All-England Eleven Spreads Cricket — Manchester, Bristol, Derby and the Country Towns, 1847-49

In 1846 first-class cricket was concentrated in London and a handful of southern grounds. The new railways, the rising prosperity of northern industrial towns, and Clarke's promotional drive combined to make a national fixture list possible for the first time.

The 1847 inaugural national tour had proved the model. Clarke spent the winter of 1847-48 expanding the list of host clubs and lengthening the season into August and September.

Clarke's eleven played around 25 fixtures in 1847; that rose to 30 in 1848 and 34 in 1849. The geographical spread widened in step. Manchester first hosted the eleven in 1847 (at Hyde Park, near the present Old Trafford); Bristol in 1848 (where the local team included a teenage E.M. Grace's older relatives and laid the seed of Gloucestershire cricket); Derby, Norwich, Stourbridge, Bath and Plymouth all received their first AEE visit in this period. Each fixture brought together a local 18 or 22 against the eleven and drew crowds of two to five thousand, with the gate generally going to the local club to underwrite improvements to ground, pavilion and equipment. The financial template — local club paid Clarke a guaranteed fee of £55 to £70 per match plus expenses, kept the gate, and used the day to stage its own equivalent of a county fete — gave provincial clubs both a benchmark and a windfall. Within five years Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle and Bristol all had clubs strong enough to challenge for first-class fixtures. The AEE matches also normalised the sight of professional cricketers in a town: spectators who had only read about Pilch, Mynn or Lillywhite saw them in the flesh.

By 1850 every major industrial town in England had hosted the AEE at least once. The local clubs that descended from these visits — Manchester, Stockton, Newcastle and others — became the nuclei of the future county cricket clubs of Lancashire, Durham, Northumberland, Norfolk and Gloucestershire.