Fairs, past and present

by Cornelius Walford

Slaves.—In this same Fair of Smithfield, as well before as after the period upon which I am now writing, men and women—i.e., slaves and captives—were sold among the articles of merchandise. And on a part of the site over which the fair extended, after the accession of Henry IV., men and women were burnt alive as heretics. The martyr fires were usually kindled on that spot of ground outside the Priory gates, over which the lighter portion of the fair spread—ground occupied by the holiday makers, and the tumblers, jesters, and dancers by whom they were entertained.

Tolls.—1445. At the close of the thirteenth century there had arisen a dispute between the City of London and the Prior regarding the tolls of this Fair, which was then decided in favour of the Priory. When the matter came up for adjudication again does not seem clear. The fair had continued to grow, and its greatest expansion was in the direction of the City. Indeed, at this or a later period, it extended down the West side of Aldersgate nearly as far as St. Martin’s-le-Grand, or to St. Paul’s itself. On the other side the jurisdiction of the City extended only to Smithfield Bars. In 1399 Henry IV. had granted to the Citizens of London the office of gathering tolls in Smithfield. Probably in consequence of this arrangements were come to between the Priory and the City. Certain is it that forty-six years later, or in 1445 (23rd Henry VI.), four persons were appointed by the Court of Aldermen as keepers of Bartholomew Fair and of the Court of Piepowder. In that Court, therefore, the City then became represented as joint lord of the Fair with the Priory, the lordship of the City being founded on its right over the ground beyond the jurisdiction of the Canons. See 1538 and 1593.

Dissolution of Monasteries.—1538. This is an eventful year in the history of the Fair—the Dissolution of the Monastery was declared. The Fair itself indeed remained—it was the Priory which created it that had melted away.

Reviewing the fair as it had existed during the four centuries passed since its origin—but many of the details of which I have necessarily passed over in the preceding outline—we may adopt the picture thus freely drawn by Mr. Morley: Thus we have in the most ancient times of the Fair a church full of worshippers, among whom were the sick and maimed, praying for health about its altar; a graveyard full of traders, and a place of jesting and edification, where women and men caroused in the midst of the throng; where the minstrel and the story-teller and the tumbler gathered knots about them; where the sheriff caused new laws to be published by loud proclamation in the gathering places of the people; where the young men bowled at nine pins, while the clerks and friars peeped at the young maids; where mounted knights and ladies curvetted and ambled, pedlars loudly magnified their wares, the scholars met for public wrangle, oxen lowed, horses neighed, and sheep bleated among their buyers; where great shouts of laughter answered to the Ho! Ho! of the devil on the stage, above which flags were flying, and below which a band of pipers and guitar beaters added music to the din. That stage also—if ever there was presented on it the story of the Creation—was the first wild-beast show in the fair: for one of the dramatic effects connected with this play, as we read in an ancient stage direction, was to represent the creation of beasts by unloosing and sending among the excited crowd as great a variety of strange animals as could be brought together; and to create the birds by sending up a flight of pigeons. Under foot was mud and filth, but the wall that pent the city in shone sunlit among the trees; a fresh breeze came over the surrounding fields and brooks, whispering among the elms that overhung the moor glittering with pools, or from the Fair’s neighbour, the gallows! Shaven heads looked down on the scene from the adjacent windows of the buildings bordering the Priory enclosure; and the poor people whom the friars cherished in their hospital, made holiday among the rest. The curfew bell of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the religious house to which William the Conqueror had given with its charter the adjacent moorland, and within whose walls there was a sanctuary for loose people, stilled the hum of the crowd at nightfall, and the Fair lay dark under the starlight.

