On 18 August 1643 the following report on the fighting in Leicestershire appeared in the London newspaper, Certaine Informations :

From Leicester it is informed, That Manchester Carriers came lately with forty packs from London to that Towne, with whom the Lord Grey of Groby sent out a hundred horse to guard them to Derby, which they having effected, in their returne home, they met with another hundred of their owne Horse, at Copt-Oake, in the Forrest of Leicester, where they joyned together, and went towards Ashby de la Zouch . . .

The commanded horse sent out from Leicester were under the command of Captain Francis Hacker, a future Regicide and by reputation one of the most zealous officers fighting for parliament's cause. Having completed their escort duty without incident, it seems that the Leicester horse were itching for some proper action and decided to try their luck at Ashby, the headquarters of the leading Leicestershire Royalist, Henry Hastings

On the approaches to Ashby,  within about two miles whereof, they met with an hundred of Colonell Hastings Horse and Dragoones, founded them a charge, and advanced to encounter them, but Hastings Horse wheeled about, and made with all speed to Bagworth-Heath whither the Leicester Horse followed them . . .

Hasting's men had a reputation (among local parliamentarians, at ay rate) for preying on any carrier or goods wagons on the Leicestershire roads. Hastings depended a good deal on these mounted troops, commonly referred to as his 'Flying Army', and they were the reason why Hacker had been dispatched by Lord Grey to act as escort for the Manchester carriers. Having failed to intercept the carriers, Hasting's men had been caught on their return and now fled for safety in the direction of Bagworth. Apparently outnumbered 2:1, and cut off from Ashby, it is likely that they were making for the safety of the Royalist garrison of Bagworth House, two-and-a-half miles distant.

Having caught up with the fleeing royalists at nearby Bagworth Heath, after the first charge, Hastings men ran away, the other pursued them eagerly, trasht and cut them sorely, killed six of them, tooke sixty of them prisoners, with their horses, amongst which was a Serjeant Major, a Captaine, and a Lieutenant: Which good piece of Service, hath diminished some of those Rob-Carriers, who, like the Arabians, or Italian Banderroes, lie sculking upon the Leicestershire and Staffordshire Roads, to intercept all travellers and passengers into the North-west parts of the Kingdome.

To judge from the above report, it would appear that the royalists lost half their strength, including officers, in the fight at Bagworth Heath: quite a coup for Lord Grey's Leicester forces. But the triumph with which this victory was heralded in the news belies the fact that Grey had been unable to contain the royalists in the local area for much of 1643. He and Sir John Gell had failed to dislodge Hastings from his stronghold at Ashby when they had besieged him there the previous January. In June, Grey's plan to advance on Newark from Nottingham, supported by Cromwell's horse, was abandoned due to in-fighting among the leading parliamentarians and from fear that Hastings would move in Leicester in Grey's absence ('I perceive that Ashby-de-la-Zouch sticks much with him,' Cromwell observed). In fact, Hastings was promoted to lieutenant general in October 1643, and created Baron Loughborough, in recognition of his increasing strength across the north midlands. Captain Hacker, the victor of Bagworth Heath, was himself captured in November, although the ardent parliamentarian was released in an exchange of prisoners the following month, having refused the offer of a command under the royalists.

The action of Bagworth Heath was retained in local folk memory: the area to the immediate south east of Ellistown in Leicestershire was commonly known as 'Battleflat', a name retained in 'Battleflat Lodge' that stands there to this day. Much of the area now lies under an industrial estate. At least some of the action recorded above would have taken place there. Battleflat's distance from Bagworth (some two-and-a-half miles), and the heath beyond it, gives some idea of the breadth and extent of the running battle that was fought there in August 1643.

Stool-ball, n. 'An old country game somewhat resembling cricket, played chiefly by young women or, as an Easter game, between young men and women for a 'tansy' [a festive cake or pudding flavoured with tansy flowers] as the stake.'[1]
                                                                                                                            Oxford English Dictionary

In the mid-seventeenth century, before the spread of cricket or the invention of rounders, stool-ball was the most popular of summer ball games. But in an age before sports were codified, and their rules committed to writing, what can the historical record tell us of this popular game and the rules by which it was played?


