If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

Village cricket spread fast through the land.

I never knew a man go for an honest day's walk for whatever distance, great or small, and not have his reward in the repossession of his soul.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.