The Home of Cricket
Broadhalfpenny Down was first brought to our attention by John Thornton of Hambledon, so this page is dedicated to him and the Hambledon History Group.
We met three of the group at the Bat and Ball, a famous inn on top of the hill facing the Hambledon Cricket Ground where the Nyren family (Richard and son John) established the sport while the father was landlord (#1,2) in the second half of the C181. The HQ then moved to Marylebone (MCC) and the rest is H. But as cricket is my favourite sport, I’d better stop there.
When Richard Nyren moved to the pub it was called the Hut, or Broadhalfpenny Hutt, because it was a …drover’s inn. And you can see why: few customers on that windswept hill till cricket provided them. (The Welsh never caught the cricket bug in the same way.) #3 shows the B&B atop the hill with a splendidly wide green verge leading up to it.
The origin of the term “Broadhalfpenny” has been investigated by the HHG with great thoroughness: it was an exemption from payment for setting up tables or “boards” at a fair to sell goods from and this exemption would have to be mentioned in the Letter Patent carried by the stallholder. Well, I don’t think that applied to Drovers, unless they had stockings to sell, as they did at Farnham. So boards are out. And Letters Patent are out because I can’t imagine drovers operating within the minutiae of the law, let alone stowing away their LP's undamaged and undirtied. Their beasts would, anyway, have been welcomed as a source of manure on the down, but I have no idea if Broadhalfpenny was ever common land… Nah, nothing common round there. They’d have to pay for the grass. Usual cost was a halfpenny a beast for the night, funnily enough...
They were on their way to Kent to graze – there’s a Drift Road in Clanfield, the next village to the east – or to Havant & Portsmouth to sell to the Navy, which is the route we tried to follow. We couldn’t cross from the Bat & Ball directly because the farmer opposite had padlocked the gate, so we walked briskly down the road going south-west to 673165, leapt agilely through a hedge, probably vaulted a stile and saw off a bull before joining Monarch’s Way going south to Scotland, which is how it’s marked on all the maps. And on the way was a smashing little lane (#4,5). We’d like to think that Scotland used to be another inn but I can’t find any evidence. But the name is either a reference to the nationality of a previous owner or the payment of scot, a tax on land which sounds medieval.
The road fizzled out shortly after that, so it was fieldpaths until Harrowgate Lane and Lone Barn Farm took us back to car outside Clanfield. Good Day! And thanks again to Hambledon History Group for making it so interesting.
1 Cricket was well-established in Southern England before that: in 1611 two men were prosecuted for playing the game on Sunday instead of attending church.