The Rules

In Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Joseph Strutt provides an overview of the game. Noting the absence of any wicket or stumps in medieval depictions of cricket, he argues that the idea of a target for a bowler to aim at was introduced to cricket from stool-ball:

Stool-ball is frequently mentioned by the writers of the three last centuries, but without any proper definition of the game. I (Mr Strutt) have been informed that a pastime called stool-ball is practised to this day in the northern parts of England, which consists simply in setting a stool upon the ground, and one of the players takes his place before it, while his antagonist, standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of striking the stool, and this it is the business of the former to prevent by beating it away with the hand, reckoning one to the game for every stroke of the ball; if, on the contrary, it should be missed by the hand and touch the stool, the players change places; the conquerer at this game is he who strikes the ball most times before it touches the stool. I believe the same also happens if the person who threw the ball can catch and retain it when driven back, before it reaches the ground.[2]

From Strutt's description, then, stool-ball would seem a simple enough game: a ball, but no bat; a rudimentary target and no exertion in having to run great distances. But Strutt's account is limited, written in a period when stool-ball was little-played and losing-out in popularity to the more nuanced and complex game of cricket, and from an author who clearly had no first-hand experience of the game. Happily, seventeenth century sources are able to provide us with further details, which imply that at the time of the English Civil War there was more to stool-ball than Strutt's account would suggest.


Women v Men

The notion that stool-ball was played 'chiefly' by young women is evidenced by 17th century folk-song and ballads. One such ballad from the Samuel Pepys' collection, The Shepherd's Delight informs us that, 'At trap-ball and stool-ball Rebecca and Rachel; / Saphania doth stoop well, and Katey can catch well'[3] Another ballad of the 1670s, The Young Man's Approbation, extols the virtues of a golden-haired woman who is skilled in all manner of active pursuits: 'Of all the Maids in our Town she bears the bell away, / At singing or at dancing or else at Stool-ball play.'[4] Of course, such repeated references to women at stool-ball may be due to the balladeers' preoccupation with athletic maidens in a literary form that was rich in sexual content. Trap-ball, incidentally, was a game in which a ball, placed in a hinged wooden trap or cradle, was launched into the air by the player by striking the trap with her bat, with which she then hit away the ball. The winner was the player that hit the ball the furthest - clearly a very different game to stool-ball or cricket, in which the batter defends a target from a ball thrown by the opposition.

But stool-ball was apparently more than just a pastime for young women. A ballad of c.1700, The West-Country Weaver, features the eponymous figure living in fear of his violent and sexually dominant wife. He fondly recounts the days before he was married: 'When I was a Batchelor gallant and gay, / Then at Stool-ball, or Cricket, I freely might play'.[5] This would suggest that stool-ball was just as much a young man's game and, with reference to the weaver's 'Batchelor' days, a sport for those who are sexually free and active. The game's suggestive nature was clear to Restoration author William Winstanley, who wrote in his Poor Robin's Almanack: 'Young men and maids Now very brisk, / At Barley-break and Stool ball frisk.[6]

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'The Shepherd's Delight': a song celebrating the sensuous and fecund English countryside - replete with games of stool-ball. [via English Broadside Ballad Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara]

Sexual allusion is less-explicit in the (supposedly) more refined verse of the period, but the carnal aspects of this energetic, summer sport are discernible in Stuart poetry nonetheless. George Chapman's translation of Homer's Odyssey (c.1615) has classical figures playing contemporary sports: 'virgins, did at stool-ball play'.[7] Sir Phillip Sidney's Arcadia (1613) has a shepherd character delivers the lines: 'A tyme there is for all, my Mother often says / When she with skirts tuckt very hy, with girls at stoolball plays'.[8]

