Paul Campbell from the Australian National University in Canberra has uncovered a reference to the sport in a poem written in 1533, in which cricket is linked to Flemish weavers working in England.

The poem is attributed to John Skelton, a popular poet and playwright of the day. In “The Image of Ipocrisie”, Skelton appears to describe the Flemish weavers who settled in southern and eastern England from the 14th century as “kings of crekettes”:

O lorde of Ipocrites

Nowe shut vpp your wickettes

And clape to your clickettes!

A! Farewell, kings of crekettes!

The reference to “wickettes” gives further credence to the claim that “crekettes” refers to cricket (the modern game involving two sets of wooden wickets). If such a claim were true, then it bowls over the traditional theory that the sport evolved from children’s games played in England since Anglo-Saxon times. Instead, Flemish weavers might have been playing a rudimentary game of cricket on the fields of Flanders, taking it with them when they emigrated to England in search of work.

“I’m pleased but not totally surprised,” says Charles Brommaert from local league Cricket Vlaanderen. “If you look closely at some of Pieter Brueghel’s paintings you see his characters playing a game that could have been cricket. This discovery will certainly put the sport in a new light in Flanders and will help to convince the Flemish that cricket isn’t an alien sport.”

The poem was uncovered by Campbell while working with Heiner Gillmeister of the Department of English at the University of Bonn, who suggests that the term “cricket” has its roots in the Flemish phrase “met de krik ketsen”, or “to chase with a curved stick”.

Before Campbell’s discovery, the first written reference to cricket was believed to be that of John Derick in 1589. During a court case in Guildford, England, he recalled that, as a young man at the Royal Grammar School, “he and diverse of his fellowes did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies”. But the new finding from an earlier source suggests that the sport – as well as the word itself – is Flemish in origin.

Weavers from Flanders are certainly known to have settled in rural areas around Kent and Surrey, where it is generally believed that the English game of cricket originated. What’s more, the historical spread of the game across the southern counties could also match the movement of Flemish weavers.

All we need now is to find reference to the game of “crekettes” in early Medieval Flemish literature, and the image of cricket being a particularly English invention would be hit for six.