Did Jane Austen really invent baseball?

"It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books." Baseball is mentioned in Northanger Abbey in a list of sports that Catherine Morland liked to play, and Jane is sometimes credited for it's invention as the book was published 40 years before it's official invention. However, did Jane really invent baseball? The short answer is of course no, no she did not, but I shall continue! A Guildford teenager called William Bray evidences baseball in his diary in 1755 and a German book in 1796 also contained several pages with the rules of "Englischer Baseball". The first official recorded game of baseball took place in 1749 in Surrey and featured the Prince of Wales as a player.

There were a number of early folk ball games that resemble baseball even earlier than this, but would often be played with varying sets of rules, which were not written down. In 1801, Joseph Strutt claimed in his book The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, that baseball like games can be traced back to the 14th century and that it is actually a descendant of a game unfortunately named stoolball. The earliest known reference to stoolball was in a 1330 poem by William Pagula who recommended to priests that the game be forbidden in churchyards. The rhyme in the picture above entitled base-ball was published by John Newberry in 1744, but is thought to be describing stoolball. So our beloved Jane did not invent baseball, but her use of the word may refer to a ball game not recognisable as baseball today.

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