Given the OED's reference to stool-ball as an Easter sport, and as a competition between women and men, played for a prize, it would seem that stool-ball had undercurrents of a fertility ritual. This idea is taken further in the more classical verses of Robert Herrick's Hesperides (1648): 'At Stool-ball, Lucia, let us play, For Sugar-cakes and Wine; / Or for a Tansie let us pay, The Losse or thine, or mine.'[9] Here, the game of stool-ball is paralleled with courtship, the 'Losse' referred to being an allusion to orgasm. It was more than just literary fancy. The early 18th century diarist Nicholas Blundell provides a real-life account of a stool-ball game between teams of women against men: 'Young Weomen treated ye Men with a Tandsey as they had lost to them at a Game at Stoole Balle'.[10]

In all the above examples, the implication is that the game is a clownish, rustic pursuit, the presence of both sexes adding an amorous undertone. In Shakespeare's and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (c.1613-18), the character of the gaoler's daughter asks her suitor, simply known as the 'Wooer', if he will accompany her to the ends of the earth. When the Wooer asks what they might do there, the Daughter replies: 'Why, play at stool-ball', suggestively adding, 'What is there else to do?'[11]

Stool-ball would seem to lend itself well to games between the sexes as, to judge from Strutt's account, it did not rely on height or body strength, which would generally give the advantage to men. In stool-ball it does not matter how far the ball is hit, the aim is simply to keep the ball from hitting the stool. Indeed, teams at stool-ball might be of mixed sexes: 'The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence' (1685) contains a mock lover letter from 'A Country Bumpkin to his Mistress', in which the bumpkin implores 'Marry Jone, thou know'st I always plaid a thy side at stool ball'.[12]


Stool-Ball in the English Civil War

Unsurprisingly, stool-ball became a victim of seventeenth century 'puritanism'. The preclusion of games on the Sabbath was as old as puritanism itself: at Maldon in 1564 the parish constables were censured for having allowed stool-ball to be played on Sunday.[13] Stool-ball was not referred to specifically in James I's Declaration of Sports (1633), although given its festive nature it may have been encompassed by the reference to 'May-games, Whitsun-Ales' that were sanctioned by the royal edict as suitable pastimes which would not conflict with religious observance .[14] By the mid-1640s, however, royal authority (and that of the Anglican Church) had been eclipsed and Presbyterianism was seeking to dominate the post-war religious settlement. Following an ordinance of October 1645, [15] and underscored by further legislation in August 1648, playing games of stool-ball on the Lord's day would find the protagonists suspended from church communion. Stool-ball's popularity was such that the Parliamentary ordinance listed it along with 'Shooting, Bowling, playing at Foot-ball [and] wrestling'. It would seem, then, to be among the most popular of the ball games among commoners in the mid-seventeenth century.


18th Century Baseball

If stool-ball survived as a northern pastime (as Strutt claimed in 1801), in southern counties it was supplanted by cricket during the course of the eighteenth century. By 1816, the church warden of Watlington, Oxordshire, recommended that girls exercise at baseball, whilst men and boys played at cricket, trap ball and quoits. No mention of stool-ball at all. [16]

In fact, baseball seems to have evolved directly out of stool-ball - references to the later game only occur after the mid-1700s, when stool-ball was on the wane. For a time, though, the two games survived side-by-side. Baseball, according to John Newbury's Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), involved the hitter of the ball flying between several 'posts' before returning to his original mark. It is a familiar enough description, and yet Newbury's rendering of a game of stool-ball in the same book is remarkably similar. Here, the protagonist must run 'swift round his course', and that if the run was not achieved the target stool would be 'taken by Suprize'.[17] This is an aspect of the game entirely omitted by Strutt in 1801. In this form, stool-ball begins to resemble a form of single-wicket cricket, wherein the batter scores by running between the wicket and a given mark, with the opponent bowler allowed to deliver the ball at the vacant wicket before the batter has returned to defend it. In neither depiction, either of baseball of stool-ball, was a bat used to hit the ball.

It may be that in Newbury's reference to 'running' in stool-ball we are witnessing a slightly altered, eighteenth century version of the game, influenced by the spread of cricket from the southern counties. This form of stool-ball may not have reached the north, hence the absence of running from Strutt's account. A desire to increase the amount of running in stool-ball may have led to more stools or 'bases' being added to a widened field of play, resulting in a new game: baseball. By the time of Newbury's writing the two games may have been indistinguishable, save for the number of bases. There may have been an aspect of running in the seventeenth century game, for why else would Spencer's player need to have her skirts 'tuckt very hy' unless to aid her running? However, Spencer's line could easily be a reference to running to catch the ball after it was struck.


