The Medieval and Tudor rural housewife, rich or poor had only limited access to the hundred and one items required by the household that they could not provide for themselves from their estate or the land they cultivated, either round their cottage or from their field strips. The local weekly markets were fine for basic needs and the travelling pedlar or the "chap-man" would carry thread and needles, coarse lace, pins, trinkets, ribbons and kerchiefs etc but for anything else and certainly luxury items such as spices, sugar, fine cloth, pepper or wine there was either a visit to the appropriate merchant in the nearest big town or one waited till the Annual Fair came round and what occasions these were.
All over the country the roads the Romans built and greenways used by the Anglo-Saxons, the long barrows and other landmarks gave locations for bartering places that developed into the great trading fairs of the Middle Ages. The fairs had come into being alongside ancient trackways like the great Stourbridge fair at Cambridge, held beside the Ickneild Way, which ran from Avebury across the Berkshire downs and Chiltern Hills, crossed the Thames at Streatly went along the heights of East Anglia and down into Norfolk. Strete Fair was established by a busy ford on the River Test on the Roman Road from Salisbury and Winchester into Somerset.
They lasted at least a week, quite often up to a fortnight, Scarborough Fair lasted 45 days and no one was exempt from the excitement and anticipation. At all these big fairs held on moorland, downland or large open spaces, a small town grew, with temporary booths, shelters, standings and tents, maybe even a bower or two for people to lodge, overnight sleeping on tanned hides. Others would be selling from beside their carts or from their boats if the fair was by a navigable river. For days before hand, roads leading to the site would be thronged with herds of cattle or other livestock, itinerant traders carts, merchants pack trains, pedlars and chap men, and along with the respectable and responsible would come the reverse, the thieves, con-men, cut purses, pickpockets and whores also hoping to do a roaring trade among the farmers and others who had come to sell their sheep or produce and who might have money in their pocket when the sale was done.
Food and ale were in great supply, as were gamesters and fortune tellers, musicians, magicians, sellers of herbal cures for all ailments, love potions, and fairings. Some of the serious traders had come a long way, at Stourbridge for instance merchants came from Iceland, Arabia, Italy and Eastern Europe bringing sophisticated silks, lustrous satins, damasks, gold, jewels, glass, carpets, amber and silver and the French and Spanish brought fine wine. Bowmen from all over the country came to take part in competitions, knightly contests such as jousting would be held. Strolling players, tumblers, and jugglers would entertain the crowds once the traders had shut their booths and there would be cock fighting and bull baiting for those who felt the need for further excitement.
All the big fairs started as one-commodity fairs, their beginnings were not in general trading but in the one over-riding produce of the area. Sheep fairs were held in Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire and many other of England' counties both East and North. There were cloth fairs in, amongst other places, East Anglia, Devon, Huntingdon, and Yorkshire. There were horse fairs at Smithfield, Brampton in
Oxfordshire, Windsor, Appleby in Cumberland, Lee Gap and Brigg Fair in Yorkshire, and Lavenham in Suffolk. Nottingham had its Goose Fair as did Tavistock in Devon and in the north Ovingham and Brough Hill, from all over England geese were driven in great flocks to London for the Michaelmas Fairs.
Cheese and corn, hops, hides, cattle, onions, cherries, garlic, pears and herrings all had their special fairs in different locations most usually held between September and November when the harvest had been gathered in and these was time to take stock of the year and plan for the next.
This was also the time of the Mop Fairs; the hiring fairs when servants, dairymaids, shepherds, stockmen, farm labourers or boys stood around the square or lined the street each carrying the emblem of their trade. These fairs were countrywide, anyone wishing to change his or her employer would wait to be approached and if satisfied with wages and conditions
would accept the situation by taking a proferred shilling which constituted a bond between
employer and employee lasting a year till the next Mop Fair and could not be easily set aside.
It could be rather a degrading and saddening experience especially for the elderly labourer
coming to the end of his working life, for without a job he was likely to be in dire straits, there was no social security in those days.
There were many well known fairs nationwide but one of the most scandalous and notorious of all the big fairs was St. Bartholomews in London. It started as a cloth fair held in the churchyard of that name, also dealing in cattle, cheeses and horses but it was definitely not for the genteel, being bawdy and vulgar with a very carnival atmosphere. In 1564-5 when the Thames iced over it transferred to the river and it was said that Queen Elizabeth took a turn around the booths and stalls and watched the ox roasting, but it was over a century later in 1683-4 when a prodigious frost gripped London from the beginning of December till February that the Frost Fair was truly born. A coach and horses was driven on to test the ice and when it held, the fair began. An entire street of booths was built spanning the Thames from Temple to Southwark selling cloth, plate, earthenware, everything one could think of as
well as meat, drink and tobacco. A whole ox was roasted, there were menageries and bear-baiting, cock fights, coaches plying up and down, horse races, skating, puppet shows, even an enterprising printer with his press where people could have their names printed and the day and the year marked. It was said he successfully made five pounds a day with this as well as what he got by selling ballads and pamphlets.
Even Charles II, always partial to a little revelry, was reputed to have attended the fair and taken a royal party to the printers booth to have their names printed. Although they were called Fairs all these big meetings were really markets, based on trading they had lasted for hundreds of years, but began to decline and lose some of their original function when better roads allowed more mobility, taking commodities like cheese and butter to new and distant markets.
The canals too played their part but it was the growth of the railway network that finally spelled their demise. Some managed to survive in a much watered down form, but they became more of a fun fair than the great buying and selling occasions that had been the high light of the rural year.
