Gambling aristocrats in a London tavern wrote the laws of cricket. Historian Tom Holland explains how the MCC, the club that owns Lord’s and still governs the game’s rules, originated as a self-appointed group of wealthy men who seized control of cricket from a culture of clubs, bets, and grandfather clocks.
The standard answer to who wrote the laws of cricket is simple: the MCC. The Marylebone Cricket Club adopted its first Code of Laws on 30 May 1788 and has remained the sole custodian of cricket’s rules ever since. The ICC, cricket’s global governing body, still relies on the MCC to write and interpret the Laws of the Game in 2026.
What that answer leaves out is how the MCC came to hold this power. Tom Holland, the British historian, bestselling author, and amateur cricketer, fills in the gap.
“The laws that we have were written up by Marylebone cricket club as it came to be known. So the people who own Lords… they originated in the culture of clubs and taverns in St. James’s in London… people in chairs, ticking grandfather clocks, mad bets, all of that kind of thing… they appointed themselves as the guardians of the game in an overtly and self-consciously aristocratic way.”
Tom Holland, YouTube interview, 2026
Holland is describing a specific place and a specific culture. The Star and Garter tavern at 100 Pall Mall in London’s St. James’s district was where cricket’s earliest laws were formally revised. On 25 February 1774, a committee of noblemen and gentlemen from Kent, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex, and London gathered there to draw up the rules that introduced LBW, the middle stump, and a maximum bat width. Sir William Draper chaired the meeting. The Duke of Dorset, Earl Tankerville, and Sir Horace Mann were among those present.
The London Cricket Club, a precursor to the MCC, had its headquarters at the Star and Garter. The main purpose of the Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Club that created it was to encourage gambling. Throughout the 18th century, cricket was funded by gambling interests and attracted very large stakes. The aristocrats who frequented St. James’s were drawn to sport not for its spirit but for its potential as a vehicle for wagering.
The Grade Cricketer, host of the same interview, put this bluntly.
“Cricket likes to present itself as a game that’s not only there to compete but has a moral center… didn’t they used to play a team of guys with one leg against a team of guys with one arm and they bet on it?”
The Grade Cricketer, YouTube interview, 2026
He is not exaggerating. In 1766, two teams of Greenwich pensioners, sailors who had lost limbs during Royal Navy service, played a cricket match at Blackheath. The one-armed team beat the one-legged team. By 1796, these matches were being staged at Aram’s New Ground in Walworth for wagers of 1,000 guineas. The crowd that tried to break in to watch one match caused a building to collapse. These were not exhibitions for charity. They were gambling spectacles organised by the same class of men who were writing cricket’s laws in Pall Mall taverns.
Cricket was not governed from the playing fields. It was governed from leather chairs in taverns where men bet enormous sums on outcomes they then wrote the rules for.
From Tavern to Lord’s: How the MCC Seized Control
Before the MCC existed, the Hambledon Club in rural Hampshire was English cricket’s most powerful institution. By the late 1770s, Hambledon had developed many of the game’s conventions and produced the finest players in the country. But Hambledon was a village club. Its power base was rural.
The aristocrats in London wanted something different. George Finch, the 9th Earl of Winchilsea, and Colonel Charles Lennox, who later became the 4th Duke of Richmond, were leading members of the White Conduit Club, a cricket club that played on public land in Islington from around 1782. The problem was that the ground was open to the public. The aristocrats did not want to share their cricket with common spectators and the chaos of public betting.
Winchilsea asked Thomas Lord, a Yorkshire-born cricketer who worked as a groundsman and practice bowler at the White Conduit Club, to find them a private ground. Lord leased land from the Portman Estate at Dorset Fields, and on 31 May 1787, the first match took place there. Middlesex beat Essex by 93 runs. The White Conduit Club dissolved and reconstituted itself as the Marylebone Cricket Club.
One year later, the MCC adopted its first Code of Laws. No vote was held among cricket’s existing clubs. No consultation took place with Hambledon or the county associations that had been revising the rules for decades. The MCC simply took over. By 1796, nobody showed up for Hambledon’s annual general meeting. The village club that had been cricket’s heart was dead.
The MCC governed cricket unchallenged for 182 years until administrative control passed to the Cricket Council in 1969. But it never gave up the Laws. To this day, the MCC writes, revises, and interprets the Laws of Cricket. The ICC governs the sport. The MCC governs its rules. That distinction matters, and it traces directly back to the moment a group of gambling aristocrats in St. James’s decided the game belonged to them.
The 29-year waiting list for MCC membership tells you how little has changed in structure. Full membership requires endorsement from three existing members and a senior MCC official. The alternative is paying between £55,000 and £75,000 for a lifetime membership. Stephen Fry, who served as MCC president from 2022 to 2023, said publicly that he felt “slightly embarrassed” by the role because the club had been run for hundreds of years by “fleshy, white Englishmen, public school, Oxbridge.” He said the MCC “stinks” of privilege.
The 2023 ICEC report confirmed what Fry described. The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket found that “elitism and class-based discrimination” were widespread and deep-rooted in English cricket. Some 58% of men who played for England in 2021 were privately educated, compared to 7% of the general population. The talent pathway was structurally aligned to private schools, not state schools.
Holland’s point is not that the MCC is corrupt. It is that cricket’s governing culture was aristocratic from the start, and it never fully outgrew that origin. The men who wrote the laws did so from a position of inherited power, not earned authority. They were gamblers first, lawmakers second, and cricketers only incidentally.
Insider Read: The Laws Nobody Writes Down
Holland describes how aristocrats appointed themselves as cricket’s rulers. Anyone who has played professionally knows this did not stay in the 18th century. It lives inside every dressing room.
Cricket has 42 written Laws. It has hundreds of unwritten ones. How a junior player addresses a senior. Whether a young bowler is allowed to question the captain taking him off the attack or is expected to accept it without a word. Who speaks first after a session. Who sits where in the dressing room. Who is allowed to question a decision from the coach, and who is expected to accept it in silence.
No other team sport operates with this level of internal hierarchy. Football dressing rooms have egos. Cricket dressing rooms have rank. A player who has 50 caps carries authority that a player with five caps cannot challenge, regardless of current form. This is not just culture. It is structure. The senior players, the captain, the coach, the selectors, the board. The chain of command in cricket runs vertically in a way that mirrors the aristocratic club Holland describes.
The connection is not accidental. Cricket’s institutions were built by men who believed hierarchy was the natural order of things. The Earl of Winchilsea did not ask Thomas Lord to find a democratic ground. He asked him to find a private one. The MCC did not consult other clubs before adopting its Code of Laws. It simply declared itself in charge. This instinct, that authority flows downward from those who hold it rather than upward from those who play the game, still shapes how cricket operates at every level.
When the ICEC report found class-based discrimination in English cricket, it was describing a system whose DNA was set in a Pall Mall tavern in 1774. The men in that room did not write laws for everyone. They wrote laws for themselves. And the game has been governed in their image ever since.
Holland, who plays cricket himself for the Authors XI and has argued that the US Civil War killed cricket in America for similarly practical rather than ideological reasons, understands this pattern. Cricket’s history is not a story of the game’s spirit being gradually corrupted by power. It is a story of power being there from the very beginning, dressed in whites.
Sources:
- Laws of Cricket 1774: Star and Garter, Pall Mall revision (archive.acscricket.com)
- The sporting past of 100 Pall Mall (OnLondon)
- About the Laws of Cricket (Lords.org)
- One-armed versus one-legged cricket (Wikipedia)
- Greenwich Pensioners’ cricket matches (Old Royal Naval College)
- White Conduit Club history (Wikipedia)
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