Fairs, past and present

by Cornelius Walford

And that no manner of person buy nor sell but with true weights and measures, sealed according to the Statute in that behalf made, upon pain that will fall thereof.

And that no manner of person, or persons take upon him, or them, within this Fair to make any manner of arrest, attachment, summons, or execution, but if it be done by the officer of this City, thereunto assigned, upon pain that will fall thereof.

And that no person or persons whatsoever, within the limits and bounds of this fair, presume to break the Lord’s Day in selling, showing, or offering for sale, or in buying or offering to buy, any commodities whatsoever, or in sitting, tippling, or drinking in any tavern, inn, alehouse, or cook’s-house, or in doing any other thing that may lead to any breach thereof, upon the pain and penalties contained in the several acts of parliament, which will be severely inflicted upon the breakers hereof.

And finally, that whatever person soever find themselves aggrieved, injured or wronged by any manner of person in this Fair, that they come with their plaints before the Stewards of this Fair, assigned to hear and determine pleas, and they will minister to all parties justice, according to the laws of the Land and the Customs of this City. God save the King!

Then, the mayor, sheriffs and aldermen, sitting on horseback, robed in their violet gowns, having again made this proclamation at a point between the City Fair and that owned by the Warwick or Holland family (as successors of Sir Richard Rich?), ride through the Cloth Fair, and so return back again, through the Churchyard of Great St. Bartholomew’s to Aldersgate, and thence home again to the Lord Mayor’s house.

Tradition declares that the mayor, when he had read the Proclamation, drank ale from a silver flagon, and that thereupon the bustle and business of the fair began. I believe as a matter of fact the proclamation was usually read by the Lord Mayor’s attorney, and repeated after him by the sheriff’s officer, in the presence of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and sheriffs. The officers of the Lord Mayor’s household afterwards dined at the Sword-bearer’s table. This may have become the custom at a later date. See 1688.

Merchant Taylors’ right of search.—1609. An incident occurred this year which raised the question of jurisdiction concerning an important function which had heretofore been deemed of much consequence. Immediately before the fair of this year the Drapers questioned the right of search, for cloth pieces of insufficient length or quality, as exercised by the Merchant Taylors. What followed is shown by the records of the last-named company. Its clerk was ordered thereupon to attend Drapers’ Hall on the next court day with a message to the following purport, viz., That the Merchant Taylors’ Company had right to search, and that they had quietly enjoyed the same since the 27th of Henry VI., being above 150 years past, and still earlier, as by the Merchant Taylors’ records appeared, wherein is mentioned a lengthened lawsuit between them and the Drapers about the same question of right of search, when a sentence was passed for the Merchant Taylors. There is in 1612 a note of a dinner at Merchant Taylors’ Hall “for the search on St. Bartholomew’s Eve.”

The Drapers were incorporated as a Guild in 1364. In their charter was a special exemption made against any prohibitions to be exercised by the Company regarding the sale of cloth by any who were not free drapers, in favour of the King’s beloved in God, the Prior of St. Bartholomew’s, in West Smithfield, and other lords who had fairs in the suburbs of London. A draper meant originally one who made the cloth he sold. It was the London designation for clothier, a very few members of the Drapers’ Company being resident beyond the limits of the City. Therefore, say the old writers, that Bartholomew Fair was frequented by “the clothiers of England and the drapers of London.” Mercers especially frequented fairs and markets, where their standings were gay with haberdashery, toys, and even drugs and spices, the small articles of traffic on which they throve. Mercers attending the French fairs towards the close of the thirteenth century paid only half-toll when they were not stall keepers, but exposed their wares on the ground. They, and the class of pedlers to which they were allied, may have enjoyed a like privilege in England. But while many of the mercers were thus of the brotherhood of Autolycus, others dealt largely in silk and velvet, and abandoned to the haberdasher traffic in small articles of dress. Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, was a mercer.—Vide Morley, p. 95.

Paving the Streets.—1614. This was an important year in the annals of Smithfield. It passed from its old and normal condition of mud, into a clean and paved enclosure, such as was familiar to many of us before the new market buildings were erected in 1866. Other changes had preceded. It was not until 1608 that the City had obtained a grant of the ground of the late Priory of St. Bartholomew, which had been constituted into a parish after the dissolution. Again, while it had ceased some time before to be the scene of the morning performances of the common hangman—Tyburn (itself afterwards absorbed in May Fair) having succeeded to the distinction; it had still remained the locus of a far more savage form of persecution. The ashes of the last martyr fire had burned out in 1611—the victim being Bartholomew Leggatt, a pious Unitarian, burnt for distrust of the Athanasian and Nicene creeds, by the order of James I. at the sentence of John King, newly-made Bishop of London!