THE sports desk was all a-flutter on Monday. "They're meeting at the Tontine," they whispered in awe. "Tonight. Murray and Quinn. He's flown in from Ireland specially. The deal's back on..."

Exciting though the fate of Sunderland Football Club is, it was the word "tontine" that interested the most.

The Cleveland Tontine is a plush restaurant beside the A19 near Northallerton - a secluded place to meet to discuss how many millions of pounds you are prepared to invest to follow your football dream.

There are other, unrelated, Tontine hotels in Greenock, Peebles and Ironbridge in Shropshire; there are Tontine streets in Manchester, Stoke, Swansea, Blackburn and Folkestone; there are Tontine roads in Chesterfield and Wigan; Birmingham library was created by a tontine.

A tontine is a 17th century investment scheme invented by a Neapolitan banker called Lorenzo de Tonti. He had left his homeland and gained political influence in the France of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

After the 30 Years War, France was virtually bankrupt. Its people were heavily taxed - the salt tax, which obliged everyone over the age of eight to buy an amount of salt a week, was widely reviled - but it had a huge army to support.

New means of raising revenue were required. In 1653, Tonti suggested a tontine. He described it as "a goldmine for the king... a treasure hidden away in the realm".

Subscribers - or tontiners - paid money into a fund - a tontine - which went to the government. The tontiners were paid an annual dividend. When a tontiner died, his stake was shared out amongst the survivors. The last investor alive scooped the whole pot. When he died, all of the tontine went to the king.

Although Louis liked the idea, the French Parliament realised this was really a longevity lottery. It was a great gamble, an early pyramid scheme: if you thought you'd live longer than the other tontiners, you'd have a flutter.

In 1668, Louis imprisoned Tonti in the Bastille. He emerged eight years later, a broken man without influence, and died in 1684. Ironically, nine years later, Louis was so desperate for money to fight the Nine Years War, he introduced the first tontine.

Tontines became popular in France, Britain and the United States. They weren't always state-sponsored scams; often they were used to finance altruistic projects, like Birmingham library of 1798.

In 1804, the worthies of North Yorkshire and Cleveland wanted a staging post between Thirsk, Guisborough and Yarm: a place where passengers could rest and horses could be changed. They set up a tontine to raise £2,500. Lords Crathorne and Dundas were among the investors, and the Cleveland Tontine was opened in late 1804.

Nowadays, in Britain and the US, the tontine is illegal. It placed too much temptation in the way of the tontiners. If you stand to increase your personal wealth through the death of others, if you stand to scoop the pot by being the last man alive, it must be hard to resist killing everyone else.

A tontine is a regular device in murder mystery literature, from Robert Louis Stephenson to M*A*S*H and even The Simpsons.

The tontine is also credited with influencing our modern thinking. Tontiners regarded it as a pension - it was a gamble: if they won, they were wealthy; if they lost, they weren't around to care who scooped the tontine.

And so today, rather than save enough for our old age, we're still happy to gamble with our pension. Rather than invest in something sensible like a tontine, we put it all on the Stock Market where the brokers are the only ones who make a killing.