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The ancient game of Rackets originated in late eighteenth-century London as a game played in debtor prisons such as the Kidderminster Prison and the Fleet Prison. Prisoners used a hard ball struck against brick or stone walls and improvised wooden bats. The environment required elongated strokes and rapid reactions in confined spaces. Racquet from the game of Rackets, 1803 As the sport gained popularity beyond prisons, taverns, schools and clubs constructed purpose-built cour

Demi-Paume racquets feature a distinct lopsided head with a pronounced downward angle. The stringing follows the trebling technique, where the cross strings are looped 360 degrees around the main strings. The handle is wrapped with leather, and the solid wooden frame reflects the craftsmanship of eighteenth-century makers. Garsault’s Demi-Paume, 1767 The racquet follows the design described by François-Alexandre-Pierre de Garsault  in 1767 . In his treatise Art du paumier-raq

Antique battledore. The Indo-German Legacy Racquet belongs to a tradition of equipment used for early forms of court tennis, a game that enjoyed popularity among European aristocracy from the Renaissance onward. Such racquets were characterized by a rounded wooden head with a loosely strung gut mesh, typical of early court tennis equipment used in aristocratic circles during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Indo-German Legacy Racquet, 1648 Evidence of this distinctive racquet

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