Change produces change; and so other events followed at this period. For instance, the disputations of the scholars in the Mulberry Garden at the time of the Fair ceased after the suppression of the Monastery. John Stow had witnessed these when a lad, and he furnishes the following account of the same, and of some events preceding: “As for the meeting of the schoolmasters on Festival Days at Festival Churches, and the disputing of the scholars logically, &c., whereof I have before spoken, the same was long since discontinued; but the arguing of the schoolboys about the principles of grammar hath been continued even till our time; for I myself, in my youth, have yearly seen, on the eve of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, the scholars of divers Grammar schools repair unto the Churchyard of St. Bartholomew ... where upon a bank boarded about under a tree, some one scholar hath stepped up, and there hath opposed and answered till he were by some better scholar overcome and put down; and then the overcomer taking the place did like as the first. And in the end the best opposers and answerers had rewards, which I observed not but it made good schoolmasters and also good scholars diligently against such times to prepare themselves for the obtaining of this garland. I remember there repaired to these exercises amongst others, the masters and scholars of the free schools of St. Paul’s in London, of St. Peter’s at Westminster, of Thomas Acon’s Hospital, and of St. Anthonie’s Hospital; whereof the last named commonly presented the best scholars and had the prize in those days. This priory of St. Bartholomew being surrendered to Henry the Eighth, those disputations of scholars in that place surceased; and was again, only for a year or twain, revived in the Cloister of Christ’s Hospital, where the best scholars, then still of St. Anthonie’s school, howsoever the same be now fallen both in number and estimation, were rewarded with bows and arrows of silver, given to them by Sir Martin Bower, goldsmith. Nevertheless however, the encouragement failed—the scholars of St. Paul’s meeting with those of St. Anthonie’s would call them Anthonie’s Pigs, and they again would call the others Pigeons of Paul’s because many pigeons were bred in St. Paul’s Church, and St. Anthonie was always figured with a pig following him; and mindful of the former usage, did for a long season disorderly provoke one another in the open street with ‘Salve tu quoque, placet mecum disputare?’—‘Placet.’ And so proceeding from this to questions in grammar, they usually fell from words to blows with their satchels full of books, many times in great heaps, that they troubled the streets and passengers; so that finally they were restrained with the decay of St. Anthonie’s school.”

It was during this reign of Henry VIII. that Grotwell (or Cartwell), himself a common hangman—for there were then many of this occupation, and plenty of employment—was hanged with two others, for robbing a booth at the Fair. They were executed in the wrestling place at Clerkenwell.

I may resume the historical narration. When the King had taken the estates of the greater monasteries, they were put under the management of a Royal Commission, with Sir Richard Rich—under the style of Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations—at its head. The Prior’s house became Lord Rich’s town mansion; and with this mansion in Great St. Bartholomew there had been assigned to him and his for ever, the Close of the said late monastery or priory called Great St. Bartholomew Close, and all the limits and precincts of the said Close; also all those closes, edifices, called the fermery, the dorter, the frater, the cloisters, the gallery, the hall, the kitchen, the buttery, the pantry, the old kitchen, the woodhouse, the garner, and the Prior’s stable, of the said late monastery and priory belonging; and also all that water and the aqueduct and water-course coming from the conduit-head of St. Bartholomew in the manor of Canonbury.

By the same Letters Patent the King farther granted to Sir Richard Rich, knight, his heirs and assigns, “all that Our Fair and Markets, commonly named and called Bartholomew Fair, holden and to be holden every year within the aforesaid Close called Great St. Bartholomew Close, and in West Smithfield aforesaid to continue yearly for three days,” &c. And also all the stallage, piccage, toll, and customs of the same Fair and Markets; and also all our Courts of Piepowders within the same; also the scrutiny of weights and measures and things exposed to sale, and the Assize of bread, wine, and ale, and other victuals. This grant included the tolls of the Cloth Fair, but not, of course, the rights of the City to the tolls for the fair outside St. Bartholomew’s enclosure.

Growth of London.—1590. During the reign of Elizabeth various attempts had been made to stop the growth of London. Proclamations had been issued forbidding under heavy displeasure the building of new houses. But the Elizabethan era was an important one in the development of commerce, as it had been in the fostering of learning; and with the development of commerce there came a greater influx of strangers into the city. Thus it came about that more houses in the city were imperative. It was found that the lines of trade marked at Bartholomew Fair by the standings of the clothiers and others, would yield more money as streets of houses than as streets of booths, and so, before the close of the century, as Stow tells us, “notwithstanding all proclamations of the prince, and also the act of parliament, in place of booths within the churchyard (only let out in the fair time and closed up all the year after) be many large houses built, and the north wall towards Long Lane taken down, and a number of tenements are there erected for such as will give great rents.” This last line of trading-houses was substituted for the profitless dead wall. Parallel with it, through the ground vacant of building north of the church, which that wall had enclosed, parallel also with one of the church walls, a street of considerable houses occupied the site and kept the name of Cloth Fair.