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Following on from List of English cricketers (1787–1825), this is a list of people who are known to have been involved in the historical development of cricket between the 1826 and 1840 seasons in England. It excludes everyone named in the previous list. As it covers a short timespan of 15 seasons, it is presented alphabetically by surname.
Contents
The previous list ended in 1825 because of the catastrophic fire on the night of 28 July that year. The Lord's Pavilion was burned down, and a massive collection of records and archives, including unique scorecards, destroyed. Starting in 1826, there is a fairly comprehensive record of matches, although many scorecards continued to lack certain details, especially bowling analysis, for some years to come. [1]
The main development between 1826 and 1840 was the roundarm revolution. Until the 1820s, bowling was done using an underarm action, but roundarm became the accepted style following a series of trial matches in 1827.
The principal club since its foundation in 1787 was Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which organised the early Gentlemen v Players matches, and most of the games played by occasional XIs. Inter-county cricket had ceased during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was successfully revived in the 1820s. The main centres at county level were Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, which formed the Sussex County Cricket Club in 1839.
Cambridge University had already become prominent, and the University Match against Oxford University began in 1827. In the north of England, cricket continued to develop through town clubs which became the focal points of the game in their respective counties, especially Manchester, Nottingham, and Sheffield.
The key historical sources for this period are Arthur Haygarth's Scores & Biographies, Volume 2 (1827–1840) (published in 1862), and A Guide to Important Cricket Matches Played in the British Isles, 1709–1863, published in 1981 by The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS).
As for the 1787–1825 list, online databases are not excluded from this work, but the scope remains historical, and NOT statistical. As in the previous list, a "match" is eleven-a-side, and also considered important, unless it is specified as single wicket, or another form. [note 1]