Buckinghamshire County Cricket Club

Buckinghamshire County Cricket Club is one of twenty minor county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Buckinghamshire.

The team is currently a member of the Minor Counties Championship Eastern Division and plays in the MCCA Knockout Trophy. Buckinghamshire played List A matches occasionally from 1965 until 2005 but is not classified as a List A team per se.

The club has its administrative headquarters at Little Chalfont and plays its matches around the county at various locations. Until 1979 it played regularly at Ascott Park, the home of the Rothschild family which was prominent in the club's foundation.

Honours

Earliest cricket

A match in October 1730 on Datchet Heath (now known as Datchet Common), outside the village of Datchet near Windsor, is the first reference to cricket in Buckinghamshire. Datchet is nowadays in Berkshire but was historically part of Buckinghamshire.

County cricket

Inter-county cricket matches are known to have been played since the early 18th century, involving teams that are representative of the historic counties of England and Wales. Since the late 19th century, there have been two county championship competitions played at different levels: the County Championship, a first-class competition which currently involves eighteen first-class county clubs; and the Minor Counties Championship, which currently involves nineteen English county clubs and one club that is representative of several Welsh counties.

History

County cricket started in the eighteenth century, the earliest known inter-county match being played in 1709, though an official County Championship was not instituted until 1890. Having already been badly hit by the Seven Years' War, county cricket ceased altogether during the Napoleonic Wars and there was a period from 1797 to 1824 during which no inter-county matches took place.

Development of county cricket

Inter-county cricket was popular throughout the 18th century, although the best team, such as Kent in the 1740s or Hampshire in the days of the famous Hambledon Club, was usually acknowledged as such by being matched against All-England. The most successful county teams were Hampshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey and Sussex. There was, however, often a crossover between town and county with some strong local clubs tending at times to represent a whole county. Examples are London, which often played against county teams and was in some respects almost a county club in itself; Slindon, which was for a few years in the 1740s effectively representative of Sussex as a county; Dartford, sometimes representative of Kent; and the Hambledon Club, certainly representative of Hampshire and also perhaps of Sussex. One of the best county teams in the late 18th century was Berkshire, which no longer has first-class status.

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players each on a field at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard-long pitch. The game is played by 120 million players in many countries, making it the world's second most popular sport. Each team takes its turn to bat, attempting to score runs, while the other team fields. Each turn is known as an innings (used for both singular and plural).

The bowler delivers the ball to the batsman who attempts to hit the ball with his bat away from the fielders so he can run to the other end of the pitch and score a run. Each batsman continues batting until he is out. The batting team continues batting until ten batsmen are out, or a specified number of overs of six balls have been bowled, at which point the teams switch roles and the fielding team comes in to bat.

In professional cricket, the length of a game ranges from 20 overs (T20) per side to Test cricket played over five days. The Laws of Cricket are maintained by the International Cricket Council (ICC) and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) with additional Standard Playing Conditions for Test matches and One Day Internationals.

Buckinghamshire

Buckinghamshire (/ˈbʌkɪŋəmʃər/ or /ˈbʌkɪŋəmʃɪər/, abbreviated Bucks; archaically the County of Buckingham) is a ceremonial county in South East England. It borders Greater London to the south east, Berkshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the west, Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north east and Hertfordshire to the east.

Buckinghamshire is a home county and towns such as High Wycombe, Amersham and the Chalfonts in the east and southeast of the country are parts of the London commuter belt, forming some of the most densely-populated parts of the county. Development in this region is restricted by the Metropolitan Green Belt. Other large settlements include the county town of Aylesbury, Marlow in the south near the Thames and Princes Risborough in the west near Oxford. Some areas without direct rail links to London, such as around the old county town of Buckingham and near Olney in the northeast, are much less populous. The largest town is Milton Keynes in the northeast, which with the surrounding area is administered as a unitary authority separately to the rest of Buckinghamshire. The remainder of the county is administered by Buckinghamshire County Council as a non-metropolitan county. In national elections, Buckinghamshire is considered a reliable supporter of the Conservative party.

Knights of Buckinghamshire

This article contains a list of the known knights of the shire who represented Buckinghamshire in the Parliament of England and similar bodies of lesser status between 1290 and 1660. It also includes details of Parliaments from 1265 to which elected knights of the shires were summoned.

Preliminary notes

The parliamentary electoral constituency, representing the historic county of Buckinghamshire, was created in (1265): see Montfort's Parliament for further details and History of Buckinghamshire for maps of the historic county. This county constituency was represented by two knights of the shire until 1832 and three 1832-1885.

Knights of the shire are known to have been summoned to most parliaments from 1290 (19th Parliament of King Edward I of England) and to every one from 1320 (19th Parliament of King Edward II of England).

Although at some periods several Parliaments were held in a year, at others there were considerable gaps between Parliaments. Knights of the shire were also summoned to meetings which have not been classified as Parliaments by modern expert opinion. The names of the members in some Parliaments are not known.

Buckinghamshire (disambiguation)

Buckinghamshire is a county in southeast England.

Buckinghamshire may also refer to: