Category: Tennis (real and modern)

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. 

One of the most fascinating passages I found is the following paragraph which I quote here verbatim from “The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period”, Joseph Strutt, 1801. 

“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 14^th century loser of a Duke.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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)

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. 

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.

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.

Evidence Of Expenditure On Tennis & Music

Returning to the search for evidence of Philip’s tennis playing, one of the on-line sources – is the 1888 book “Itineraries of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, Dukes of Burgundy, 1363-1419, according to the expense accounts of their hotel. Collected and put in order by Ernest Petit”.  On p475, we find the so-called girdle accounts, recorded as May 1368.  My translation:

“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.

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 14^th 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 14^th 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.

I performed this one as a short instrumental. There is a beautiful recording of this as a harp instrumental performed by Andrew Lawrence King – still available for purchase/download here.

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 14^th and early 15^th 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.

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. 

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.

The agrarian crisis that led to the decree and followed from it is well-documented,  including a fascinating 1982 academic piece The “Disloyal” Grape: The Agrarian Crisis of Late Fourteenth-Century Burgundy by Rosalind Kent Berlow, and a more folksy article summarising the topic by Rupert Millar on thedrinksbusiness.com is available on-line here.  Further, as Ben O’Donnell points out in The Exile of Burgundy on winespectator.com, Philip did not go so far as to implement his decree in Beaujolais, which he perhaps saw as a lesser, rural backwater in any case. There the Gamay continued to be planted and wines produced from it, as they are still in Beaujolais.

[ANNOUNCE MINI WINE TASTING BEFORE RETURNING BRIEFLY TO MUSIC – the wine samples were served during the remainder of the session]

Burgundian Music & Tennis Reprise

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).

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.

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, 1998 that:

“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:

• Ancient Arithmetic: The Possible Origins Of The Tennis Scoring System, Part One Of Four Pieces On Tennis History;
• Horrible Histories: The Primordial, Honourable & Ignoble Arts Of Tennis Handicapping, Part Two Of Four Pieces On Tennis History;
• Odds Oddities: 18th & 19th Century Tennis Handicaps & Traditions – Some Stranger Than Others, Part Three Of Four Pieces On Tennis History;
• Scoring Synchronicity: How Real Tennis Scoring Was Adopted For Lawn Tennis Scoring – Then Lawn Tennis Handicapping Methods Wormed Their Way Into Real Tennis, Part Four Of Four Pieces On Tennis History.

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 Annals Of Tennis, Julian Marshall, “The Field” Office, 1878

Colloquia Familiaria by Desiderius Erasmus, c1518

Antonio Scaino, 1555, Trattato del Giuoco della Palla (Treatise of the Ball Game)

 A Treatise on Tennis By a Member of the Tennis Club, now attributed to Robert Lukin, 1822

De Corrupti Sermonis Emendatione, Mathurin Cordier (Corderius), 1536

The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England from the Earliest Period, Joseph Strutt, 1801

Music At the Court of Burgundy 1364-1419, Craig Wright, Institute of Medieval Music, 1979.

“Dijon, Burgundy,” in Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418, Volume 1. Ed. David Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016: 102-124

The Chronicles of Froissart, Selected, Edited & Translated by Geoffrey Brereton, Penguin Classics, 1968

The “Disloyal” Grape: The Agrarian Crisis of Late Fourteenth-Century Burgundy, Rosalind Kent Berlow, 1982

‘A very bad and disloyal variety’: The banning of Gamay, Rupert Millar, thedrinksbusiness.com, July 2016.

The Exile of Burgundy, Ben O’Donnell, winespectator.com, November 2011.

Histoire et statistique de la vigne et des grands vins de la Côte d’Or, By Jean Lavalle, 1855.

Jean-Michel Mehl, Les Jeux Au Royaume de France, 1998