Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. Around the 1520s Erasmus wrote a dialogue between two tennis players where one says “we’ve got 30, we’ve got 45.” Though one 16th-century English text did use 40 for a tennis score, a treatise from a few decades earlier indicated that French students were simply shortening the word “45” to “40” when they described the game (and their teacher corrected that it should be 45), writes Heiner Gillmeister, linguistics scholar at Bonn University in Germany and sports historian, who authored the thoroughly researched Cultural History of Tennis in 1998.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. A 1505 tennis match at Windsor castle gave one player a handicap of 15. Charles d’Orléans composed a ballad around 1439 while imprisoned in an English castle after the battle of Agincourt, in which he compared life with a game of tennis and uses the French word for 45, playing on the number as both his age and the score in a tennis match. A poem written a few years after the 1415 battle of Agincourt counts up the points - 15, 30, 45 - in a tennis game between English King Henry V and the French Dauphin. Records of scoring systems related to today’s date back almost to the beginning of the sport, but in these years the scoring was 15, 30, 45 - the math of which at least makes more sense than the modern system, as each increment was 15 points. Though it’s well known for being beloved among royalty ( Henry VIII was a notable and avid player, and the French revolutionaries’ tennis court oath was made on an indoor court at Versailles), it was also enjoyed among commoners and monks.
Over a course of the next few centuries the game saw periods of incredible popularity, with more than 1,000 tennis courts in Paris in the 16th century. With its strong association with pageant traditions of the French court, Wilson says, tennis was highly stylized from the beginning.
It was initially played with the palm of the hand, and rackets were added by 16th century. The modern game of tennis traces back to a medieval game called jeu de paume, which began in 12th century France. Despite its complexity, the tennis scoring system has been stable since the Victorian period.
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