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The Racquet of the Majesty, dated 1583, belongs to the Golden age of Real Tennis, the sport of European kings. The game had evolved from the French Jeu de Paume and became a symbol of royal prestige. Courts were built in palaces such as Hampton Court under King Henry VIII, where the game was played indoors with refined skill and ceremony. Across France, by the end of the sixteenth century, hundreds of such courts stood in use, serving nobles and courtiers alike. In Normandy,

Antonio Scaino, an Italian priest and theologian from Salò, completed Trattato del giuoco della palla  in 1555. The work was printed in Venice by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari and his brothers, one of the leading publishing houses of the Renaissance. It is recognized as the earliest known treatise devoted entirely to the study of ball games in Europe. Scaino described the social context of play at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua and divided existing games into three main types

The game we now know as tennis took nearly a thousand years to evolve into its modern form. While some evidence suggests that early forms of ball games were played in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, most historians trace its direct origins to French monasteries around the year 1000 AD. Here, monks played jeu de paume, the “game of the palm,” striking a wooden ball with the bare hand or with a simple leather glove across a rope stretched through the cloister courtyard. The ga