The Parish Elite at Play? Cricket, Community and the "Middling Sort' in Eighteenth-Century Kent

This article aims to extend understanding of the rural middling sort by exploring their engagement with cricket. Cricket enjoyed considerable popularity across the south-eastern counties by the mid-eighteenth century; however, very few sources have survived and so our knowledge of the game - especially at the grass roots - is very limited. The article focuses on a unique set of scorecards from a club founded in 1773 in the Kentish village of Wingham, and uses these to examine both who was playing village cricket in this period, and the nature of the social and cultural networks in which it was embedded. As will be seen, those engaging in the game were closely associated with the larger farmers, tradesmen and artisans in the village. The same groups ran the parish vestry, and it is suggested that cricket flourished in this period because it provided a suitable outlet for the middling sort to display their social status both within and beyond the bounds of their own parishes.