John Drew writes:

Last autumn, my cousin Richard and I – our grand-uncle, on the unimpeachable testimony of his daughter, being the last man to bowl out W.G. Grace – had a couple of days out on the Downs in search of 17th century Kentish cricket. Could we find the name of the earliest known Kent cricketer?

At Ash-cum-Ridley, with its splendid faux 18th century ground in front of the Manor, a clump of sycamores at cow corner and matches where you can still play for a draw, we looked for antecedents to William Hodsoll, Kent’s first known demon fast bowler (1718-1776). His descendants were able to form full family elevens and we hoped to find that his ancestors had done the same. The gaunt Hospitallers church revealed that (variously spelled) Hodsolls had lived as yeoman farmers at nearby South Ash Manor since Chaucer’s time but there our luck ran out.

We had a bit more luck on the hills above Chevening. It is a proud Kentish boast that the earliest known cricket fixture, not just some old story of lads profaning the sabbath by playing in a churchyard, was between the Weald and the Upland at Chevening in about 1610 (when Shakespeare was writing The Tempest). The word ‘fixture’ suggests some degree of organisation. Hills v Dales would later become a popular fixture: was the Wealdens heading on to the clay of the sheep-cropped Uplands something that had been going on since the very beginnings of cricket?

There are three hills above Chevening, either side of the Rye Road, once the fastest road between London and Paris, with parallel holloways serving two of them. Several parish bounds meet up here and, while the fixture might have been played within Chevening, it is more likely to have been in Knockholt, erstwhile Okeholt (where the Smithers had their lovely country estate ground, Homefield). While Richard and I poked around in the wind and rain trying to locate the likeliest spot, in the field in front of Windmill Lane, where Breakneck Hill plunges down into Chevening, we suddenly put up eleven partridges – a good cricketing number.

We did finally get something historical from a third day out, in the Kent Archives at Maidstone. The reference to the Weald v Upland fixture comes in an eccentric commonplace book kept by the 17th century M.P. for Kent, Sir Roger Twysden, whose independence of mind cost him dear with both the Cavaliers and Roundheads in the Civil War.

A noticeable part of the commonplace book – temptation must be avoided to call it Twysden’s Almanack – is given over to Sir Roger’s concern to establish a division of Kent not along the East-West divide with which we are all familiar but between North and South: Upland and Weald. Among several historical court cases he cites there is one in 1639 concerning alleged trespass in Chevening of a coppice pightlake, or small enclosed field, that Richard and I discovered still exists much as it did 400 years ago.

The deposition about a cricket fixture taking place some 30 years before – and, as it happens, a football fixture some 15 years before that – has so little to do with the court case it is quite a shock to realise its sole purpose can only be to determine where Weald and Upland meet, the fixtures beating the bounds as it were.

The depositions about these ancient sporting fixtures are made by Samuel Green and Arthur Cheesman. There was an Arthur Cheesman who lived and died a servant in the same East Peckham parish where Sir Roger lived and died on his Roydon Hall estate. It’s a pound to a penny Arthur, who was 17 in 1610, was asked to depose about the famous match three decades later because he was known to his master as one who enjoyed cricket and telling stories about playing it in his youth, perhaps with his father John.

The Chevening reference, first dug out in 1950, has become increasingly garbled online and nobody seems to have taken a second look at its crucial context. There’s only the one known Arthur Cheesman (1593-1650) who fits. There could be two Samuel Greens, one from Chiddingstone, one from Hadlow, both dying in 1651, but if either is the one whose Christian name was spelt ‘Sanyell’, born in Cranbrook in 1581, he could have played in the football fixture in 1595.

When the Stanhopes later closed off the roads across their grand estate and damned the pub the cricketers used and chased them off, the publican who protested was a Hodsoll. Wiliam Hodsoll, the demon bowler of the next century, is usually known as a Dartford tanner – his trade the hide both on and off the field – so it was good to find he was of long-standing yeoman stock with a telltale manor to boot: quixotically always subject to gavelkind, the peculiar Kentish system of land ownership and inheritance that predated the Norman Conquest and which was not abolished until 1925. This was the reason, I suspect, William had to move from his family home into Dartford. He was clearly attached to his grandfather Captain John, who likewise had to go into the Navy and was the subject of a painting, now lost, of him rowing Charles II on a review of his fleet on the Medway. I was hoping Captain John might turn up as one of the sailors who played cricket at Aleppo in 1676 but I have not managed to get to Greenwich yet on that one.

While looking at the Hodsolls still playing on the Brent for Dartford in the early 19th century, my cousin Richard came across one good story.  Charles Hodsoll, while batting for Dartford v. Camberwell in 1827, lost sight of the ball when it ran up the handle of his bat. After a moment of bewilderment both he and the wicket-keeper realised simultaneously it had lodged in his pocket and therefore presented the possibility of a catch. Hodsoll then set off at a jiggling run into the outfield pursued by the wicket-keeper. How this strange story ended has been left to beggar the imaginations of cricketers ever since but it seems Hodsoll was faster and more adept. I don’t suppose he ran it over the boundary but he may have done.

Richard and I are pleased to tell ourselves we have found the name of Kent’s earliest known cricketer: Arthur Cheesman. We also reckon there could have been a Hodsoll or two up on the hills that day in the early 1600s.

(Many thanks to John Drew – and cousin Richard – for his research. If anybody has any way of proving, or disproving, that Arthur Cheesman was one of those men of the Weald or the Upland, in 1610 we would love to hear about it.)