Free Foresters Cricket Club is an English amateur cricket club, established in 1856 for players from the Midland counties of England. It is a 'wandering' (or nomadic) club, having no home ground. The Free Foresters were founded by the Rev. William Kirkpatrick Riland Bedford who had been appointed rector of Sutton Coldfield in 1850. At Oxford University, he had discovered cricket and in 1847 he had set up the Sutton Coldfield Cricket Club. The name of the Free Foresters was chosen to reflect the fact that archery had been popular at the Rectory Park long before cricket was introduced. The club played its first match on 20 July 1856 against the Pilgrims of the Dee, at the Rectory Ground in Sutton Coldfield. In 1863, the Free Foresters presented the rector with a silver salver as a token of t