.
• Most historians credit the first origins of the game to 11th or 12th century French monks, who began playing a crude handball against their monastery walls or over a rope strung across a courtyard. As the game became more popular, courtyard playing areas began to be modified into indoor courts, where the ball was still played off the walls. The oldest Real Tennis court is located at Hampton Court Palace, originally built by King Henry VIII at about 1530. After bare hands were found too uncomfortable, players began using a glove, then a glove with webbing between the fingers or a solid paddle, followed by webbing attached to a handle- a racquet. Rubber balls were still centuries away, so the ball was a wad of hair, wool, or cork wrapped in string and cloth or leather. Then in later years, hand-stitched in felt to look something like a modern baseball. Some accounts report as many as 1800 courts in France by the 13th century. It soon spread to England, where both Henry VII and Henry VIII were avid players who promoted the building of more courts. The game's popularity was almost to zero during the 1700s, but in 1850, Charles Goodyear invented a new way to process rubber. Soon after during the 1850s, players began to experiment with using the bouncier rubber balls on outdoors on grass. An outdoor game was completely different from an indoor game played off walls, so several new sets of rules were formulated. In 1874 the first courts appeared in the United States. By the following year, equipment sets had been sold for use in Russia, India, Canada, and China. In 1877, the All England Club held the first Wimbledon tournament, and its tournament committee came up with a rectangular court and a set of rules that are followed. Lawn Tennis is played on courts which can be made of grass, clay or even plastic. Basically, the first main idea is to keep the ball in play - by getting the ball over the net in to court.
