History of Tennis

The very first recorded discussion of tennis was in the fourteenth Cycle of play
s called 'The Second Shepherds Play' from the Wakefield Yorkshire author known s
imply as The Wakefield Master. In scene VIII Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur s
round table plays tennis with a group of giants.
However, this would have been the medieval form of tennis called real tennis whi
ch had evolved more than three centuries from an earlier ball game played in Fra
nce around the 12th century.
This involved hitting the ball with the bare hand or later a glove and is believ
ed to have started with monks playing the game in monastery cloisters, based upo
n the construction and appearance of some of the early courts.
The game soon proved to be a hit among European royals and in England was taken
up by Henry V in the early fifteenth century. A hundred years later Henry VIII
had the biggest impact as a young monarch, playing the game with enthusiasm at
Hampton Court on a court he built in 1530.
The game flourished among the 17th century upper class in France, Spain, Italy,
and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but suffered under English Puritanism. By th
e time of Napoleon, the royal families of Europe were under threat and real tenn
is was largely abandoned.
In England, in the 18th century and early 19th century, as real tennis died out,
three other racquet sports emerged: racquets, squash racquets, and lawn tennis
(the contemporary game).
The contemporary sport is tied to two separate inventions.Between 1859 and 1865,
in Birmingham, England, Major Harry Gem, a solicitor, and his friend Augurio Pe
rera, a Spanish merchant, combined elements of the game of rackets and the Spani
sh ball game pelota and played it on a croquet green in Edgbaston.
In 1872, both men moved to Leamington Spa and in 1874, with two doctors from the
Warneford Hospital, established the world's first tennis club. In December 1873
, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield devised a comparable game for the amusement of
his guests at a garden party on his estate of Nantclwyd in Llanelidan, Wales.
He based the game on the older real tennis. At the suggestion of Arthur Balfour,
Wingfield named it "lawn tennis, and patented the game in 1874 with an eight-p
age rule book titled "Sphairistike or Lawn Tennis", but he failed to be successf
ul in enforcing his patent.
Tennis was first played in the U.S. at the home of Mary Ewing Outerbridge on Sta
ten Island, New York in 1874. In 1881, the yearning to play tennis in competitio
n led to the organization of tennis clubs, which led to the four Grand Slams, wh
ich are regarded as the most prestigious activities on the tennis circuit.
They are: Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open, and the Australian Open and t
hey evolved into and have remained the most prominent events in tennis. Both the
name and much of the French vocabulary of tennis are borrowed from real tennis:
Tennis comes from the French tenez, the command form of the verb tenir, to hold:
This was a cry used by the player serving in royal tennis, meaning "I am about
to serve!" (rather like the cry "Fore!" in golfing).
Racquet comes from raquette, which comes from the Arabic rakhat, denoting the pa
lm of the hand.
Deuce comes from '? deux le jeu', meaning "to both is the game" (that is, the tw
o players have equal scores).
 Love is widely believed to come from "l'oeuf", the French word for "egg", repres
enting the shape of a zero.
The convention of numbering scores "15", "30" and "40" comes from quinze, trente
and quarante, which to French ears makes a euphonious sequence, or from the qua
rters of a clock (15, 30, 45) with 45 simplified to 40.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently
concerned with <a href="http://2012londonolympicsvolunteers.com/tickets-for-lond
on-olympics.html">Tickets for London Olympics</a>. Click a link if you are inter
ested in the <a href="http://2012londonolympicsvolunteers.com">2012 London Olymp
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