I played some real tennis (& padel), I spoke at the Real Tennis Society Conference, I watched four sets of the World Championship (the middle day) and had a thoroughly good time.
Frederika (Freddy) Adam tapped me up (moments before the final I seem to recall) to see if I would produce something vaguely historical for the Real Tennis Society Conference during the World Championship in September.
Only if I can get myself a decent seat for the match that evening and a room at Prested Hall for a couple of nights.
A couple of weeks later, I somewhat idly (more in hope than expectation) checked out the match and room situation. One front row seat had popped back into the pot and so had a room for two nights at Prested Hall. I eagerly grabbed both and resolved to do something for the history conference.
The Prested people (both in the tennis club and the Hall) are incredibly helpful. They arranged for me to play real tennis on the Monday afternoon when I arrived and padel on the Wednesday morning before I left. Both were very good games.
I met one or two of my fellow real tennis addicts at dinner in the hotel on the Monday evening, but the fun really started at breakfast on the Tuesday, where I found Freddy and Michael “Mikko” Lindell, one of the other conference presenters. Almost as soon as we started to chat, Mikko asked if he could draw me. Naturally I agreed. When I got back to my room after breakfast, about 30 minutes after that request, the headline picture (above) was sitting in my e-mail inbox.
During my performance, just prior to playing an instrumental piece of music, I made a quip about suffering from pre-minstrel tension. As soon as I had finished, Mikko presented me with the following picture:
Janie is already working on getting this prized possession framed.
But we were mostly there for the World Championship, in which Camden Riviere was challenging Rob Fahey for the fifth and probably final time (Rob is now an astonishing 54), having toppled Rob in 2016 but somehow Rob had grabbed the crown back in 2018. This challenge, in September 2022, was the delayed March 2020 one.
Before the tennis was a reception, which was a chance to catch up briefly with real tennis friends who had come down just for the evening. After the tennis there was a loud and convivial atmosphere in the Prested bar/bistro – an atmosphere I can only describe as unique in the real tennis world…but then there is only one real tennis club in Essex.
The tennis that Tuesday evening was very exciting…at least it was in the end. The match was poised 2-2 sets after the first day. Camden won the first three sets on Tuesday evening with relative ease and was even 4-0 up in the fourth set of the night, when Rob somehow managed to start turning things around – astonishingly taking that set having saved several set point along the way.
Actually James joined me for breakfast briefly the next morning before he flew back to the states and I scurried over to the padel court. It was a good opportunity to chat in person having exchanged e-mails in the past but not really chatted. Several other conferencistas were there at breakfast, which was a chance to swap metaphorical notes.
After padel, I packed and left, stopping off at Lord’s for one last look at county cricket this season – well it would have been rude not to.
On the pavilion/tennis side of the ground, I ran in to a few people who had been at Prested the night before. Then I wandered round to the new Edrich Stand, gracing it with my presence for the first time in glorious autumn sunshine. It was a fitting end to a very enjoyable short trip.
During the lockdown period of our recent plague, in 2020, I found some solace while not being able to play real tennis by reading a great deal and writing a little about tennis history.
“During the reign of Charles V . palm play , which may properly enough be denominated hand – tennis , was exceedingly fashionable in France, being played by the nobility for large sums of money ; and when they had lost all that they had about them , they would sometimes pledge a part of their wearing apparel rather than give up the pursuit of the game . The Duke of Burgundy, according to an old historian , having lost sixty franks at palm play with the Duke of Bourbon , Messire William de Lyon , and Messire Guy de la Trimouille, and not having money enough to pay them, gave his girdle as a pledge for the remainder; and shortly afterwards he left the same girdle with the comte D ‘ Eu for eighty franks, which he also lost at tennis.”
[The reference in Strutt simply reads “Laboureur, sub an. 1368”.]
I wanted to find out more about this 14th century loser of a Duke.
Philip The Bold of Burgundy (1342-1404)
I quickly and easily found out that the Duke in question was Philip The Bold, the youngest brother of Charles V, otherwise known as Charles the Wise.
Charles The Wise – no apparel-loser, he.
Despite the pathetic image conjured by the girdle adage, Philip The Bold was no loser. Heralded for his bravery in battle, he became the most influential French nobleman of his period.
Further, as I shall argue in this immersive presentation, his activities had seminal and lasting effects on worlds as diverse as wine, tennis and music. But evidence to support such arguments is hard to come by for a period as early as the 14th century.
We really only have three contemporary types of information source. Chronicles [e.g. The Chronicles of Jean Froissart] which record major events and edicts. These tend to tell us that major events happened, with scant evidence about how they happened and almost nothing on activities such as tennis and music.
Secondly, the account books of noble households which provide circumstantial evidence of how activities might have been undertaken. My story will be relying quite a bit on those.
The third type of source, more open to interpretation than the other two, comes from poets and lyricists of that period. We have a few fascinating and amusing pieces of this kind for Philip the Bold’s story.
A Potted History Of Philip The Bold’s Life
Philip was born in 1342, the youngest son of John The Good, who become King of France in 1350. Philip joined with his father in 1356 in the Battle of Poitiers, a couple of decades into The Hundred Years War, where both were taken prisoner and removed to England.
John The Good (but not THAT good in battle)
Philip remained a gilded prisoner in England between 1356 and 1360, thus spending the best of his teenage years in captivity and helping to establish the tradition of English residential secondary education resembling a prisoner of war camp. More seriously, there are contemporary accounts of Philip playing chess with his captor, The Black Prince (Prince Edward of Woodstock), but sadly there is nothing in the chronicles connecting Philip with wine, tennis or music during his period in captivity – they don’t even report the chess match results.
Philip’s mother, Bonne of Luxembourg, had been a great patron of the arts, before her untimely death in 1349 of plague.
Bonne & John, were pretty lookin’ people…
When, in 1360, the 18-year-old Philip returned from captivity to the Valois court in Paris, Guillaume de Machaut, one of the most important composer-poets of the 14th century, who had been one of Bonne’s favourites, was still a frequent guest of the royal household, certainly until the death of King John the Good some four years later.
Guillaume de Machaut
Douce Dame Jolie by Guillaume de Machaut
The structure of the song is a virelai. The subject matter is fin’amor – often now referred to as courtly love – unrequited love directed towards a perfect, unattainable woman – the singer eventually pleads for his lover to kill him as a mercy to end his torment. Typical.
I performed this one mostly acapella with a short instrumental intro and accompanied outro.
Here is a rather beautiful instrumental version of the piece:
While here is Theo Bleckmann singing the song beautifully with electronic backing which should not be mistaken for traditional 14th century accompaniment:
A Potted History Of Philip The Bold’s Life (Continued)
Philip of Rouvres
In 1361 the 15-year-old Duke of Burgundy, Philip of Rouvres died, probably of plague, which meant that the Burgundy Dukedom technically reverted to the Kingdom of France. In 1363, John The Good, soon before he also died, secretly conferred the Burgundian Dukedom to Philip. In 1364, Philip’s older brother, now King Charles V, officially invested Burgundy upon Phillip.
Thus Philip was a 26-year-old single Duke at the time of the reported 1368 tennis-girdle incident.
In 1369 Philip married Margaret of Flanders which lined Philip up for a much-expanded Dukedom once Louis of Male, Count of Flanders, died, in 1384.
Marriage of Philip & Margaret. An end, no doubt, to girdle gambling days.
Four years earlier, In 1380, Charles V died, leaving 11-year-old Charles VI King of France. Three Dukes shared the regency until the youngster reached majority. Philip was the youngest of those three Dukes, but neither Louis, Duke of Anjou nor John, Duke of Berry were particularly interested in governing France, leaving Philip The Bold as de facto regent.
Charles VI, known as Charles The Beloved. Not Charley the Barmy.
In 1388 Charles VI claimed the throne, but within four years was regularly in the throes of violent mental illness, such that a more tentative, disputed regency was in play for most of the rest of Philip the Bold’s life, which ended in 1404 following a flu-like or covid-like respiratory illness.
“On folio 3 1 of the same account, Monseigneur le Duc, having lost sixty pounds in tennis, gave his belt as a pledge for the said sum to the Duc de Bourbon, Guy de la Trémouille and others, who had won it from him.
“Fol. 9-3 from the same account. The duke’s belt is still given as a pledge to the Comte d’Eu for eighty francs which he had lost with him in tennis.”
Leaving a belt as surety at least sounds a little more dignified than leaving a girdle. It also has a more “sporting trophy” sound to it.
Battle of Pontvallain – 1370 – Philip probably missed out on this one
There are several references to tennis and dice losses in the expense accounts for the period when Philip was in residence in Saumur on a military campaign in 1372. On that sequence of occasions, it seems the Duke was not required to leave any clothing as surety but he took pains to seek to return and settle his debts. [This sequence is charmingly written up on-line on the Les Portes Du Temps website.]
Another fascinating reference, cited in Music at the Court of Burgundy 1364-1419 A Documentary History by Craig Wright, from the account books of 1378, shows Philip presenting Jean De Dinnat with a silver belt worth 29 francs and then 1379 with 10 francs for beating him at tennis. Jean de Dinnant was one of Philip’s favourite musicians who accompanied him at times on his travels. Still, it is most unusual to find an accounted example of a nobleman playing tennis with a minstrel. This unusual transaction makes me wonder whether the 29 franc belt might have previously been mortgaged a few times.
What we do know for sure, as reported by Wright and others interested in the history of music in Burgundy at that time, is that Philip ran up huge expenditures by the standards of his time, sending his minstrels around the music schools in France and abroad – certainly in the period 1378 to 1394, with large payments for musicians travel and instruments recorded many times in the household accounts.
Philip was not the first and not the only French/European noble to do this sort of thing in the 14th century. His parents had been great patrons of the arts, as was to some extent, Edward III of England, whose household accounts show him sending minstrels “across the seas, to learn new songs”, as early as 1335.
