The origin of cricket

There are so many wonderful little delights in Lucy Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk. I’m going to guess many Brits know this, but I was surprised at the theory that the children of laundresses invented cricket. It relates to the way the Tudors washed clothes: they beat the dirt out with a wooden bat called a ‘beetle’ after first scrubbing the clothes with balls of soap. And as Lucy found when she tried this herself, it was tempting to thwack those balls of soap with the beetle.