Origins of Cricket--- 700 to 1000 AD

The latest thinking on the origins of cricket is that it may have developed out of ancient bat-and-ball games from the Greater Punjab ("Doab") region of the Indian subcontinent straddling North India and Pakistan, which travelled through Persia by the 8th century or earlier. In this, cricket could have behaved like two other imports into Europe from the Indian subcontinent certainly did, at about the same time--- Chess, the board game of the Indian warriors which became the Persian "shatranj" from the Indian "chaturanga", and travelled via Constantinople into Europe...and the nomadic Gypsies who wandered away from the Indian deserts through Turkey into Eastern Europe, arriving there by the 10th century...Team sports were, of course, not new to Europe. Team "ball" games had developed there since ancient times. The Greeks even played field hockey which they had learned from Egypt, and a throwing/fielding game called ephedrismos which used a wicket, or stick, as a target for a cricket-ball-sized ball. The Romans, too, played a number of ball games....their sports looked like today's rugby, soccer and handball. What came in from the East was the "bat", i.e.a stick designed to hit an object like a ball or similar projectile, so it could be fielded.
It is the Bat, the old "danda" of South Asia, that marks the beginning of early cricket.
In the 8th century, the monk Eustatius Cardonius was demonstrating a new bat-and-ball sport he had picked up from further east, to a conclave of cardinals in Florence, Italy. By the 9th century, bat-and-ball games looking somewhat like cricket were being played in Italy, and also in Spain and Portugal. The Church in Europe seems to have taken the lead in sponsoring these bat-and-ball sporting activities on their monastery lands, as part of community-wide celebrations following church services....perhaps the beginning of "Sunday afternoon cricket" !
As the Church expanded into the British Isles, these sporting activities entered Ireland and then Britain. They were soon integrated into these rural communities, becoming part of Christian life in those places by about 1000 AD.