But a concerted bout of international minstrel schooling seems to have been triggered by the Bruges peace conferences of 1375 & 1376, brokered between Philip The Bold and his recent adversary at war, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. One of the few conclusive results of those peace conferences was exchanges of minstrels; Gautier l’Anglais remained in Philip’s employ for several years, while several of Philip’s minstrels travelled to England with John of Gaunt’s retinue.
Gaunt, was, like Philip, a princely patron of arts, known as “King of the Minstrels” in the Minstrels’ Court, a form of trade guild centred on Tutbury Castle, where the apprenticeship of minstrels was organised in late 14th century England.
Song Two: Puis Que Je Suy Amoureux, attributed Richard Loqueville
Attributed to Richard Loqueville – a harper and teacher at Cambrai;
A rondeau in form;
Another unrequited love song – in this one the singer hopes for just one glance from his beloved. Typical;
Performs well either as a harp/gittern instrumental or song.
Below is a beautiful rendition of the song by Asteria.
Without question Philip the Bold went large on employing musicians towards the end of his life. When his father-in-law Louis, Count of Flanders, died, Philip retained the entire Flanders collection of musicians along with his own to create probably the largest payroll of musicians anywhere at that time. His prior collection was made up primarily of minstrels, but the collection Philip acquired on the death of Louis of Flanders included a substantial chapel as well as minstrels. The burgeoning importance of the music school at Cambrai in the late 14th and early 15th century was largely attributable to Philip The Bold’s investment in musicians.
We don’t know for sure what types of music specifically Philip The Bold favoured but we do know that Phillip’s library, towards the end of his life and posthumously, was well stocked with Guillaume de Machaut’s work. Machaut, unlike many of the lyric poets who followed him, was very much a composer of music as well as a poet.
One of Machaut’s most famous pupils was Eustache Deschamps, a prolific lyric-poet otherwise known as Morel. Deschamps was a contemporary of Philip The Bold. Deschamps’s estates in Champagne had been ransacked by the English, probably under the auspices of John of Gaunt. Unsurprisingly, Deschamps writes disdainfully about the English generally. He was, however, fond of Geoffrey Chaucer, another contemporary of these chaps, such that Deschamps wrote a tribute to Chaucer lauding his work.
Geoffeey Chaucer – Eustace Deschamps was a fan
In the 14th century there was no real distinction between lyricists and poets. Much of Deschamps’s canon is written in lyrical forms such as virelays and rondeaus that make it hard to imagine that those poems were not intended to be sung. However, many of Deschamps’s ballad poems, including those that mention Philip the Bold and tennis, were probably intended for recitation, not song.
Philip the Bold is mentioned in far from flattering terms in a couple of Deschamps’ poems. The poem “Ordre de la Baboue” describes an imaginary drinking club of unsightly looking people who are members of Philip the Bold’s household.
More interesting is the Dit du Gieu des Dez, The Ballad Of The Dice Game, (1395), in which Deschamps imagines a drunken drinking and dice session at the Hotel de Nesle, the Duke of Berry’s Paris mansion – in which Philip the Bold together with his host & the Duke of Bourbon enjoy a night of excess and ribaldry.
The Hotel de Nesle was the location of a very early indoor tennis court, built by Philip The Fair around 1300 for his son Louis, latterly Louis X, the Quarrelsome, who famously died in the aftermath of a game of tennis, possibly drunk, possibly murdered or possibly both.
It is clear from Deschmaps and other medieval sources that an entertainment and gambling session would often have begun with the rigours of tennis and then, to continue gambling, turned to drinking and playing dice.
On similar themes, an earlier, 1372 Deschamps poem, The Charter of Good Youths of Vertus in Champagne, is a satirical ballad, set in Deschamps’s home town of Vertus, explaining how to live a “good life”. This ballad mentions tennis a couple of times. I shall recite a couple of dozen lines from this relatively long poem (more than 250 lines), sometimes swapping strict meaning to allow the English language version to follow the lyrical and satirical quality of the Medieval French.
The king of the hedonists,
Lived the long life of a dedanist;
Deep inside a tavern in Vertus,
Badly dressed, yet virtuous;
To all the young in the town,
Who habitually would come on down;
Saying “cheers”, while following this charter faithfully,
Which I shall now report to you thoughtfully and gracefully.
First, as soon as we rise, whatever the time,
Let’s refresh our mouths with the best and most expensive wine;
From dawn until dusk, without leaving or pausing for food,
As none of that would do us any good.
Assign the bill, no-one’s entitled to force it,
He who gripes or tinkers should pay double as forfeit;
Grandiose talk might turn out to be wisest,
Trading in goods might be done in many guises;
Games of tennis and dice often need arbitration,
Agree peacefully – indoors – in the court of libation.
…
Serve yourselves grandly and serve yourselves lazily,
Never care to work – people kill themselves ploughing crazily;
Play dice and tennis on sloping roofs or on thatch,
To exercise within – but if you must go out – find a match;
In women’s cloisters or communes or village communities…
[…followed by another 160 lines of bawdy verse, which no amount of trigger warnings or woke translation could repair for 21st century ears]
Philip The Bold & The Grapes Of Wrath (Pinot Noir v Gamay)
Those mentions of wine bring me to the third aspect of Philip The Bold’s legacy which I’m keen to discuss with you.
The beloved Pinot Noir
On 31 July 1395 Philip The Bold made a solemn decree about wine, banning the Gamay grape from Burgundy, insisting that the traditional, high-quality, low-yield grape, pinot noir, be restored to its rightful place in Burgundian vineyards. [The whole text of the ordinance can be found on-line in many places, including the source linked here.] Here is a loosely translated extract from the ordinance, in which Philip objects to the planting of:
“a very bad and treacherous variety of grape called Gameez, which produces abundant quantities of wine; and to allow the greater production of this bad wine they have left in a ruinous state good places where the best sort of grapes might be grown. Wine from Gameez is the type of wine that is extremely harmful to human beings, to the extent that, we are reliably informed, many people who previously partook of this wine were infested by serious diseases, because such wine from grapes of that nature is infused with much foul and horrible bitterness. For these reasons we solemnly command all who have said Gameez vines to cut them down or have them cut down, wherever they may be in our country, within five months.”
The ordinance goes on to stipulate and restrict other agricultural practices for Burgundy. It is a seminally comprehensive and prescriptive state decree on food and/or wine standards. It’s context was almost certainly the aftermath of the plague, which would have hit Burgundian wine-growers badly, both in terms of massively reduced manpower to produce fine wines from a difficult grape such as pinot noir and a reduced wider market for Burgundy’s fine wines. The Gamay grape – a cross-breed between Pinot Noir and a despised, peasant-variety, Gouais, does indeed grow abundantly compared with its high-falutin’ parent grape. Intriguingly, the Chardonnay grape is also a cross-breed between Pinot and Gouais, yet the white cross-breed latterly found favour for the fine white wines of Burgundy.
The decree was not popular at the time. The farmers were suffering and the abundant production of Gamay was saving their livelihoods and those of the wine merchants. The town council in Dijon that August voted that the ordinance was a breach of their privileges, thus rejecting it. Philip the Bold had the Mayor imprisoned and replaced. Also several councillors were fined as a result of that impertinence. When Philip made a decree he really meant it.
[ANNOUNCE MINI WINE TASTING BEFORE RETURNING BRIEFLY TO MUSIC – the wine samples were served during the remainder of the session]
Burgundian Music & Tennis Reprise
Guillaume Dulay (left) & Gilles Binchois (right)
Towards the end of Philip’s life, a very young Guillaume Dufay was taken to Cambrai by his mother, where he joined the chapel as a choirboy. Little is known of Dufay’s formative years at Cambrai, but he no doubt have studied under several of the Burundian-sponsored masters and benefitted from the many conventions of musicians for which Cambrai became famous at that time. Parenthetically, there is a beautiful picture in a Cambrai book of hours, dated c1300, of monks playing jeu de paume (see below…or click this link to see many of the stunning images from that Book of Hours).
Paume had been a big deal at Cambrai since c1300, based on this Book Of Hours picture
Dufay lived a long life and his compositions are seen as central to the Burgundian School’s importance in the development of music from Medieval Ars Nova into Renaissance music. This song, probably from early in Dufay’s life, is a rondeau in the ars nova style popular towards the end of Philip The Bold’s life. It would have been close to the top of the medieval charts for several of the early 1400s decades. Unlike the fin’amor love song I sang earlier, this song is a lament for leaving behind a beloved place, along with, no doubt, loved ones in that place.
Adieu Ces Bon Vins De Lannoy by Guillaume Dufay
Another rondeau, said to be inspired by Loqueville’s style, as Dufay would have studied under him.
I performed this song acapella.
Here are Asteria again, with a lovely accompanied rendition of this song.
By the end of Dufay’s life, in 1474, the Valois-Ducal-Burgundian line was almost at an end. Charles The Bold died at the Battle of Nancy in 1477 leaving no male issue. His daughter, Mary of Burgundy, Philip The Bold’s great, great granddaughter, married Maximillian I, ending the Valois dynasty, joining its remainder with the Habsburg dynasty. The Burgundian lands soon reverted to France, but by that time tennis had become more firmly established as a grand game for nobles as well as a smaller-scale town and tavern game for the middling sort.
Mary of Burgundy (1458–1482).*oil on oak panel.*47.5 x 35 cm
As for music, the cross-fertilisation of music styles between the burgeoning Burgundian School and emerging techniques from England (John Dunstable’s influence was overtly recognised by Burgundian musicians) led to the development of multi-part polyphony based on triads and chords which we now consider central to Western music and which are seen musically as the transition from Medieval to Renaissance music.
My closing number is another lament to a place – Innsbruck – written by Heinrich Isaac, probably in the middle of the 1480s, when he was employed there by the Habsburg Archduke Sigismund. This piece is sometimes misattributed to Maximillian I which is as likely as the attribution of Greensleeves to Henry VIII – i.e. utterly implausible.
Innsbruck Ich Muss Dich Lassen
Here is a recording of my first (2017) attempt at this song for The Gresham Society.
