Clack spring and fall Fairs were well attended formerly. They were held for horses, pigs, cows, oxen, sheep, and shows; but especially for the “hiring servants.” Hamlet’s words,—“Oh, what a falling off is here!” may not inappropriately be applied. Old Michaelmas-day is the time the fall fair is kept, but, really, every thing which constitutes a fair, seemed this year to be absent. A few farmers strolled up and down the main street in their boots, and took refuge in the hospitable houses; a few rustics waited about the “Mop” or “Statue” in their clean frocks twisted round their waists with their best clothes on; a few sellers of cattle looked round for customers, with the pike tickets in their hats; and a few maid servants placed themselves in a corner to be hired: here, there was no want of Clack, for many were raised in stature by their pattens and rather towering bonnets; and a few agriculturists’ daughters and dames, in whom neither scarcity of money nor apparel were visible, came prancing into the courts of their friends and alighting at the uppingstocks, and dashed in among the company with true spirit and bon hommie.
Clack fair was worth gazing at a few years ago. When Joe Ody,[410] the stultum ingenium, obtained leave to show forth in the Blindhouse by conjuring rings off women’s fingers, and finding them in men’s pockets, eating fire and drawing yards of ribands out of his mouth, giving shuffling tricks with cards, to ascertain how much money was in the ploughman’s yellow purse, cutting off cock’s heads, pricking in the garter for love tokens, giving a chance at the “black cock or the white cock,” and lastly, raising the devil, who carries off the cheating parish baker upon his back. These, indeed, were fine opportunities for old women to talk about, when leaning over the hatch of the front door, to gossip with their ready neighbours in the same position opposite, while their goodmen of the house, sat in the porch chuckling with “pipe in one hand and jug in the other.” Then the “learned dog” told person’s names by letters; and here I discovered the secret of this canine sapiency, the master twitched his thumb and finger for the letter at which the dog stopped. I posed, master and dog, however, by giving my christian name “Jehoiada.” A word no fair scholar could readily spell; this shook the faith of many gaping disciples. The “poney” too was greatly admired for telling which lassie loved her morning bed, which would be first married, and which youth excelled in kissing a girl in a sly corner. The being “ground young again,” no less enlivened the spirits of maiden aunts, and the seven tall single sisters; then the pelican put its beak on the child’s head for a night cap, and the monkeys and bears looked, grimaced and danced, to the three dogs in red jackets, with short pipes in their mouths; and the “climbing cat” ascended the “maypole,” and returned into its master’s box at a word. This year’s attractions chiefly were three booths for gingerbread and hard ware—a raree show! a blind fidler—the E. O. table—the birds, rats, and kittens in one cage—and a song sung here and there, called the “Bulleyed Farmers,” attributed to Bowles of Bremhill, but who disclaimed like Coleridge, the authorship of a satiric production.
Thus, fairs, amusements and the works of mortals, pass away—one age dies, another comes in its stead—but who will secure the sports of ancestry inviolate? who search into the workings of the illiterate, and hand them down to posterity, without the uncertain communication of oral tradition, which often obscures the light intended to be conveyed for information.—Thanks be to the art of printing, to the cultivation of reading, and the desire which accompanies both.
NATURALISTS’ CALENDAR.
Mean Temperature 44·40.
[408] Gentleman’s Magazine.
[409] There is a very old stanza known here, which though it gives no favourable mention of Clack, couples many surrounding places well known—
“White Cliff—Pepper Cliff—Cliff and Cliff Ancey,
Lyneham and lo—e Clack,
C—se Malford[411] and Dauncey.”