It’s a discovery that has the world of cricket clean bowled: The game may not be as English as afternoon tea after all. Research into the linguistic origins of the sport has in fact revealed that it may have been born in Flanders, the northern part of modern-day Belgium.
A poem dating back to 1533 unearthed by an Australian academic, Paul Campbell, earlier this year is being seen amongst sports historians as definitive proof of the theory that the word cricket is of Flemish origin.
The poem called ‘The Image of Ipocrisie’ is attributed to John Skelton, an English poet and playwright popular at the time. The poem is primarily a rant against the Church but it includes the following passage: “O lorde of Ipocrites/Nowe shut vpp your wickettes/And clape to your clickettes!/A! Farewell, kings of crekettes!”
While the spelling may be unfamiliar the mention of “wickettes” and “crekettes” makes the poem the earliest written reference to the sport.
There is some dispute about who exactly Skelton is referring to as the “kings of crekettes,” but one widely quoted interpretation is that he means Flemish weavers and shepherds who emigrated from the Low Countries to England in the 14th century. If this is indeed the case, then it is to the medieval wool-trade that cricket must thank for its birth.
Campbell’s discovery of the poem follows long-standing research by German academic Heiner Gillmeister who spotted the Flemish connection to cricket more than 20 years ago. A linguist and sports historian, Gillmeister said he was interested in tracing the history of cricket, a game that was commonly thought to have evolved out of Anglo-Saxon children’s games. However he was unable to relate the term ‘cricket’ to any Anglo-Saxon word or even French word. He then came across the Flemish phrase “met de krik ketsen” meaning “to chase with a curved stick.”
Gillmeister’s theory is that the very early forms of cricket probably involved Flemish shepherds and weavers playing a game in which a ball was hit with the curved end of a crook. This kind of game would have likely been an imitation of medieval chivalric games, in which a knight on horseback guarded a narrow passage or opening.
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The English, for whom the idea of cricket being Flemish is simply ‘not cricket’, should take heart.
If Gillmeister is correct, the sport as we know it today would likely have evolved in England itself. He pointed out that as late as 1755, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language defined cricket as a ‘sport at which the contenders drive a ball with sticks in opposition to each other.’ “This sounds a lot more like hockey than cricket, so it could well be that the distinction between cricket and hockey was eventually made in England,” he said.
Nonetheless, cricket’s Flemish connection has created quite a stir in the British media, particularly given that it was an Australian who discovered the Skelton poem. The Daily Telegraph newspaper, a staunch defender of all things English, questioned the motives of Campbell in an editorial, goading the “Aussies” to pick 11 Belgians for their Ashes team.
Skelton’s poem notwithstanding, a Belgian test-playing side is however not imminent.
While a fair amount of cricket is in fact played in the country, it remains largely limited to expatriates from the Indian sub-continent and England.
Charles Blommaert, the founder of the Flemish town of Ghent’s only cricket club, is an exception. Fascinated by the sport ever since he saw it broadcast on the BBC as a university student in the 1980s, Blommaert had to wait almost 20 years before he was actually able to play a game.
“I simply loved spin bowling. The variety of spin and the tactics a spin bowler had to use,” he said, his eyes lighting up at the memory. “But in Belgium there was no local cricket at all at the time.”
Finally, in 2004, Blommaert was able to establish a cricket club with the help of expat friends. It was called the Arcadians and today it is the most “local” of all of Belgian’s 14 clubs. It boasts six or seven local players amongst its adult team and its junior division is majority-Flemish.
The best-financed cricket club in Belgium, Blommaert said, is called the Antwerp Indians, made up of the city’s prosperous Gujarati diamond traders. But instead of using their resources to popularise the sport within the wider community, the Antwerp Indians do not allow anyone not of Indian origin to join their club.