Nearly five years later, I think I’m a little bit better at making music, which is more than can be said for my tennis. The following video is a good example of the full four parts Isaac wrote for this song:
In many ways Philip’s wine & music legacies are more evidentially direct, but his influence on the progress of tennis is, arguably, just as seminal and lasting. We learn from Jean-Michel Mehl, Les Jeux Au Royaume de France, 1998that:
“in 1385, Philippe le Hardi had made, in his hotel in Arras, “a pavement of thirty feet of stone to play tennis with palms. Without doubt, this tennis court was still used by Philip the Good.”
The last overt reference to tennis in the accounts of Philip’s household, according to Petit, was in 1390:
“On 10th of March, the duke donated to the lady of Suilly, a clasp of gold, garnished with four brooms and eight large pearls to three children playing tennis, shining, to the value of 180 gold francs. (Letter to the Duke, dated Rouvre 10 March)”
Here we see an older Philip sponsoring things he found beautiful, although whether the donation was primarily for the woman or primarily for the young tennis stars we’ll never know. But Philip was, repeatedly, a generous sponsor of things he liked and wanted to encourage. I warm to that aspect of him. I also share his love for wine, tennis and music.
Mini Wine Tasting
Wine One: Morgon La Chanaise 2020, Dominique Piron – Cru Beajolais – Gamay – Price range £12 to £16 per bottle
Wine Two: Les Pierres Rouges Bourgogne 2020, Louis Jadot – Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée – Pinot Noir – Price range £14 to £18 per bottle
Acknowledgements
I’d especially like to thank my friend, Gresham Society colleague and linguist Professor Tim Connell, who has helped me with translation of several Deschamps poems. One fascinating aspect of working through these poems is how open to interpretation some of the material is. I have most certainly taken liberties with some of Tim’s diligent translation, substituting an attempt to emulate the lyrical and satirical rhythm of the work at the expense of strict meaning/translation.
Also with grateful thanks to my early music tutor, Ian Pittaway, whose patient tutelage on both the music history and the techniques of medieval music-making can only be explained by his depth of knowledge and sense of humour.
Thanks also to my wife, Janie, for tolerating my incessant tapping at the keyboard, plucking at the guitar strings and warbling of the songs, regardless of whatever else might have been on the agenda these past few weeks.
Further Reading & References
Ian Harris’s Ogblog Tetralogy On The Origins Of Tennis:
Tennis: A Cultural History, Heiner Gillmeister, A&C Black, 1998 or Tennis A Cultural History (Second edition), Heiner Gillmeister, Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2017
Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson, Ronaldson Publications, 2015
Willis Faber Book Of Tennis & Rackets, Lord Aberdare, Hutchinson, 1980
Lowenthal Trophy 2022 Finalistas and officials: Simon Marshall, Yuri Kugler, Nick Browne, Carl Snitcher, Josh Farrall, Sebastian Wood, Ian Harris
The words tournament and success do not normally go together in the context of me playing sport. In fairness, until I started playing real tennis I hadn’t actually participated in a sporting tournament for some 40 years.
But now, I am able to report going two better than semi-final defeat.
In the Dedanists’ Society Lowenthal Trophy event at Queen’s, partnering Sebastian Wood, I not only managed to get to a final for the first time…
…we went on to win the trophy.
Josh Farrall (centre) presented the trophy to me and Sebastian after a splendid dinner at Queen’s. With thanks to The Dedanists’ Society for this and the headline photo
Let us not dwell on the details of how handicap doubles tournaments using vicious sliding handicaps work.
In particular, let us not dwell on how close we came to losing the second of our round robin matches, which we won on a single point decider after creeping from behind to four-games-all.
But I’m in danger of letting this fleeting success go to my head, so let us move on.
Dedanists v Jesters At Queen’s, 27 May 2022
Young Bertie Vallat hitting the winning shot in the flagship match of the fixture
The Dedanists’ Society is a private club for real tennis enthusiasts, dedicated to raising funds for the preservation of the game. The Jesters Club is an invitation only club for enthusiasts of court sports such as real tennis, squash, Rugby fives, Eton Fives and padel. Coincidentally, given the origins of my addiction to such games (rugby fives at Alleyn’s), the very first Jesters fixture, in December 1928, was a rugby fives match against The Alleyn Old Boys.
Anyway, this fixture presented me with an opportunity, just a couple of weeks later, to return to the scene of the Lowenthal Trophy crime and enjoy a friendly fixture and another fine dinner at Queen’s.
On this occasion I got a chance to resume my partnership with James McDermott:
Me & James At Royal Hampton Court, October 2019
We prevailed, just about, in our rubber, early in the event, before settling down to enjoying the atmosphere at Queen’s, taking some tea and watching some real tennis.
The flagship match of the event was the father & son combination, Richard & Bertie Vallatt vs Alex Brodie and Andy Keeley. It was a splendid watch for us lesser amateurs and a bit of a leveller for me.
As I get older, I realise that certain statements that older people make, such as, “the policemen look younger and younger” express how those older people feel, rather than an objective reality about the average age of policemen.
But when I say, “the county championship seems to start earlier and earlier” I believe that is pretty much true…although not by all that much.
The last time I froze this much, Daisy and I went to see the second day of the 2013 season in Nottingham, 11 April that year, reported on King Cricket at that time…
I had arranged to play tennis at 14:00. I got to Lord’s in time to see most of the first session of play. I decided to sit in the relatively sheltered central part of the pavilion forecourt, where I watched, read and chatted a little with one or two other hardy folk. The stewards reckoned I wouldn’t last long out there but actually it wasn’t too bad in the morning and the new soft padding on the pavilion benches…
…standards are falling…
…made the whole experience less painful than expected.
Young Josh de Caires bowling
After a very close game of tennis, which my adversary won by dint of the odd point here and there, I took my time over my ablutions and then grabbed a soft drink followed by a light bite and coffee – initially in the pavilion bar but subsequently, as the sun was shining, I took my coffee in the new Compton Stand – a vantage point from which I took the headline picture (also replicated above).
But even in the sunshine, it was bitterly cold by that afternoon period, so I decided to return to the pavilion.
By the time I got to the pavilion, Josh de Caires had taken a wicket. This was to be my burden all afternoon; I didn’t actually get to see a single wicket – I was either changing or on the move every time Middlesex took a wicket. One of the friendly pavilion stewards even asked me to keep moving around, as my moves seemed to coincide with Middlesex’s success so comprensively.
Anyway…
…I decided to focus on 19-year-old Josh de Caires’s bowling.
I watched for a while from one of my favourite vantage points, the writing room. If you ever wondered what it looks like from behind the sight screen, wonder no more – the above picture gives you a pretty good impression of it…indeed much like an impressionistic art work.
I had brought plenty of warm clobber with me and I decided to don the lot of it. After all, as Alfred Wainwright famously said:
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”
Thus I braved the middle tier balcony, as evidenced by the following pictures…
…for about three overs, before I decided that jumper, thick jacket, scarf, hat and gloves were insufficient for me as the sun was going down on a seriously chilly April day.
I congratulated the handful of hardy folk who remained on the balcony, admitting to them that I was a wimp. One agreed. One consoled me by letting me know that I was far from the first to have tried and failed to brave the afternoon chill. One pointed out that I hadn’t lowered the ear-flaps on my hat, which might have made all the difference.
I watched the remainder of the day from the impressionistic comfort of the writing room. Naturally Middlesex took a wicket while I was ambling down one flight of stairs from balcony to room.
I had a very good day. I read, I chatted, I played tennis and best of all I watched some live cricket again.
This piece of amateur research was triggered, towards the end of 2021, by a casual enquiry by Carl Snitcher, a leading light in the Dedanists & Real Champions world, while we were on our way to play a match at Hampton Court Palace.
Carl was wondering whether the asserted date of 1740 for the first real tennis champion was accurate. Some had suggested it was not. I was the only amateur tennis historian Carl had to hand at that moment.
The answer to the exam question: “Did Clergé become the first tennis champion in precisely the year 1740?”, is a reasonably straightforward one; I shall answer it briefly in the next section of this piece.
But I realised, on engaging in this small piece of research, that, far more interesting than the numerical, “when?” question, is the more human query, “who on earth was this initial tennis champion Clergé?”
Other great players of this time (1740- 1753) were Clergé, the elder Farolais, La Fosse, Barcellon (the father), and Barnéon. Clergé was the most remarkable…
Paumiers qui acquirent, il y a trente ou quarante ans, une certaine réputation de force, furent les sieurs Clergé, Farolais pere, La Fosse, Barcelon pere & Barneon ; — le sieur Clergé étoit le plus vanté…”
…except in the matter of dates, where Manevieux is saying “these past thirty or forty years” rather than stating specific dates. Manevieux no doubt spent several years writing his amateur treatise.
As an early music lover, I am at home with the use of “circa” for dates derived from estimates based on best available evidence. I find the term “circa 1740” suitably precise yet hedged for the starting date of Clergé’s pre-eminence.
Who Was This Manévieux Fella?
Before we explore the story of Monsieur Clergé, I’d like to delve a little into the author, Manévieux , upon whose 1783 writings our knowledge of the early tennis champions is based.
He is almost certainly otherwise (or more completely) known as Louis-Claude Bruyset de Manévieux, who published a couple of other works, in particular a eulogy to his great uncle,Jean André Soubry (1703-1774), Treasurer of France in Lyon.
One of my bugbears is that we have no picture of Clergé, nor of Manévieux for that matter, but there is a contemporaneous portrait of Soubry, which will have to do in the “eye candy” department for the time being:
Portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, presumed to be Jean André Soubry, c1729
In the 1783 tennis treatise, Monsieur Manévieux describes himself as an amateur. Whether he means amateur tennis player, writer or historian is unclear. Sounds like my kind of guy in any case.
Manévieux dedicates the treatise to Le Comte D’Artois, who went on to become Charles X after the Bourbon Restoration. As a youngster, Charles, Count of Artois was famous for his drinking, gambling and womanising (presumably he wasted the other 10% of his time), the fashionable rumour of the time was that Charles was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette. He famously won a bet with Marie-Antoinette that he could get his architect, François-Joseph Bélanger, to design and build a party palace within three months. The result, at enormous expense, was the 1777 Château de Bagatelle.
