“What, over other existing jurisdictions, the lords of the neighborhood, or the corporation of Winchester?” asked Thompson.
“Yes, supreme for the time. Even the city was for the time under the bishop’s rule; on St. Giles’ eve the keys were delivered to him, and during the fair toll was exacted in his name on all goods that went through the city gate. No baron within the circuit could hold his manor-court without a license from the bishop’s pavilion. The bishop appointed a mayor, bailiff, and coroner of his own during the fair.”
“Being so near the coast, foreigners must have often resorted to the great Winchester fair, I presume?”
“Yes,” rejoined Herbert. “So numerous and powerful that they had their separate street in the fair, as the drapers, and spice-dealers, and potters had theirs; and the toll to the bishop from the foreign merchants formed no mean portion of the revenue he derived from the fair.”
“It was an old custom for merchants to meet from all countries at the different fairs,” said Lathom. “I remember to have read that in 1314, Philip of France remonstrated with our second Edward on the great loss his subjects had received from the merchants of England desisting from frequenting the fairs in France.”
“Yes,” remarked Frederick Thompson; “in the days of the Edwards and Henrys a fair was as great a panacea for evils, as public meetings in this century. If a village was sacked or destroyed by fire or flood, the grant of a fair was an established means of restoring it to its pristine vigor.”
“We must look abroad for the old fairs, such as they were in the middle ages,” said Herbert. “Frankfort and Leipzig still remind us of such fairs as that at Winchester; thirty to forty thousand buyers and sellers are not uncommonly seen at Leipzig, the last great fair of Central Europe.”
“And yet,” said Lathom, “both of these are but children to the great fair of Nischnei-Novgorod, where merchants from the banks of the Baltic and the Caspian interchange goods with Khivans, Chinese, the mountaineers of Central Asia, and the merchants of Western Europe.”
“It is, indeed, almost difficult to believe Kohl’s account of the meeting at Nischnei-Novgorod,” said Herbert.
“Wonderful, but of admitted truth. How curious must be the scenes: a town of vast emporia, mingled with nearly three thousand shops, almost without an inhabitant, save a few government officials, until the flag is raised on the 29th of June; then the town is alive like an ant-hill. Every magazine and booth is filled with merchandise, the produce of the most diverse countries; thousands of boats are landing goods, or taking them to other vessels; piles of merchandise stand on all sides, even in the open country; and amidst all this treasury of wealth, three hundred thousand of nearly all nations under heaven are trafficking.”