Given Derrick’s age, it was about half a century earlier when he was at school and so it is certain that cricket was being played c.1550 by boys in Surrey.
6 The view that it was originally a children’s game is reinforced by Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 English-French dictionary in which he defined the noun “crosse” as “the crooked staff wherewith boys play at cricket” and the verb form “crosser” as “to play at cricket”.78One possible source for the sport’s name is the Old English word “cryce” (or “cricc”) meaning a crutch or staff. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, he derived cricket from “cryce, Saxon, a stick”.4 In Old French, the word “criquet” seems to have meant a kind of club or stick.9 Given the strong medieval trade connections between south-east England and the County of Flanders when the latter belonged to the Duchy of Burgundy, the name may have been derived from the Middle Dutch (in use in Flanders at the time) “krick”(-e), meaning a stick (crook).9 Another possible source is the Middle Dutch word “krickstoel”, meaning a long low stool used for kneeling in church and which resembled the long low wicket with two stumps used in early cricket.10 According to Heiner Gillmeister, a European language expert of Bonn University, “cricket” derives from the Middle Dutch phrase for hockey, met de (krik ket)sen (i.e., “with the stick chase”).11 Gillmeister has suggested that not only the name but also the sport itself may be of Flemish origin.11
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