Charles, Count of Artois, painting attributed “after Antoine Callet”, c1775
Charles, Count of Artois was unusually keen on tennis for a French royal of his era. Thierry Bernard-Tambour (good name for a tennis historian, Tambour) in his article on 18th century royal paumiers, registers, from royal archives that that…
Janvier-Jacques [Charrier] became the King’s paumier in 1763, also [paumier to the] Count of Artois
and
[ball making by] Etienne Edmond [Quillard] in 1765 for the Dauphin and the Count of Artois
…which means that Artois did play tennis from his infancy. The Manévieux dedication suggests that Charles retained an interest in the game into adulthood. Shneerson (pp76-77) provides some fascinating insights into Charles’s extravagant behaviours and spending around the game. D’Artois apparently had a hissy-fit when spectators applauded his opponent in a public court. After that, he only wanted to play on private courts. Between 1780 and 1786 he had his architect, Belanger, build him a court on the Boulevard du Temple – as much for drinking, gambling and womanising as for watching/playing tennis if the designs are anything to go by. That was probably the last pre-revolution court built in France.
Charles spent several years in England during his exile from France, during which time he is known to have played regularly at the James Street (Haymarket) court, spectators presumably having been warned not to cheer the future King of France’s opponents.
But let us now return to Monsieur Clergé himself.
Wikipedia (Unusually Not) To The Rescue
My usual starting point for research of this kind is Wikipedia, but on this occasion, at the time of writing (December 2021), Wikipedia was having a bit of a shocker in the matter of our first named tennis champion, Monsieur Clergé.
Parenthetically, it is amusing to note that Louis de Rouvroy,The Duke of Saint-Simon founded his own fame and reputation as a memoirist on the back of his annotations of Dangeau’s memoires, despite stating that Dangeau’s writing was:
of an insipidity to make you sick.
Still, the period of the Dangeau memoires; 1684-1720, covered the last 30+ years of The Sun King, Louis XIV’s reign and the early years of the Louis XV era.
Here is an example from the autumn of 1685:
Sunday 4 November 1685, in Fontainebleau. – The King went to shoot; My lord [Louis the Grand Dauphin] did not go out all day; he made the good jeu de paume players play, and Jourdain played better than little Breton or little Saumur had ever played, as people say at that time.
I am not the first tennis historian to trawl those 19 volumes for nuggets of information about tennis, nor will I be the last. It is mostly pedestrian stuff, but I discern and summarise the following:
tennis was on the whole falling from favour in royal circles during that period;
more or less only in the autumn, when the royals were at Fontainebleau and Versailles for the hunting season, does tennis feature at all in their lives;
younger members of the royal family would “have a go” – Louis the Grand Dauphin was still having an occasional hit in the earlier period of those diaries. For example, on 3 December 1686, he played on the three-day old new court at Versailles – the Grand Dauphin continued to play regularly there throughout the winter of 1686/87, but the novelty of playing there soon wore off for him;
there was more enthusiasm for watching professional players play than for having a hit themselves – the royals tended to watch if the weather was too poor for hunting and/or if they were entertaining visiting dignitaries, such as exiled English royals;
one of the Jourdain brothers was the pre-eminent player in the mid 1680s at least;
in October 1687 the professionals at Fontainebleau petitioned The Sun King for a licence to exhibit their skills in Paris; this he granted:
Thursday 9 October 1687, in Fontainebleau. – The King saw the good players of jeu de paume play, who asked that they be allowed to take money to see them play in Paris; it would earn them money, and apparently the king will allow them.
Sunday 26 October 1687, in Fontainebleau. – The king saw the good players of jeu de paume playing, and granted them the privilege they asked for; they will play twice a week in Paris, and will be displayed like the actors. They are five: the two Jourdains, le Pape, Clergé et Servo.
I believe the above mention of Clergé The Elder to be the only one by Dangeau himself. There is a further mention in the autumn of 1690 which comes from a Saint-Simon footnote, the detail presumably extracted from Mercure:
Thursday 12 October 1690, in Fontainebleau. – The bad weather made it difficult for people to go hunting. – The king led the exiled royals [James II & Mary of Modena] of England to the tennis court, where the great players played (1).
(1) “The weather was so bad in the afternoon that we could not go chasing the deer. So we only went to the game of jeu de paume, where a game between the Jourdain brothers and le Page, Clerget [sic] and Cerveaux against them, gave a lot of pleasure.” (Mercure of October, p. 297)
The great journalistic tradition of mis-spelling names goes back at least to the 17th century
Eagle-eyed lovers of tennis might have noticed that the account suggests that the exhibition match might have been three-a-side, or possibly three-against-two. Accounts from the 17th and 18th century, such as they are, suggest that such matches were quite common at that time – possibly even the norm for exhibition matches.
What Do We Know About The Initial Tennis Champion, Clergé The Younger?
The first thing to say is that there must have been an elder and younger Clergé, despite some histories suggesting that the Clergé referred to by Dangeau in 1687 and the Clergé referred to by Manévieux as being pre-eminent for some years from c1740 might have been one and the same person.
Even those of us who marvelled at the skills displayed at Lord’s, until recently, by nonagenarians Robin Simpson and the late Major Jan Barnes, would admit that the giddy heights of skill described by Manévieux are probably only at their peak for a decade or two or (at a push) three.
possibly a son, or grandson, of a player of the same name, mentioned above [by Dangeau]
…while in Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson is more resolute:
probably the grandson of the Clergé who played in front of Louis XIV.
I agree. The tennis business tended to be a family business, in those days to an even greater extent than it is today. Assuming our c1740 champion Clergé was the grandson of the Louis XIV petitioning and performing Clergé, it is probable that the father was also “in the business”.
In truth, we know almost nothing about the early life of the younger Clergé.
The Master Paumiers who acquired, over the past thirty or forty years, a certain strong reputation, were Messrs Clergé, Farolais (the father), La Fosse, Barcelon (the father) & Barneon. Mr Clergé was the most extolled by the strength of his first stroke, which he executed perfectly. He was the man who played the doubles game best, taking only the shots he had to, according to the rules, bolstering & warning his second, strong or weak, to take the ball. Very different from other players, who tend to make their second useless, by hogging the whole game.
When Clergé had taken the serve [hazard end], he advanced to the last [winning] gallery, appearing to defend the galleries with volleys from boasts, cross-court forces and shots off the tambour, warning his second to play the others. On the service side, he would take his place in the line of four tiles [around chase one-and-two] near the [dedans] post, where he volleyed forehand or backhand the forces or boasts off the main wall. He preferred to allow the ball to land a chase than to move from this position & let his second play all the other shots.
Nobody, in a word, was nor will be held in higher regard, not only for the strength of his game, but also for the strength of his character – Mr Clergé was a totally honest paumier. There was no deceit to his game nor did he succumb to the commercial interests that sooner or later tend to prejudice the professional player; he never played for money.
It really does sound as though he was a great bloke, Clergé, as well as a great player.
We think we know just a little more about his later life.
Between those two notable/notarised events, we find our hero assisting Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé in putting the finishing touches on his jeu de paume court at Chantilly, in 1756/1757.
It was Clergé who put the finishing touches on that Chantilly jeu de paume and who also acted as paumier to Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé for some while after that:
It is to Henri-René Clergé du Gillon, master paumier, that we entrust the regulatory finish of the room, to namely “the black painting of the Jeu de Paume three separate times”. Finally, we equip the room with nets and we buy different “utensils” needed for the game for nearly 1,500 pounds.
By that time, Guillaume Barcellon had been appointed paumier to King Louis XV, in 1753. Modern historians suggest that Clergé’s supremacy as a player had probably waned by then and that Barcellon was the champion player for a dozen or so years.
We also know, based on an undated mention in Manévieux, that Antoine-Henri Masson at one time (probably after 1765, once his supremacy had been established) challenged and defeated Clergé and Charrier, having given them half-fifteen in handicap.
La Taille et La Taille the younger, Bunelle, Clergé, Farolet, Masson, Charrier and Barcellon
But, when Manévieux lists paumiers and their courts at the end of his 1783 treatise, the name Clergé is absent. Possibly he had retired, possibly he had died between 1775 and 1783.
There might now be enough evidence gathered in one place (I’m pretty sure this article is more comprehensive than anything previously published about Clergé) to enable a keen historian to dig deeper and uncover more.
Picture This: Henri-René Clergé du Gillon, aka “Clergé The Younger”
I mentioned earlier that it seems such a shame that we have no portrait of the first champion of tennis, the first sport to establish a continuous world championship.
We have images of Barcellon and Masson, who followed soon after Clergé The Younger, but none of our hero. Perhaps he eschewed pictorial publicity as well as pay for play.
So I decided to commission a fine artist – the only amateur fine artist I had to hand at that moment – to create an artist’s impression of what Clergé The Younger might have looked like.
“Nobody was nor will be held in higher regard, not only for the strength of his game, but also for the strength of his character ”
There you have it – Clergé The Younger – he looks and sounds like such a fine chap.
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to the many encouraging and helpful people whose comments and ideas have shaped and are shaping my scribblings on tennis history. In particular thanks to Thierry Bernard-Tambour for additions and corrections (currently in process).
At the beginning of November, life seemed to be almost getting back to normal. Lots of real tennis in convivial circumstances for a start,
Thursday 4 November 2021 – MCC Real Tennis Skills Night
For my sins, I have inherited, from John (“Johnny”) Whiting, the role of “match manager” for the popular skills nights at Lord’s. A few years ago, on hearing John and the professionals discussing the amount of organising the event needs on the night, I made the schoolboy error of offering to help next time. John saw the offer of help as an opportunity to step down; frankly, Johnny had done it for so many years, who can blame him?
