Something that Beldham and others may have said to Mr, Pycroft may have made this fact "quite evident" to him, but I cannot see that he has transmitted any such evidence to us. This much, however, I think we may say with confidence, that all that was best of cricketing tradition and practice in the south of England—that is to say, as far as was in touch at all with its influences—clustered in the little corner of Surrey in which the parish of Farnham is. But that is not to say that there were not other nuclei of cricket in the north and elsewhere, and I think there is evidence to lead us to think there were other centres, perhaps less energetic.
The "county" boundaries were not so rigid in those days. "You find us regularly," says Beldham to Mr. Pycroft—"us" being Farnham and thereabouts—"on the Hampshire side in Bentley's book," and it is quite true.
Then, from this little nucleus, cricket in the south extended. Beldham had a poor opinion of the cricket of Kent at first. Crawte, one of the best Kent men, was "stolen away from us," in Beldham's words. Aylward, the hero of the 167 runs, was taken, also to Kent, by Sir Horace Mann, as his bailiff, but "the best bat made but a poor bailiff, we heard." Sussex was a cricketing county from an early date, but Beldham had a poor opinion of its powers likewise.
The elements of the nucleus formed round Farnham were disseminated, as much as anything, by the support that certain rich and influential people
