[BROADSIDE] CRICKET. On Wednesday, the 30th August, 1809, will be played, in the Roe Buck Field, Maidstone, a Game of Cricket, H. Russell, Esq. & Mr. T. Bowyer, against Mr. John Amos & Mr. T. Save, for Twenty Guineas,

the wickets to be pitched at twelve o’clock. A good ordinary at two o’clock, by J. Shore. [Maidstone] : from the Press of J. Blake, [1809]. Broadside, 220 x 140 mm, letterpress on wove paper with engraved oval vignette of a double-wicket cricket match in progress; three light horizontal creases, several short tears (mostly closed), right margin a little roughened, but with no loss of text; mounted in a modern gilt frame, glazed.

An early nineteenth-century cricket broadside advertising a double-wicket challenge match to be played at Maidstone, Kent on the penultimate day of summer, 1809.

Cricket matches had been staged at Maidstone’s Roebuck Field since at least the late eighteenth century: we know, for example, that the ground was the venue for a single-wicket match between J. Boorman of Canterbury and Woolett of Wrotham on 27-28 August, 1789 (source: Cricket History website). Another single-wicket game is recorded as having taken place there on 26 August, 1801, during which Mr. Bates, of Egerton, died suddenly (Union Magazine, and Imperial Register, September 1801, p. 206).

The broadside was printed by John J. Blake (d. 1814), who, according to the wording on an example of one of his trade cards held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a printer, bookseller, stationer and binder with premises in High Street, Maidstone. Blake was both printer and editor of The Maidstone Journal and Kentish Advertiser.