Fortunately for me, Johnny had left comprehensive instructions and spreadsheets rendering the event almost fool-proof, as long as there are a couple of pros who know what they are doing to make the event run smoothly on the court, which, of course, it did.
Alternatively, if anything ever goes awry with the MCC site link, a scrape of the report can be found here.
Naturally, skills night is as much an exercise in conviviality as it is an exercise in tennis court skills.
However, the assembled throng did have to listen to me waffling on about prizes and the like:
Thanks again to Giles Stogdon for this photo
A Week Of Tennis & Dining Out 6 to 12 November 2021
Quite a week. Janie and I went to Simon Jacobs place for dinner on 6th, where he cooked a delicious soup followed by chicken & mushroom pie. Lots of chat about music and that sort of thing. No photos on this occasion but there are photos from our previous visit, before lockdown 2.0:
I played a fair bit of tennis that week, not least a ridiculous 24 hours during which I played an hour of real tennis singles on the Tuesday evening, two hours of modern tennis on the Wednesday morning (part singles, part doubles), then a match, representing MCC against Middlesex University on the Wednesday, which ended up being another two-and-a-half hours of doubles. No wonder I served a couple of double-faults at the end of my second rubber on the Wednesday evening. Again, no photos from the match this time, but here’s a report with pictures and videos from the most recent equivalent home fixture – a couple of years ago:
On Thursday 11th, I went to the office for the first time (other than for a team meeting) in more than 18 months. Then I met up with Johnboy – initially in “Ye [sic] Old Mitre” (it really should read “þe Old Mitre”, you know) and then on to Chettinad Restaurant (my choice), as I thought a high-quality Indian meal would be a good way for us to “get back on the bike” of dining out. The food was very good.
It had been a really long while since John and I had met up for a simple restaurant meal – our last few gatherings had either been at homes, the four of us or the four of us at homes. This Yauatcha meal might have been the previous one:
Then on the Friday I was evicted from this year’s MCC singles tournament for feeble-handicappers in the Round of 16. I don’t think I’ll try tournament singles again. I love playing singles more than doubles on a friendly basis but doubles makes more sense at my level for matches and tournaments.
Tennis At All Sorts Of Levels, Performances Of Various Kinds & A Bit Of A Boost, 15 to 29 November 2021
On 15 November I spent a very jolly afternoon at The Queen’s Club watching real tennis played by real players; The British Open 2021.
I saw Neil Mackenzie take on Matthieu Sarlangue, then Zac Eadle challenge Nick Howell, then finally (and most excitingly, a five setter) Edmund Kay against Darren Long. Here is a link to the draw/results on the T&RA website. If by any chance that link doesn’t work, I have scraped the file to here.
I spent much of the afternoon & evening with my friend/adversary Graham Findlay with whom, by chance, I was due to battle with myself that very Thursday. I was thus able to reciprocate the coffee and cake Graham kindly treated me to at Queen’s with a light bite in The Lord’s Tavern after our battle on the Thursday, before I went home to perform my latest ThreadMash piece – click here or below.
Janie and I had an afternoon of adventure on the Friday, having our Covid vaccinations boosted (we don’t get out much these days – all such matters need noting).
Picture actually from first vax
Most people reported a sore arm and aches. We both got the aches but strangely my arm did not feel at all sore at the vaccination site and I was able to play lawners lefty-righty all weekend.
A quieter week followed. I continued to play some doubles in partnership with Andrew Hinds, in preparation for our R16 match – this we did Tuesday 16th and Monday 22 November.
… star in Little Women at The Park Theatre on the Thursday, but sadly our performance needed to be cancelled due to cast illness (not Lydia) that day, so we’ll miss the run now.
On Monday 29th, Andrew Hinds (depicted wooden-spoon-wielding, left, in the photo below) and I won a place in the quarter finals of the feeble-handicappers’ doubles tournament.
With thanks to Tony Friend for this photo From skills night
Due to competitor/court availability (or lack thereof) before the seasonal break, that means that we shall still be in the 2021/22 tournament into the New Year – the equivalent of getting to week two of a grand slam lawn tennis tournament – but in a very slightly less-elevated way.
A few weeks ago, I played an especially close and exciting real tennis tournament match at Lord’s, emerging victorious – in straight sets but by the narrowest of margins in each set.
Exhausted but happy, I stopped at Porchester Waitrose on my way home, to pick up bread and other comestibles for my supper.
But I discovered the in-house bakery covered in tarpaulin, with signs reading, “No Entry” and “Due to a leak in our ceiling we have had to close down this area…”
Opposite the bakery were mostly bare shelves, where normally the bread would be. But one shelf was fully stocked, bulging with packs of brioche loaves and brioche rolls.
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, I said to myself. In the circumstances; who wouldn’t?
The English expression. “let them eat cake” is, in fact, a loose translation of the phrase, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”.
I don’t like the loose, English translation. Brioche is, in my opinion, a rich form of bread. Classified as viennoiserie, brioche is almost pastry, but not a piece of cake.
Bread, pastry, biscuit, cake; these distinctions might seem trivial or inconsequential. Yet, in the early 1990s case of McVities v HMRC, the very VAT status of Jaffa Cakes hinged on whether that particular delicacy should be defined as a cake (zero-rated) or a chocolate-covered biscuit (standard rated). The tribunal ruled that the product had nine characteristics, some cake, some biscuit, but on balance determined it to be a cake.
Two hundred years earlier, Marie Antoinette’s place in history was determined, formally, at the hands of the French Revolutionary Tribunal. Unfortunately for Marie Antoinette, her informal reputation is entwined with the phrase “let them eat cake” or “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, despite the fact that there is no evidence that she ever used the phrase and a great deal of evidence that she couldn’t possibly have originated it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the phrase in his Confessions, attributing the anecdote to an unnamed “great princess”. Rousseau wrote Confessions between 1765 and 1769, when Marie Antoinette was still a nipper and before she had ever been to France.
Rousseau might even have made up the anecdote. Another possibility is that the anecdote originated with Marie Theresa of Spain, about 100 years earlier.
Marie Theresa was consort to Louis XIV, The Sun King, during an extremely lavish era – when Versailles was transformed from a hunting lodge into the opulent palace we now associate with Versailles.
Marie Theresa died in 1683, before the Versailles tennis court was completed, but her son, Louis, The Grand Dauphin, played an inaugural game on that court in 1686.
Roll the clock forward a hundred years again, to 1789. The Versailles tennis court played a crucial role in the French Revolution. In June 1789, the Third Estate or National Assembly of commoners, found themselves locked out of the chamber by order of the King.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, suggested that they congregate instead in the nearby Royal Tennis Court of Versailles, where they swore a collective oath, similar in style to the US Declaration of Independence, “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established”. 576 of the 577 members of the assembly took the oath.
The Tennis Court Oath was a seminal moment in the progress of the French Revolution. Ironically, though, the tennis court oath neither benefitted the reputation of tennis nor that of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
Jeu de paume, as the French call real tennis, virtually died out in France in the aftermath of the French revolution. In tennis’s 17th and 18th century heyday, there were hundreds of courts in Paris alone.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a doctor who opposed capital punishment. He advocated the use of a quick, painless blade mechanism, but only in preference to the more torturous methods of execution commonly used. It was much to the doctor’s chagrin that the deadly mechanism acquired his name. There is an urban myth that Dr Guillotin was himself thus decapitated during the reign of terror. It is true that A Dr Guillotin met that fate, but not Dr Joseph-Ignance Guillotin, who was imprisoned, but survived the reign of terror by the skin of his teeth.
I mused on all these matters that evening, a few weeks ago, while munching my brioche and reflecting on winning a tennis match by the skin of my teeth.
The oath I had heard on the tennis court that evening was the single expletive, “shit”, used by my opponent so many times, he got a warning from the marker (umpire). I wondered how many of the 576 subscribers to the original Tennis Court Oath were reduced to such lesser, expletive oaths, soon after their revolutionary gesture.
Changing the social order, like brioche, is not a piece a cake.
A real treat of a day out for real tennis – such a long time since I have been able to do one of these.
Selected to represent The Dedanists against The Hamsters (a select subset of the Royal Tennis Court membership), I again, as last time, enjoyed the company of Carl Snitcher on the journey from Central London to Hampton Court Palace.
Carl with ball in hand
Here and below is my write up of the fixture from two years ago:
Again, this time, James McDermott was my partner, but, on this occasion, we were down to play the first rubber rather than the last of the match. That left me available for much of the day to do some match marking – I actually marked two of the other rubbers in the 2021 match.
In between those playing and marking activities, there was plenty of time for convivial chat and eating a wonderful lunch.
Of course the pandemic isn’t over, but this sort of day marks a further return to something closer to normalcy. It was a splendid day and I thoroughly enjoyed the match and the company.
Oliver Wise called me out of the blue in March and asked me if I would be prepared to do something similar to the Gresham Society talk as part of a series of on-line events that his club, Boodle’s, has been holding during lockdown.
How could I possibly say no to Oliver? He probably doesn’t even remember it, but he gave me a great deal of encouragement when I started playing real tennis at Lord’s. I’m sure he does that with everyone; his view is that the handicapping system allows newbies and duffers to play with advanced players, so all should be encouraged to participate.
Anyway, I said yes to the Boodle’s on-line talk/discussion and we agreed a storyboard or semi-script with pictures and video clips that went roughly like this.
Playing The Odds: The Storyboard
Oliver: Can you briefly explain how real tennis differs from its offshoot, lawn tennis?
I’d like to answer that question in two respects – in terms of the history of the games and the nature of the games themselves.
Lawn tennis emerged in the mid to late 19th century, following the invention of vulcanised rubber. So when Boodle’s was founded, in 1762, the term “tennis” would refer to the game we now call “real tennis”. Indeed, the use of the single word “tennis” to refer normally to lawn tennis rather than real tennis dates from the early 20th century.
