1598 by a Surrey
coroner, aged 59, who asserted on oath that he, being a scholar
in the free school at Guildford, 'did runne and play* on a
certain field at 'CreckettV This would carry the game back to
the middle years of the sixteenth century. There is, however,
yet another game which may have contributed to the evolution
of cricket. In the same proclamation of 1365 mention is made
of club'ball. This game is referred to in a case which came be'
fore the Husting Court at Oxford in 1292; complaints were
brought against two men who were playing in the street with
a club and a great ball, and while doing so damaged the goods
displayed in a neighbouring shop. 2 A fourteentlvcentury picx
ture shows a man holding a ball and a second figure ready to
hit out with a club/shaped bat 1 (PL 39, J). It may be that both
the disciplined games ofmodern times cricket and hockey
have developed from the confused rough/and/tumble game
depicted in a twelftlvcentury manuscript of Bede*s Life of
St. Cuihlert (PL 140, a) 3 which illustrates the prowess of the
youthful saint who boasted that he could surpass his content
poraries and sometimes even his seniors in leaping or running
or wrestling or anything else which required agility of limb.
The game of golf originated in the Low Countries and a
famous illumination in an early sixteenth/century Flemish
Book of Hours depicts a game in progress (three players are
engaged in putting (PL 140, i)). The Scottish like the English
government made a series ofstatutes prohibiting games in order
to encourage archery. In the Act of 1424 there is no mention of
golf; but in that of 1457 golf, like football, is to *be utterly cryt
down and not usyt*. From this we may infer that it was be'
tween these dates that the game became popular. Though the
1 See under 'cricket* in the Oxford English Dictionary.
2 Records ofMe&evd Oxford, e