When was the modern game of tennis introduced to England?

1874

[This message was edited by FizzyChip on 10-08-03 at 07:10 AM.]

Thank you!

Again, this, like the other tennis question, is not correctly answered. The year given above, 1874, was the year of the formation of a tennis club. Surely, the game was well-known before people decided to form a club devoted to it. Below from Wikipedia -

Its establishment as the modern sport can be dated to two separate roots. In 1856, Alex Ryden, a solicitor, and his friend Joao Batista Pereira, a Portuguese merchant, who both lived in Birmingham, England played a game they named "pelota", after a Spanish ball game. The game was played on a lawn in Edgbaston. In 1872 both men moved to Leamington Spa, and with two doctors from the Warneford Hospital, played pelota on the lawn behind the Manor House Hotel (now residential apartments). Pereira joined with Dr. Frederick Haynes and Dr. A. Wellesley Tomkins to found the first lawn tennis club in the world, and played the game on nearby lawns. In 1874 they formed the Leamington Tennis Club, setting out the original rules of the game. The Courier of 23 July 1884 recorded one of the first tennis tournaments, held in the grounds of Shrubland Hall (demolished 1948).

In December 1873, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield devised a similar game for the amusement of his guests at a garden party on his estate at Nantclwyd, Wales. He based the game on the older sport of indoor tennis or real tennis ("royal tennis"), which had been invented in 12th century France and was played by French aristocrats down to the time of the French Revolution.

According to most tennis historians, modern tennis terminology also derives from this period, as Wingfield borrowed both the name and much of the French vocabulary of royal tennis and applied them to his new game:

* Tennis comes from the French tenez, the imperative form of the verb tenir, to hold: This was a cry used by the player serving in royal tennis, meaning "I am about to serve!" (rather like the cry "Fore!" in golf).
* Racquet comes from raquette, which derives from the Arabic rakhat, meaning the palm of the hand.
* Deuce comes from à deux le jeu, meaning "to both is the game" (that is, the two players have equal scores).
* Love may come from l'œuf, the egg, a reference to the egg-shaped zero symbol; however, since "un œuf" is more commonly used, the etymology remains in question.
* The convention of numbering scores "15", "30" and "40" comes from quinze, trente and quarante, which to French ears makes a euphonious sequence, or from the quarters of a clock (15, 30, 45) with 45 simplified to 40.

Seeing the commercial potential of the game, Wingfield patented it in 1874, but never succeeded in enforcing his patent. Tennis spread rapidly among the leisured classes in Britain and the United States. It was first played in the U.S. at the home of Mary Ewing Outerbridge on Staten Island, New York in 1874.

quote:

Originally posted by DorianGreyed:
In 1856, Alex Ryden, a solicitor, and his friend Joao Batista Pereira, a Portuguese merchant, who both lived in Birmingham, England played a game they named "pelota", after a Spanish ball game. The game was played on a lawn in Edgbaston.

In December 1873, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield devised a similar game for the amusement of his guests at a garden party on his estate at Nantclwyd, Wales. He based the game on the older sport of indoor tennis or real tennis ("royal tennis"), which had been invented in 12th century France and was played by French aristocrats down to the time of the French Revolution.

According to most tennis historians, modern tennis terminology also derives from this period, as Wingfield borrowed both the name and much of the French vocabulary of royal tennis and applied them to his new game:

* Love may come from l'œuf, the egg, a reference to the egg-shaped zero symbol; however, since "un œuf" is more commonly used, the etymology remains in question.

Both Royal ('Real') tennis and pelota make use of a back wall. Real tennis does have a net halfway across the court and certainly bears a close resemblance to lawn tennis. Pelota resembles fives or squash, but the ball is hurled back with a basket device fitted to the wrist.(Is it not played in Vegas?) Both games are still played in Europe. Pelota is a Basque game still popular in that region and in the South of France:in Antibes we have a local team and league games in nearby Cannes and Nice. There are old real tennis courts at Hampton Court Palace but more recent ones at various clubs and universities in England. Wingfield would certainly have known real tennis well. It's as though he tried to transfer the game to outdoors, to be played on a lawn, and simply dispensed with the need for a wall and the 'hazards' in it.His original game was played on a court shaped like an hour-glass: where he got that idea from, who knows?

Love could be love meaning 'nothing' as in 'neither love nor money', though the OED says that love to mean 'nothing', 'nil', 'nought' in games dates, in print, from the mid-C18.If we look for an egg to mean nothing we should look to cricket. A batsman who scores no runs and is dismissed is 'out for a duck', having 'made a duck' or 'scored a duck', a reference to a duck's egg being shaped like the zero in writing the score.

"His original game was played on a court shaped like an hour-glass: where he got that idea from, who knows?"

He tried to patent the game, and had to make changes to make his version different enough to warrant issuing a patent. He also made a few other modifications.
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"Love could be love meaning 'nothing' as in 'neither love nor money',"

I disagree. The phrase does not mean that neither love nor money have no value (nothing). The phrase means "regardless of what is offered,..." Using "Neither love nor money" to indicate that it would be impossible to cause or prevent an action seems to be indicating that everything of value in the world could not sway the speaker from his intended action or inaction.

Your reference to cricket being the influential cause of egg signifying nothing makes sense, but only in the UK. Surely France didn't adopt the concept of an egg meaning zero from cricket. Both the name "tennis" and the term "duece" show that the terminology of the game is derived from French. It is far easier to accept "love" coming from l'œuf meaning egg that it is to think that the "love" in tennis is derived from the cricket term for "nothing" and somehow it got turned into "love."

Where did the idea come from that real tennis as played and scored in France used 'love' or 'l'oeuf' or some word sounding like those ? It is certainly curious that the OED can find no earlier use of the term 'love' in games before the mid-C18. People in England were playing real tennis long before then and not just at Hampton Court. Did nobody use the term in print when describing the game? It would be strange if none of the books In English on sports and pastimes, of which many were published long before the mid C18(one of Caxton's bestsellers was on chess ),did not describe the game and the scoring.If not, there ought to be at least one reference somewhere in all the other literature and correspondence from the C15 to 1750 or so.

It has been suggested that 'love' in tennis came from Dutch lof meaning 'honour' and arrived with one of the influxes of migrants to England from the Low Countries. 'Offe lof spelen' means 'to play for the honour' i.e. without hope of reward, for free, for nothing.The OED doesn't help on that particular but puts all the senses of both noun and verb as coming from the same root, the same one that the Frisians, the Saxons, the Germans et alii had for their local word.

The expression in British English ' not for love nor money' connotes doing something neither free, without reward or payment nor for payment and is generally said in despair or in anger (whether mock or genuine): 'Are you going to do that job if offered?' may receive the indignant reply 'No, not for love nor money' or, equally colloquial, 'not at any price nor none'. It does not equate to 'not for the love of the job, or the boss offering, nor for money'

One thing is plain: if someone is an 'amateur', a noun derived from the Latin for lover, they do something for nothing and it may be that this connection of doing something for honour or free explains how the word 'love' could come to stand for 'nought'.


Nobody is suggesting that 'duck' in cricket somehow became, or is directly connected with, the origin of 'love' in tennis I meant that, whilst 'l'oeuf' may be a doubtful origin for 'love' in tennis there is, as it happens, one proven example of an egg being the origin of a term meaning 'no score', 'nil', 'nothing', 'nought' 'zero' in a game. And we say mysteriously of someone 'he's broken his duck', too. It means that they've made a start e.g a salesman making his first sale of the day has 'broken his duck'