paumier: the game of the palm behind our name

every name is a small story, and ours begins with a hand. paumier, said poh-mee-ay, comes from paume, the french word for the palm, and from jeu de paume, the game of the palm, which was played in france for centuries before anyone called it tennis. here’s what the game was, who the paumiers were, and why a glove sits right at the start of the story.

what does paumier mean?

a paumier was someone who ran a court for jeu de paume, and a paumier-raquetier made the rackets: littré defines the paumier raquettier as the craftsman who makes rackets for the game¹. the word is built the way french names a trade, paume plus -ier, the same way a gantier is a glove maker².

what is jeu de paume?

the ancestor of tennis, a ball game played across a net or cord, which english speakers now call real tennis³. as the name says, it began with the palm: players struck the ball with the hand⁴.

did jeu de paume players wear gloves?

yes, and the glove came before the racket. french wikipedia’s history of the game notes that wearing a leather glove to protect the hand that strikes the ball became general at the end of the thirteenth century⁴. after the glove came the battoir, a wooden bat, and the first mention of a racket dates from 1505⁴. by the sixteenth century, as the english history of real tennis puts it, the glove had become a racquet³.

who were the paumiers?

the people who made the game possible, keeping the courts and making the rackets. thirteen paumiers are already recorded in paris in 1292⁵. they became a recognised trade in the sixteenth century: the english account dates a constitution for the master paumiers, with apprentices, associates and masters, to charles ix in 1571³, while french sources date their corporation to 1610⁵⁴.

where else does jeu de paume show up in history?

in two places you may know. on 20 june 1789, the deputies of the third estate, locked out of their hall at versailles, gathered on an indoor tennis court nearby and swore not to separate until france had a constitution, the moment known as the tennis court oath⁶. and in paris, the jeu de paume in the tuileries garden was built as a court and opened in 1862 under napoleon iii; it later showed art, housed the impressionists from 1947 to 1986, and is now a centre for photography and the moving image⁷.

what does paume mean in glove making?

the palm piece. in french, the empaumure is the part of a glove that covers the palm of the hand⁸, so the palm has always been glove makers’ vocabulary too.

why a game of the palm for a glove label?

because the story of jeu de paume runs from a bare hand to a leather glove, and a glove is still the thing that sits between your palm and the world. the paumiers kept something alive by hand, one court at a time, and we liked borrowing their name for gloves made the same way, in small runs, for the darkest part of the year.

how do you say paumier?

poh-mee-ay. the au sounds like the o in “go”, and the ending is the french -ier, as in atelier. we write it in lower case, paumier.

what does paumier make?

handmade gloves for women, made in the uk in sheepskin nappa, suede and calf hair, each style size 7 and made in small runs of each colour. you can see them all on the home page, from the 001 fringe gloves to the 006 brown python-print suede gloves, and read the history of gloves in fashion for the rest of the story.