The serve could be delivered from anywhere in the server's backcourt.
The receiver's backcourt is divided by a "pass line," parallel to the side wall, into a "receiving court" and a "pass court," the latter being a small area adjacent to the grille. The receiver can volley the ball back (return it before it hits the floor). If the receiver allows it to bounce on the floor, then to be a good serve, it must bounce for the first time in the receiving court. If its first contact with the floor is in the pass court, that counts as a "pass" and is ignored.
A serve which is neither "good" nor a "pass" counts as a "fault," and two successive service faults costs the server a point. However, the server doesn't lose the serve unless a chase is played off.
* * *
The side penthouse, with a sloped roof, is the sina qua non of royal tennis. But even if the Higgins Hotel hadn't had a courtyard with sloped roofs, William and his Barbie Consortium friends could have improvised something. In 1494, a resident of Antwerp obtained permission from his neighbor to clamp a forty foot long slanting roof to the wall dividing their properties.
Moreover, would-be tennis players could make do with an even shorter penthouse. There are illustrations from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which show French children playing a ball-and-racket game. There is no net, but they are clearly bouncing the ball off a board mounted obliquely on a wall. The board is mounted perhaps five feet above the ground, and is about three feet long. (Gillmeister Figs. 29, 33). There are also illustrations which show a small free-standing penthouse for outdoor use (Fig. 34).
The roof of last resort, available even to country folk, was a makeshift mobile roof: a washboard resting, at one end, on an upside-down tub, or a three-legged corn sieve with a block under one of the legs.
Rallies (Rests)
Once the serve is returned, the rules are more relaxed as to where the ball can bounce and still be in play. The ball still has to cross the net before it hits the floor, but it can bounce off a penthouse roof, or a wall. It can bounce once anywhere on the floor, on the other player's side, too.
The Divine Chase
Besides the wall and roof play, the most distinctive feature of royal tennis was the chase. Consider Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth (II, ii), in which Henry responds to an insulting gift of a tun of tennis balls:
When we have match't our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set,
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.
Tell him he has made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturb'd with chases.
In lawn tennis, if the ball bounces twice on the floor, the player who allowed it to happen loses the point. That isn't necessarily the case in royal tennis. A second bounce, in the right place, creates a chase. The point is held in abeyance, to be resolved later.
The serving player keeps the service until there is one chase in dispute, and a player is a point short of winning, or until a second chase is created. The chase, or chases, are then played out.
The medieval rule was that the chase was marked where the ball, after bouncing twice, finally came to rest. When Henry VIII of England and Charles V played against the Prince of Orange and the Marquis of Brandenburg in 1522, there was a third player, a lesser nobleman, on each side, the "stopper." His role was to stop the run of the ball, somewhat like a goalkeeper in soccer, if that would be advantageous. (The term "chase" may have evolved because the stopper had to literally chase the ball down.)
By 1539, the Spanish and French had adopted the "modern" rule, under which the chase is marked at the location of the second bounce. At first, there were often quarrels, sometimes physical, between the players as to whether the chase was properly marked, and this led eventually to the use of impartial professional markers, one on each side.
On the server's side, a second bounce anywhere on the court creates a chase. On the receiver's side, the second bounce must be in the forecourt.
A chase is also created if the ball goes into any opening, other than the "winning gallery," on the side wall. There is a chase line corresponding to each gallery opening.
The player who let the ball bounce a second time on his side of the court, or let it go through the side gallery on his side, will have to defend that chase. The other player, the one who laid down the chase, attacks it.
If that chase were on the service side, the original receiver, who laid down the chase, comes over to the service side to attack it, and the original server goes over to the hazard side to defend it.
The attacker now serves. Attacking the chase means he will try to either hit a winning opening, or achieve a second bounce which is better—closer to the wall—than the chase was. That doesn't have to be on the serve itself, of course.
If the service chase is a tough one—close to the wall—the attacker will probably aim for the dedans. Perhaps bouncing the ball off a wall, to trick the defender. And the defender will try to volley the shot back.
There can also be a chase on the hazard side, laid down by the server. The server still crosses over to the hazard side, to defend it. But hazard chases, by definition, are relatively far from the grille wall, and so are easier for the attacker to beat.
As Hobbes can tell you, it is important to get distance on every shot, or the other player will just let the ball bounce a second time, and then laugh at you as he wins the subsequent chase.
Strategy
From an offensive standpoint, you have two basic choices: aim for a winning opening, or just try to keep the opponent off-balance. He might swing and miss or hit the ball into the net, thus giving you the point by default. He might misjudge where the ball will bounce for the second time, allowing you to defend a chase on favorable terms.