Real tennis is a rich and complex game played, mostly in indoor courts with gallery openings, penthouse roofs, targets and hazards, as well as the central feature of a net, shared between both real and lawn tennis. In France, real tennis is called “jeu de paume”, or “palm game”, which provides some insight into the game’s emergence by the 12th century in France…
…at least that’s when the earliest records emerge. The game was played with the hand. This stunning late 13th century picture from the Cambrai Book Of Hours shows a monk instructing his pupils in the game.
I love this picture; one of the oldest if not the oldest image of real tennis action. The master is unquestionably wearing gloves; the pupils also, perhaps.
You might have noticed that the pupils are learning to play with their left hands – both hands will have been used until the notion of a racket emerged, at which point one-handed forehand and backhand play will also have evolved. The switch from hand play to racket play probably started around the advent of the Renaissance and was all-but complete by the end of the Tudor period.
Just a few comments about the game at this stage; we’ll explore more as we go along in our discussion. The racket and balls for real tennis differ significantly from those used for lawn tennis. The racket is significantly smaller and irregularly shaped; some say the shape is an enlarged palm, others simply that the asymmetric shape assists shots that need to be taken near to the side walls and the nicks. The racket is highly strung; in my case much like its user. The balls look superficially like modern tennis balls, but they are hard items made from a cork core (in medieval times human hair was bound as the core), webbing and a covering of wool felt, hand-made, only approximately regular in shape.
The court is even more asymmetric than the implements. Serving is only done from one end – the bottom end as depicted. The receiving end is known as the hazard end.
The ball is hit back and forth across the net and must be sent back over the net on the volley or after the first bounce. But only a few designated areas of the court are places where a shot might win the point outright, although there is a better opportunity for the server than for the receiver to hit an outright winning shot. Only one gallery opening on each side is a winning target; all of the other gallery openings lead to chases, as does all of the floor at the service end and half the floor at the hazard end. In real tennis, the second bounce does not normally determine that the point has been won, but that a chase has been laid.
[Explain one or two chases using the mouse pointer on the picture]
After one or two chases are laid (depending on the score), the players change ends and the serve therefore switches from one player to the other. The player who has laid each chase then needs to defend their territory – i.e. ensure that their opponent lands a second bounce further away from the rear wall than the chase they laid. The winner of the chase scores the point for that chase.
Apart from the matter of chases, the scoring system for real tennis will be familiar to lawn tennis people. 15-30-40-game. Normally six games to win a set.
Here is a CCTV clip from Lord’s, in which the service has just changed ends after the setting of two chases. Mr Snitcher, now serving, is trying to defend the five yard line for the first chase and the three yard line for the second chase. The score is 30-30 and I am leading by 5 games to four. Oliver Wise will pick up the commentary:
Oliver: (after explaining the two chases that determine the set). Would you please tell us a little about some of the colourful characters from the history of the game.
Ah, that’s one of my favourite topics.
There is documentary evidence of tennis as a royal pursuit from the early 14th century. Tennis’s first “star”, for all the wrong reasons, was Louis X of France, known as Louis The Quarrelsome.
Philip IV, Louis’s dad, bought the Tour de Nesle in 1308 and had a covered tennis court built within. While Philip was clearly keen on the game, there is no evidence that he played. It is said that the fashion for covered courts emanated from young Louis’s love of the game. That love also, perhaps, proved to be Louis’s undoing. Just a couple of years after succeeding to the French throne, Louis X died, age 26, apparently after playing an especially rigorous game of tennis at Vincennes, in 1316. Louis X thus became the earliest named tennis player in history.
That event also initiated a long and rather sordid tradition of monarchs or heirs to the throne dying in unusual circumstances with tennis standing accused of being central to their demise. We could have an entire talk on real tennis horrible histories if you fancy…no, thought not. But one such demise is relevant to Boodle’s and its links with tennis from Boodle’s earliest days. Frederick Prince of Wales died in 1751, purportedly from a lung injury sustained on the real tennis court some three years prior to his death. Horace Walpole said so and this is the received wisdom handed down from those Georgian times. Presumably there was a well-recorded incident in which the Prince was injured by “wearing one in the chest”. We’ve all occasionally sustained such bruises. Modern historians and doctors think it unlikely that a chest injury sustained three years earlier would cause such a death. More likely it was a pulmonary embolism. But the hard ball sports of cricket and tennis, which Frederick had loved and patronised, took a reputational hit in England for the rest of the Georgian era, reviving as the Victorian era evolved.
So, at the time that Boodle’s was formed in 1762, there was really only one public court of note in the whole of London; The James Street Court near the Haymarket; a short, pleasant walk away from Boodle’s. It was sometimes referred to as The King’s Court as Frederick Prince of Wales was said to frequent the place. He had a reputation for enjoying sport and gambling. At that time, public tennis courts were in part for gaming or gambling as well as for playing the sport.
It is unsurprising that many of the gentlemen who founded Boodle’s, with their love of gaming and sports, were tennis enthusiasts.
Charles James Fox was an early noteworthy…some might say notorious, member of Boodle’s. He was leader of the House of Commons and Foreign Secretary multiple times in the Georgian era. Fox was an inveterate gambler, womaniser and lover of things and fashions foreign. The Conservative historian, Lord Lexden, has compared Fox’s manner with that of the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Fox was also, according to the Georgian equivalent of the tabloids, a keen tennis player.
Here is a quote from the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Wednesday, July 2, 1777:
“Charles Fox is become conspicuous at the tennis court. When he leaves off play, being generally in a violent perspiration, he wraps himself up in a loose fur coat, and in this garb, is conveyed to his lodgings.”
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington was a more conservative character than Fox, both politically and behaviourally. Wellington was another notable member of Boodle’s and another Boodle’s member whose tennis exploits found their way into the papers. Wellington built a tennis court at Stratfield Saye. He even played a few sets there with Prince Albert when the Royal couple visited in 1845. The Illustrated London News reported that:
“we noticed this recreative adjunct to the mansion of Stratfield Saye when chronicling the Royal visit last week, when his Royal Highness Prince Albert enjoyed this olden game”.
But The History of Stratfield Saye does not record the Duke of Wellington as the star tennis player of that court. That history reports that Wellington’s…
“butler, Phillips, became one of the finest players in England of his day, successively beating all the best French players with whom he contended”.
Some years earlier, in 1820, when Robert Lukin turned the James Street Court into a tennis club, Lukin wrote to Wellington inviting him to become a member of the new Club, enclosing a list of the members who had already subscribed; Wellington graciously accepted the invitation. It would be fascinating to compare that 1820 founding members list from The James Street Court Club with the 1820 members list of Boodle’s, to see how much the membership overlapped. I’d guess quite a bit.
Oliver: One of the things I have always loved about the game is the use of a handicapping or odds system. Does the use of handicapping have ancient roots?
Unquestionably so, Oliver. We have written records of the use of handicapping as far back as the Renaissance.
There is no coincidence in the fact that the terms odds and handicap both originate from gambling. From the very dawn of civilisation there is evidence that people have liked to gamble on games of skill as well as on games of chance. We have certain, documented evidence from the middle ages onwards of noblemen and gentlemen gambling on tennis.
The fellow depicted, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, is one of my favourite colourful characters from the history of tennis. Here is a story about him, from an 1801 English book about sports and pastimes:
“During the reign of Charles V . palm play , which may properly enough be denominated hand – tennis , was exceedingly fashionable in France, being played by the nobility for large sums of money ; and when they had lost all that they had about them , they would sometimes pledge a part of their wearing apparel rather than give up the pursuit of the game . The duke of Burgundy , according to an old historian , having lost sixty franks at palm play with the duke of Bourbon , Messire William de Lyon , and Messire Guy de la Trimouille , and not having money enough to pay them , gave his girdle as a pledge for the remainder ; and shortly afterwards he left the same girdle with the comte D ‘ Eu for eighty franks , which he also lost at tennis.”
As an aside, Philip the Bold was not only well-known to be an enthusiast of jeu de paume (tennis), he was also a great enthusiast for the Pinot Noir grape; prohibiting the cultivation of the Gamay grape in Burgundy (1395), thus initiating that region’s fine wine tradition. Philip the Bold also initiated a musical chapel which founded the great 15th Century Burgundian school of music. Tennis, wine & music – Philip was my kinda guy…and might I hazard to suggest, also a Boodle’s kinda guy?
Coincidentally, the earliest written reference to handicapping I can find is from a 1506 account of a “visit” to Henry VII at Windsor by Philip The Handsome, a subsequent Duke of Burgundy and also King of Castile. I say “visit” in inverted commas because it seems that the Castilian Royal couple were shipwrecked off the coast of England and Henry VII decided that they should remain in England until they signed a trade deal between Castile and England. There might be a Brexit technique lesson in this sorry tale, but let’s focus on the tennis aspect. I shall read the contemporary account, which is charming:
“The Sattordaye the 7 of ffebruary…Bothe Kyngs wente to the Tennys plays and in the upper gallery theare was Layd ij Cushenes of Clothe of gold for the ij Kyngs…wheare played my Lord marques [of Dorset] the Lord Howard and two other knights togethers, and after the Kyngs of Casteele had scene them play a whylle , he made partys wth the Lord marques and then played the Kyngs of Casteele with the Lord Marques of Dorset the Kyngs Lookynge one them, but the Kyngs of Castelle played wth the Rackets and gave the Lord Marques xv. and after that he had pled his pleasure and arrayed himself agene it was almost nights, and so bothe Kyngs Retorned agayne to their Lodgingss.”
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that eye-witness account. That early 16th century period was a period of transition between hand-play and racket-play at tennis. Most scholars agree that the racket came into use around 1500. So the handicap described in the account has the King of Castille playing with a racket and the Marquess of Dorset playing with his hand, while receiving fifteen (i.e. starting each game 15-0 up). Personally, I’d prefer the racket, but perhaps the Marquess was a very handy player.
The evidence suggests that handicapping served a twin purpose: – (a) – to simplifying the wagers – i.e. evening up the contest, such that the choice of winner at the start of the match should be perceived as an even bet – (b) facilitating good sport – the honour and joy of doing battle in a close competitive contest.
