Cricket Under the Napoleonic War — The Lean Seasons of 1803-1808

Cricket's eighteenth-century structure had depended on the patronage of country gentry and the labour of professional cricketers. Both groups were drained by the wars: the gentry into militia and military commissions, the professionals into the army and navy. The Hambledon Club had already collapsed by the end of the eighteenth century, and the new MCC had not yet established country-wide reach.

The Peace of Amiens of 1802 brought a brief flowering: the 1802 cricket season produced more matches than any since the 1790s. The resumption of war in May 1803 ended the recovery before it could take hold.

The Treaty of Amiens of March 1802 had given Britain a brief respite from war with revolutionary France, but in May 1803 hostilities resumed and the country reverted to a war economy. The cricket establishment, dependent on patronage from gentry families and on the leisure time of agricultural and urban workers, suffered immediately. Inter-county matches had effectively ceased in 1797. Through 1803-1808 the standard pattern was that Lord's hosted between three and ten major matches a year, almost all involving MCC or a 'Hampshire' or 'England' eleven made up largely of MCC men, while the village game continued patchily and the great regional clubs declined. The 1805 season, the year of Trafalgar, produced only six recorded important matches. By 1808 the figure was six. The principal stabilising forces were the MCC at Lord's, the Brighton club (under the patronage of the Prince Regent) and the Montpelier club in Walworth, south London. These three institutions kept fixtures going, supplied venues for the few professionals who could still get released for cricket, and preserved the framework of the game. Recovery began only after 1815, when the return of soldiers and sailors and the resumption of normal economic life allowed counties to revive. Hampshire's first formal county fixture after the war was in 1817; Sussex began to organise more strongly from 1818; the great roundarm controversies of the 1820s would have been impossible without the post-war revival.

“With the Napoleonic War continuing, loss of investment and manpower impacted cricket and only seven matches have been recorded in 1807.”

“The manly and athletic game at cricket for which the boys of Sherwood have been so long and so justly famed, it was thought, had fallen into disuse, if not disgrace.”

The post-war recovery was rapid. The 1819 revival of Gentlemen v Players, the rise of William Ward as MCC's leading batsman, and the gradual emergence of new county sides through the 1820s all happened in the decade after the cessation of war. By 1828 cricket had recovered enough that MCC felt able to legalise roundarm bowling — a debate that had been impossible during the war years.