Although the etymology of "fives" is still obscure, players have come to accept that the word means the fingers of the hand acting in unison as in a "bunch of fives". The word was not used before the 17th century, but long before that the game was being played. Richard Mulcaster the 16th century headmaster of Merchant Taylor's School, had this to say: "The little hand ball whether it be of some softer stuffs, and used by the hand alone, or of some harder, and used with rackette .... against a wall alone, to exercise the bodie with both the handes in everie kind of motion." Handball the Irish game, has kept a softer ball, fives has not.
By the 18th and early 19th centuries fives was constantly recorded. Dr Johnson was hazy about the matter - "a kind of play with a bowl" the Dictionary said - but Parson Woodforde played in the churchyard at Babcary - buttresses made for good angles and, in prodigal fashion, betted on the result. Hazlitt wrote ecstatically about Jack Cavanagh's play, and Lord Torrington, that matter-of-fact observer, referred to the fives playing men and boys of Oswestry who "batter the church walls".
There is still a Hand and Racquet public house in Whitcomb Street, Picadilly, near to the site of the Royal Tennis Court, marked with a plaque, in Orange Street. Tennis courts had many uses, and the advertisements of Thomas Higginson, 1742, are particularly revealing. He "kept" tennis courts and at least one fives court. At his Holborn tennis courts there was "Fives-playing in the Tennis-Court, and Billiards at the same place". At his "Fives-court at the bottom of St Martin's Street" it was for "Fives-playing only either with Racquets or Boards, or at Hand-Fives, at 2d, 3d or 4d, a Game". Boards may have been the small wooden bats used for bat fives at schools in the next century.
Boys flocking to the reformed and new public schools as boarders in the late 19th century found fives satisfying. Long before exercise was compulsory there was keen competition for courts. Soon the makeshift arrangements at many schools were replaced by bespoke courts of one shape or another. It was not until interschool matches were started at the end of the century that anyone worried about the disparities between courts and rules.
The 20s and 30s of the last century saw these matters to some extent resolved. The Rugby Fives Association was founded in 1927; by 1931 the rules of the game and the dimensions of a standard court had been agreed. By coincidence the Eton Fives Association published "the first authoritative set of laws" in 1931, more than fifty years after the first set of rules had been produced by Old Etonian, A. C. Ainger. It was therefore in the 1920s and 1930s that competitive play began in earnest.