Stool-Ball Today

The aspect of running seems to have escaped Strutt in 1801, but there was no standardised set of rules for stool-ball, even by this date. A late Victorian sports writer was forced to confess that 'Judging from the references to this game, from the earliest to the latest, there seems always to have been a great amount of uncertainty about the rules, and this uncertainty has not ceased to exist.' [18]

Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century stool-ball appears to have been a very different game to that depicted by Strutt a hundred years before. In 1891 the game is described having not one but two 'stools', fifteen yards apart, between which two batters would run to score. The target was no longer a stool on the ground but a round or square wooden target, one foot wide and standing four feet above the floor. Clearly, this game had more in common with cricket than with any seventeenth century form of stool-ball.

The responsibility for this radical departure from the earlier game lies with William de St. Croix, the rector of Glyde in Sussex, who reinvented stool-ball in 1867 to his own design and published his new rules in the East Sussex News.[19] St. Coix's intention seems to have been to create a gentler form of cricket, suitable to be played by the crinoline-skirted ladies of his parish, and it is to these rules that stool-ball is still played today, under the auspices (from 1979) of Stoolball England association. As a result of St. Croix's inventions, stool-ball in the Victorian era became 'confined – in Sussex at any rate – to women'.[20]

he entry for stool-ball in the 1891 Encyclopaedia of Sports concludes that the game 'is evidently a very exciting and charming game' which 'gives to womankind another opportunity of combining outdoor exercise with rivalry'. It is a muted and slightly patronising praise for a game that had been deliberately re-worked for ladies, in a period when it was not supposed that women had the physical ability or mental acuity to compete in masculine pursuits.

The Victorian ladies depicted at stool-ball in 1878 seem an entirely different species to the athletic maids who would 'stoop well' and 'catch well' and hitch up their skirts to take on the men in the more exuberant, and more sexually liberated, seventeenth century.

Robert Hodkinson
August 2017



1 Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn.) (1989)
2 Strutt, J. The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London: Methuen, 1801)
3 Magdalen College, Pepys 3.55
4 British Library, Roxbrugh Ballads, 3.98-99
5 ibid., 2.513
6 Winstanley, Poor Robin's Almanack, quoted in OED (op. cit.)
7 Chapman, Odysses, ibid.
8 Sidney, Arcadia, ibid.
9 Herrick, Hesperides, ibid.
10 OED, ibid.
11 Shakespeare & Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, V, ii.
12 Phillips, E. The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1685)
13 OED (op. cit.)
14 Stuart, J., 'The King's Majesty's Declaration to His Subjects Concerning Lawful Sports to be Used' (1633), in: Gee, H. and Hardy, W. J. (eds.) Documents Illustrative of Church History (New York: Macmillan, 1896), pp.528-32. Hanover College History [website]: https://historyhanover.edu/texts/engref/er93.html. [Accessed 06.08.2017]
15 'October 1645: An Ordinance, together with Rules and Directions concerning Suspension from the Sacrament of the Lords Supper in cases of Ignorance and Scandell', in: Firth, C. H. and Rait, R. S. Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660 (London, 1911), pp. 789-797. British History Online [website]: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp789-797. [Accessed: 06.08.2017]
16 'Parishes: Watlington', in: Lobel, M. D. (ed.) A History of the County of Oxford: volume 8, Lewknor and Pyrton Hundreds, pp.210-252. British History Online [website]: http://british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol8/pp210-252 [Accessed: 06.08.2017]
17 Newbury, J. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1787 edn.) (Massachusetts: 1787)
18 Walker, C. 'Stool-Ball', in: Earl of Suffolk et al. (eds.) The Encyclopaedia of Sport (2 vols.) (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1891), pp. 412-413
19 https://www.stoolball.org.uk/history/story/glynde-butterflies
20 Walker, ibid.

websites
English Broadside Ballad Archive, University of California, Santa Barbara. Available:
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ [Accessed 06.08.2017]