If you aim for a winning opening, it doesn't have to be a direct shot; you could try for a ricochet off a wall.
You have three basic choices every time the ball comes over the net — volley it right back, let it bounce once and then return it, or let it bounce a second time and make a chase which you can attack at the proper time. Volleying was considered safest, because the floors and walls were uneven, and hence the bounces were unpredictable.
The Players
In the indoor game, there were usually one to three players on each side. Longue paume was definitely played with teams of four to six, and I would guess that the only practical limit was the one set by the size of the field.
Women players were rare and therefore noteworthy. The Chris Evert of the fifteenth century was French. De Garsault, writing in 1767, says that "in 1427 there arrived in Paris a young woman of Haynaut, aged 28 years, named Margot; she played this game excellently, surpassing the most skillful. She had chosen a gaming-house in the Rue Grenier S. Lazare, a house named 'The Little Temple,' where she held her own against the strongest players. People went to see her, drawn by curiosity as to something extremely rare."
Scaino's 1555 treatise says, "in Udine, the chief town of the Friuli, and elsewhere, charming maidens take simple pleasure [in tennis] in our times, and in Ferrara, . . . there were formerly damsels wonderfully expert and clever at the cord game with the racket." (p. 24). In 1598, women were playing tennis in Blois, France. (Abeldare, 38)
The Pros
In France, the tennis professionals were organized into a guild as early as 1457. Originally, they shared their guild with the brush-makers, but they split off in the sixteenth century. (Aberdare, 36)
The Collegium Illustre in Tubingen was a "Knights' Academy," a finishing school for courtiers. Its ballmeister taught dancing as well as tennis. In the mid-seventeenth century, he was paid 162 florins cash, plus rye, grain and wine. That meant that he was paid better than the fencing master, the riding master, and the history and law professors. Tennis lessons were free to the students, but others could be charged a tennis tuition of one and a half reichstaler a month. (Gillmieister, 155)
The Cost of Play
&nb
sp; In France in 1767, you paid 12 sous an hour to practice, and to play an actual set, 25 sous an hour on a dedans court and 20 on a quarre court. (Garsault, 27).
However, the biggest expenses were lost wagers. Each player put his money under the net (so the loser couldn't renege). The winner collected the pot, and the loser also paid for all lost balls.
The players could agree to a bigger payoff for certain kinds of victories. The single victory was in which you just outscore the opponent. The double victory, one in which you shut him out. And the triple victory, the most glorious of all, was where you lose the first three points and then score five points in a row to win.
Players differed in ability, and there was a complex system of handicapping to allow for this. For example, a player awarded a bisque could, in each set, claim one stroke which had been lost.
There were more peculiar handicaps than this: the stronger player could be forbidden to touch the walls, or limited to one half of the court, or constrained to send the ball over a higher cord, or to play with a battoir rather than a proper racket. (De Garsault, 31).
Conclusion
Scaino assured readers that tennis had been played by Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. All this proves is that the celebrity endorsement, real or feigned, is nothing new under the sun.
His marketing pitch continued by urging that the game inculcated skills of generalship, such as the "arranging of armies, planning of a battle, the capture . . . of a strong place, advance and retreat in due time and order, the making of strategic moves not thought of by the enemy." (25)
At that time, it apparently wasn't enough to say that the game was fun to play. But clearly it was. In the early seventeenth century, royal tennis was an extraordinarily popular game. The French were said to be "born with a racquet in their hand," and the British, the Italians, and the Germans were not far behind them.
It remains to be seen whether, in post-Ring of Fire Grantville, royal tennis eclipses its up-time rival, lawn tennis.
Bibliography
Aberdare, The Willis Faber Book of Tennis and Rackets (1980).
Squires, The Other Racquet Sports, Chap. 2 (1978).
Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (1998).
Scaino, Treatise on the Game of the Ball (Venice 1555)(1984 transl.)
De Garsault, The Art of the Tennis-Racket-Maker and of Tennis (Paris, 1767)(1938 Leftwich transl.)
Danzig, The Winning Gallery: Court Tennis Matches and Memories (1985).
Laws of Real Tennis (1999 Revision), www.real-tennis.com/laws/main.html
Willis, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, etc., III:569 (1886)
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Haven Pell, Ivan Robertson and Temple Grassi for inviting me to Prince's Court, a "real tennis" court in McLean, Virginia.
THE END
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Eric Flint, Grantville Gazette-Volume XV
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