ABSTRACT
Tennis emerged out of the medieval soup of European folk ball games that also produced varieties of football and bat-and-ball games such as cricket. Europe’s commoners indulged in these ball games during folk festivals, holidays (in the traditional sense of holy days) and other popular gatherings. Serving as diversions from the grinding toils of everyday life, ball sports were especially popular among peasant boys and young men. The upper classes of the feudal system, the nobility and the clergy, served as patrons for these folk games in order to bolster the cement that bound the medieval social foundation (Carter 1992; Gillmeister 1997).