But by the mid to late 18th century, there had emerged a third purpose or style of handicapping which I’d like to explore with you; a form of handicapping linked with showmanship demonstrated by tennis professionals.
In The Annals of Tennis by Julian Marshall, the antics of the French star player of the mid 18th century, Monsieur Masson, are described in some detail. Here is a particularly vivid extract:
“Against the best of the amateurs [Masson] also played matches of the most difficult combinations. One of these was, that he should deliver the service seated in a barrel, in which he remained after serving, and from which he leapt continually in order to return each stroke of the amateur. On the hazard-side, again, he awaited the service seated by the grille in his barrel, which he had to leave precipitately to play his first stroke, and in which he was compelled by the terms of the match to take refuge, before the amateur returned the ball again.”
My wife, Janie, refuses to believe this story in the absence of CCTV footage. We also know that Monsieur Masson visited England in 1767, just a few years after Boodle’s was founded. He took on and soundly thrashed the English champion of the time, Mr Tompkyns at Whitehall Hall on April 10th.
In fact tennis was enjoying somewhat of a heyday in 18th century France until the revolution came along. There were hundreds of courts in Paris and hundreds more around France. A famous moment in the French Revolution, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (or “The Tennis Court Oath”), a gathering in a tennis court near the Palace of Versailles is depicted in this 1791 Jacques-Louis David painting. The revolution led to a dramatic decline in French tennis in the ensuing decades, only partially abated by the Bourbon Restoration that followed Napoleon’s defeats.
Which brings us neatly back to the period, about 200 years ago, when Robert Lukin turned the James Street Court into a tennis club and also produced the first English language book on tennis, c1822, A Treatise On Tennis By A Member Of The Club. In this book, the author, believed to be Lukin himself, sets out over several pages all of the different handicaps in use at the time and provides some commentary on their use and their relative betting values.
The basic unit of handicapping was the bisque, whose history is documented as early as the Renaissance and which was used in several games and sports. A player who receives a bisque per set can claim one stroke (point) ahead of that point being played, at any stage during a set. Any number of bisques can be given, but the use of other point handicaps, such as giving fifteen every game or half-fifteen (i.e. fifteen every other game) means that the number of bisques per set would normally have been limited to one or two.
There are two distinct types of odds or handicaps for tennis; one being the points-based odds I have just described, the other being known as “cramped odds”, which restrict the better player in some way. Lukin’s book goes into those at some length. They mostly involve preventing the better player from making use of particular features of the court. Most of these handicaps are now obsolete or only used occasionally in fun and friendly games. “Barring The Openings”, for example, renders all of the openings, including the winning targets such as the grille, the dedans and the winning gallery, out of bounds for the better player. One interesting handicap was named “Round Service”, which required the better players serve to touch both the side and the rear penthouse to be a legitimate serve, which normally renders the serve easy to return.
To demonstrate the difference between a round service and a decent serve, I have found some very rare hand-held video of me serving to a certain Mr Wise. In the first clip, I accidentally deploy a round service, which Oliver despatches into the dedans gallery to win the point without a moment’s hesitation.
In the second clip, I produce a serve of decent length and cunning, which lead to a better outcome for my pair. Discerning viewers will notice that I was able to send my second shot to hit the tambour, which is a jutting out bit of wall on the hazard side of the court. The handicap “ban the tambour” remains in use even in the modern game for the more extreme handicaps.
In fact this might be a good moment to show some wonderful footage you pointed out to me, from the 2016 Boomerang Doubles Tournament, when the final was contested between a very uneven couple of pairs, but went right down to the wire. Would you kindly do the honours and talk us through the video sequence, Oliver?
Oliver introduced/explained and then let the clip speak for itself with the Aussie commentary. Clip runs for 2’25” from the start point of 43’35”
Oliver then explained the following highlights reel, of Rob Fahey playing Camden Riviere, which has 6’00” of sound footage but we showed just the first two minutes or so, to give people a flavour of real tennis rests at their very best]
Questions From The Audience
Questions included the following topics:
further examples of extreme handicapping, such as the exploits of Jacques-Edmond Barre, who walked from Paris to Versailles before thrashing a challenger on an extreme points handicap;
The source references for those pieces are as follows:
Tennis: A Cultural History, Heiner Gillmeister, A&C Black, 1998 or Tennis A Cultural History (Second edition), Heiner Gillmeister, Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2017
Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson, Ronaldson Publications, 2015
Willis Faber Book Of Tennis & Rackets, Lord Aberdare, Hutchinson, 1980
The video clips shown at the end of the webinar are embedded after the transcript below
Introduction
In 1561, Thomas Gresham, while residing in Antwerp, provided “bridging finance” to a young travelling spendthrift, Thomas Cecil; William Cecil’s son, who had been living beyond his means in Paris. A few months later, Thomas Cecil and his travelling tutor, Thomas Windebank, took sanctuary under Thomas Gresham’s roof in Antwerp. It seems likely that one of young Cecil’s dalliances in Paris had required the dynamic duo to move on from Paris in a hurry.
Th0mas Cecil, once he was a few years older and wiser
“I see, in the end,”said the disapproving father in a letter to Windebank on 4 November 1561,“my sone shall come home lyke a spendyng sott, mete to kepe a tenniss court.”
This reference, to be found in J.W. Burgon’s monumental 1839 two-volume Life & Times Of Sir Thomas Gresham, seems to be the only mention of tennis to be found in any biography of Thomas Gresham to date.
Facsimile of J.W. Burgon p427 of Volume 1
Tennis does not seem to have been a big thing to Thomas Gresham. But it was a very big thing to the Cecil family and it was a big thing in Tudor times.
So why did William Cecil, who was such a massive tennis fan he even built a tennis court at his house on the Strand, write in such disparaging tones about tennis in this context?
William Cecil with disapproving look
And how on earth did this minor Cecil family intergenerational gripe find its way, some 40 years later, into a subplot of Hamlet?
It is my intention to use this tiny fragment from Thomas Gresham’s life as a MacGuffin, or plot device, to describe tennis and the colourful characters that populated the game around the time of Thomas Gresham.
Medieval & Renaissance Tennis
Humans have played ball games with implements since the very dawn of civilisation. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written some 4000 years ago, uses stick and ball games as a plot device more than once.
But the game we call tennis emerged in medieval times, around the 12th century, probably initially in French monastery courtyards and subsequently in noble courts. Known as Jeu De Paume in France, this walled, galleried courtyard game played with hard balls became known as tennis in England.
Today we call the game “real tennis” to distinguish it from the modern, 19th century game played with vulcanised rubber balls on open courts of grass, clay, etc.
Real tennis is often referred to as a sport of kings. There is documentary evidence of tennis as a royal pursuit from the early 14th century. Tennis’s first “star”, for all the wrong reasons, was Louis X of France, known as Louis The Quarrelsome.
Philip IV, Louis’s dad, bought the Tour de Nesle in 1308 and had a covered tennis court built within. While Philip was clearly keen on the game, there is no evidence that he played. It is said that the fashion for covered courts emanated from young Louis’s love of the game. That love also, perhaps, proved to be Louis’s undoing. Just a couple of years after succeeding to the French throne, Louis X died, age 26, apparently after playing an especially rigorous game of tennis at Vincennes, in 1316. Louis X thus became the earliest named tennis player in history.
Quarrelsome? Moi?
There are three characteristics about Renaissance tennis that might seem alien to lovers of the modern variety of this sport which are vital to understanding what it was about in the time of Thomas Gresham:
it was originally played with the hand (hence the name “Jeu De Paume”) but by around 1500 the use of the racket was emerging, the racket becoming ubiquitous within 100 to 150 years;
the game was a wagering game. If the players were of uneven quality, “odds” or “handicapping” would be deployed, such that the stakes would be an even bet. Odds might be deployed through scoring (the lesser player being given points), through the cramping of the better player through restricting their use of the court (e.g. banning certain galleries or walls) or a mixture of those handicaps. We still use handicapping today in real tennis for all but the top level competitions;;
noble folk and monarchs tended to become very fond of the game for themselves and their own sort…while taking great pains to prohibit lesser folk from playing of tennis or such sports.
During the reign of Charles V . palm play , which may properly enough be denominated hand – tennis , was exceedingly fashionable in France, being played by the nobility for large sums of money ; and when they had lost all that they had about them , they would sometimes pledge a part of their wearing apparel rather than give up the pursuit of the game . The duke of Burgundy , according to an old historian , having lost sixty franks at palm play with the duke of Bourbon , Messire William de Lyon , and Messire Guy de la Trimouille , and not having money enough to pay them , gave his girdle as a pledge for the remainder ; and shortly afterwards he left the same girdle with the comte D ‘ Eu for eighty franks , which he also lost at tennis .
Philip The Bold, Duke of Burgundy – 14th Century loser?
As an aside, Philip the Bold was not only well-known to be an enthusiast of tennis, he was also a great enthusiast for the Pinot Noir grape; prohibiting the cultivation of the Gamay grape in Burgundy (1395), thus perpetuating that region’s fine wine tradition. Philip the Bold also initiated a musical chapel which founded the great Burgundian school of music. Tennis, wine & music – Philip was my kinda guy.
Tennis-loving royals and nobles married for strategic, territorial alliance in those days. I don’t suppose that “spreading tennis across parts of Europe that other games couldn’t reach” was central to that strategy, but such marriages seem to have contributed to the spread of the game…or in some cases possibly the tennis history of the place might have attracted the marriage.
Longue paume, or field tennis, is an outdoor variety of the game, versions of which were played across all tiers of society, which probably adopted the use of implements before jeu de paume. Elements of modern tennis and cricket derive from it. It is still played today, mostly in Picardy. It is probably the variety of the game that Edward III was banning with his infamous 1349 prohibition of sports.
Jeu de paume, the court version, almost certainly became established in Spain and the Low Countries before it became established in England. So long before Thomas Gresham popped up in Antwerp, a famous court had been established there, in Borgerhout.
The Early Tudor Period
Prior to the Tudor period, the limited popularity of tennis in England was restricted to the clergy and guilds of craftsmen in larger towns and cities in the south. The clergy tended to play the game themselves while prohibiting others from doing so; hence we have some written evidence of the game.
Henry VII, tennis enthusiast, painted 29 October 1505, by order of Herman Rinck
But the Tudor monarchs were very keen on the game, so it became a more widespread, noble sport in England from the late 15th century. It is well documented that Henry VII was a player and a fan. He liked to wager on his games and his substantial losses are well documented in royal accounting documents, as are those of his more-famously tennis-keen son, Henry VIII. Naturally those monarchs were also keen on banning the game for all but the right sort.In 1493 Henry VII decreed that, “…no sheriff or mayor or any other officer…suffer any man’s servant to play at the dice or at tennis.”
Henry VIII, who neither said “anyone for tennis?” nor did he write Greensleeves
During Henry VIII’s time, several noble courts were built and several others were planned. At Austin Friars, following the dissolution of the monasteries, Thomas Cromwell planned to build a tennis court in his garden but did not see through his plans. Drapers Hall now stands on that site.
Austin Friars Copperplate c1550
But Thomas Wolsey’s court at Hampton Court Palace did get built. There is still a court on the original site (albeit a Stuart period replacement) to this day. I have had the honour and pleasure to play there.
Dedanists Norman Hyde (left) & Christie Marrian (right) defending Henry VIII (grille)Me, marking a rubber from the Hampton Court dedans, having just (successfully) fought my own
The only other court in Great Britain that remains from that period is the Falkland Palace Court, built between 1539 & 1541 by James VI of Scotland. It is the only jeu quarré court – i.e. an older design of outdoor court, without an interior (dedans) still in use in the world. Janie and I had a delightful game there in 2018.
Believe it or not, I succeeded in hitting the ball through one of those small portholes, known as lunes, more by luck than judgement I assure you, in the course of our match. Some say that such a shot merits just one point, others say that it completes a game and yet others say that it determines the entire match. Needless to say the four of us debated that matter at length in a neighbouring hostelry after the match.
Talking of eye-witness accounts of tennis matches, there is a fascinating report by one of Henry VII of England’s attendants, of a “visit” to Windsor Castle by Philip The Handsome (another Duke of Burgundy, plus also King of Castille) and his Queen: Joanna The Mad of Castille, in early 1506:
Philip The Handsome, Duke of Burgundy, King of Castille
The Sattordaye the 7 of ffebruary…
Bothe Kyngs wente to the Tennys plays and in the upper gallery theare was Layd ij Cushenes of Clothe of gold for the ij Kyngs…
…wheare played my Lord marques [of Dorset] the Lord Howard and two other knights togethers, and after the Kyngs of Casteele had scene them play a whylle , he made partys wth the Lord marques and then played the Kyngs of Casteele with the Lord Marques of Dorset the Kyngs Lookynge one them, but the Kyngs of Castelle played wth the Rackets and gave the Lord Marques xv. and after that he had pled his pleasure and arrayed himself agene it was almost nights, and so bothe Kyngs Retorned agayne to their Lodgingss.”
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that eye-witness account. That early 16th century period was a period of transition between hand-play and racket-play at tennis. Most scholars agree that the racket came into use around 1500. So the handicap described in the account has the King of Castille playing with a racket and the Marquess of Dorset playing with his hand, while receiving fifteen (i.e. starting each game 15-0 up). Personally, I’d prefer the racket, but perhaps the Marquess was a very handy player.
Sadly, the account doesn’t tell us who won the tennis match, but the story doesn’t end brilliantly well for the visiting monarch; who in reality was more a hostage than a guest of Henry VII. Philip signed some helpful treaties and trade deals to help bring his “visit” to an amicable conclusion. Still, within a few months, Philip The Handsome died in Spain; probably poisoned/assassinated there. This made Joanna The Mad even more distraught than usual, apparently.
Joanna The Mad, but possibly Joanna The Gaslit or Joanna The Misconstrued
Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset, who as a youngster had been a ward of Henry VII, was, by 1508, sent to the tower as a suspected conspirator against Henry VII. Only the accession of Henry VIII the following year saved Grey, who had a decent run as a high-ranking courtier after that narrow escape. His grand-daughter, Lady Jane Grey, was not so lucky; famously the “nine day queen”. Coincidentally , one of his other grand-daughters, Mary Grey, pops up as a house guest for Thomas Gresham in 1569, thanks to William Cecil again, perennial supplier of house guests to Thomas Gresham. A politically sensitive and expensive guest, Mary Grey stayed with the Greshams, much to their chagrin, until 1573, by which time Sir William Cecil had become Lord Burghley.
The Late Tudor Period, Cecil & Gresham
William Cecil was a contemporary of Thomas Gresham; the two worked well together on matters of state and commerce from the early 1550s onwards. Cecil became Elizabeth’s Secretary of State in 1558. By 1560 he was ensconced in Cecil House on the Strand on the site that is now the Strand Palace Hotel and The Lyceum Theatre. Cecil House had a tennis court designed by Henry Hawthorne, the Royal Architect. It was by all accounts quite a small court with unequal lengths of penthouse along both side walls; it might have been used for hand tennis rather than racket tennis.
By that time, the prohibition of sports such as tennis had been clarified through several of Henry VIII’s statutes. Noblemen and those with an annual income of £100 or more were permitted to possess a tennis court on their own property.
Henry VIII’s 1541 statute included a system of licencing for public tennis courts and bowling alleys. Mary I abolished such licences in 1555. Elizabeth reintroduced a system of licencing for tennis courts circa 1567.
So when William Cecil vented in 1561 that his son Thomas was “mete to kepe a tenniss court”, he was not talking about the dignified tennis court that graced Cecil House. He was referring to barely reputable or even disreputable places, more or less gambling dens, frequented by “idle and misruled persons”, as the Mary prohibition statute described them.
William Cecil was an intriguing and important character during the second half of the Tudor period. Fortunately for us, he had a tendency to keep everything and to insist on his correspondence being kept, which is why we have such a rich treasure trove of material on his life and those around him, such as Thomas Gresham.
Another fascinating character who entered and stayed in William Cecil’s orbit for many decades was Michelangelo Florio, an Italian pastor who converted to Lutherism and escaped execution in Rome by the skin of his teeth around 1550. William Cecil helped establish Michelangelo Florio in London, where he became pastor to the Italian Reform Church in the City of London and chaplain to Lady Jane Grey. On this occasion, William Cecil himself gave his guest house room which led, rumour has it, to a scandalous affair with one of Cecil’s servants which resulted in Florio’s marriage to the servant and the birth of the more famous Renaissance humanist John Florio.
Soon after John’s birth, Lady Jane Grey became the nine day queen, succeeded by the Catholic Queen Mary, at which point London was not really the place for a firebrand Italian Lutheran pastor and his family.
John Florio
In the early 1570s, John Florio, steeped in a humanist education, returned to England. Around 1578, William Cecil (by then Lord Burleigh), sponsored John to study at Oxford where he excelled and the rest is history. Florio wrote several wonderful works and translated many others, not least Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Florio’s own works include First Frutes & Second Frutes, which are basically primers in the English and Italian languages. Chapter 2 of the Second Frutes book (pp15-29) is a dramatised story of a day going to play tennis with the intention to go on to the theatre afterwards.
There’s a good deal of insight into Tudor tennis in that little drama, which is a fascinating and amusing read. But Shakespeare it isn’t…
…however there are those who believe that John Florio was Shakespeare. I think those people are mistaken, but I do believe that Shakespeare probably met John Florio (through their mutual patron, the Earl of Southampton). Or at the very least Shakespeare will have read several of Florio’s works, not least the Frutes books and the Montaigne translations.
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford
Of course there are a great many “alternative Shakespeare authorship” theories, the most popular of which, Edward de Vere, Earl Of Oxford, was yet another of William Cecil’s long-term house guests; his ward for about 10 years from 1562 and subsequently Cecil’s son-in-law. In the early 1590s Oxford unsuccessfully attempted to marry off his daughter Elisabeth to the Earl of Southampton.
These geezers were all moving in similar circles, but that, to my mind, does not provide credibility to such “alternative authorship” theories about Shakespeare. But what do I know?
What is widely believed and is almost certainly true is that the character of Polonius in Hamlet was based on William Cecil and the character of Laertes, Polonius’s ne’er-do-well son abroad, based on the young Thomas Cecil. Scholars have suggested the Cecil connection for a great many reasons. For our purposes, Act Two Scene One of Hamlet has the sole mention of tennis in Hamlet, in a context that is reminiscent of the sole mention of tennis in Thomas Gresham’s biographies.
A stained glass representation of Polonius
So was Thomas Cecil “mete to kepe a tenniss court” in the end? He was less adept at stately matters than his dad and less adept than his younger brother, Robert, who became the first Earl of Salisbury and built Hatfield House. Robert Cecil didn’t build a tennis court there, but his Victorian descendants built a fine one, a refurbished version of which is still in use there today.
Hatfield House Tennis Court
But still Thomas Cecil had a pretty successful career. He inherited Cecil House, changing its name to Exeter House when he became the first Earl of Exeter, so to that extent he did keep a tennis court.
The Old Rectory, Wimbledon
He also bought, in 1576, The Old Rectory and most of the land that is now Wimbledon Park, where he developed Wimbledon Palace.
Thomas Cecil didn’t develop tennis courts in Wimbledon. But 300 years later, some other fellows did develop tennis courts, of sorts, around there, which was the start of a sustained, global, commercial sporting success. Thomas Gresham would no doubt have approved.
Wimbledon Championship, 1877
Further Reading & References
Ian Harris’s Ogblog Tetralogy On The Origins Of Tennis:
Tennis: A Cultural History, Heiner Gillmeister, A&C Black, 1998 or Tennis A Cultural History (Second edition), Heiner Gillmeister, Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2017
Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson, Ronaldson Publications, 2015
Willis Faber Book Of Tennis & Rackets, Lord Aberdare, Hutchinson, 1980
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