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withdraw from it. Its principle appears to be that of the festuca, or symbol of possession, which the seller of land handed to the purchaser in token of the change of ownership. The Carta Mercatoria (1303) laid down that every bargain should be firm and stable, "after that the earnest penny (denarius Dei) be once given and taken"1. According to Bracton, “if the purchaser repents of his purchase and wishes to recede from his contract, let him lose what he has given; but if the vender repents, let him restore double of what he has received as earnest money" 2. In the custumal of Preston it is added that if the buyer has already handled the goods, and the seller is unwilling to complete the transaction, the latter must forfeit a sum of five shillings 3. At Dublin any one who gave the earnest penny, and then repented of his bargain, paid a penalty of ten shillings. Another mercantile institution was that of promissory notes, an institution 5 of extreme importance in the development of trade and finance. The procedure of mercantile law was still often formal and marked by the retention of antiquated survivals. Thus in 1287 the party to a suit at the fair of St. Ives lost his case, because one of the compurgators in taking the oath made a slip in the name, saying Robert for Henry. None the less, in certain directions there was a departure from established usage. Notably was this the case in the production of proof by tally', or by evidence based on the examination of witnesses in the open court; while professional pleaders were afforded scope for their activities. For these various reasons the piepowder court, and the law which it administered, merit the most considerable attention. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, England was covered with a network of courts, which in number and energy were scarcely inferior to the rural courts of the townships 10. At the same time they must 1 Hakluyt, Voyages (ed. 1903), i. 329. 2 Bracton, f. 62.

Dobson and Harland, Preston Guild, 75 (thirteenth century). 4 Gilbert, Historical and Municipal Documents of Ireland, 251. 5 Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, i. 133.

6 Law Merchant, i. 20.

7 For proof by tally, see Borough Customs, i. 202-205.

8 Quarterly Journal of Economics, xx. 246.

9 Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, i. 155-156.

10 Quarterly Journal of Economics, xx. 247.

Enumera

chief fairs.

have contributed enormously to the consolidation of a body of mercantile law, which in its turn has been an important source of modern jurisprudence.

It remains to give some account of the more important tion of the of English fairs, with whose organization and development we have been concerned. The fair of St. Ives was founded in 1110 by Henry I.1, though the zeal of Matthew Paris led him to ascribe it to King Edgar 2. It rapidly developed into an important centre for hides, wool and cloth; and its situation on the Ouse attracted large numbers of native and foreign merchants. A few years earlier the famous fair of St. Giles at Winchester, of which William Langland makes mention in Piers Plowman, came into existence 4, and acquired importance as a centre of traffic between France and the south of England. The chief articles of merchandise here were cloth, woollen goods and all manner of foreign produce, and after the invention of printing there was a large sale of books; the stall of St. Swithun's Convent was especially famed for its wines and spiceries 5. Two other celebrated fairs were those of Stourbridge and Bartholomew, which even in the seventeenth century could be described in a proclamation as "fairs of special note"". Bartholomew fair originated in a grant (1133) made by Henry I. to a monk Rayer, by whom the priory was founded?. The monk chose his site with care, obtaining from the king a piece of ground in Smithfield, already associated with its famous market. The control of the fair was shared between the prior and the corporation; the latter exercised scrutiny of weights and measures and of goods exposed for sale, while tolls and forfeitures were equally divided. The fair became the chief cloth fair of England, and to it, says Stow, repaired "the clothiers of all England and drapers of

1 Cart. Monast. de Rameseia, i. 240.

2 M. Paris, Chronica Majora, v. 699.

3 See court rolls of St. Ives in Law Merchant, vol. i. passim.

4 It was founded by William Rufus (1096): Davis, Regesta Regum, i. 96. For Langland, cf. C. Passus, xiv. 52.

5 Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life, 249; Kitchin, Winchester, 161. Crawford, Tudor and Stuart Proclamations, i. 169.

Morley, Bartholomew Fair, 12.

8 Letter Book H, 70; ibid. K, 354. For early disputes over the fair (1292), cf. Cal. Fine Rolls, i. 313.

London". Greatest of all English fairs was Stourbridge, the centre of the East Anglian counties, and as late as 1722 Defoe spoke of it as "not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world; nor, if I may believe those who have seen them all, is the fair at Leipzig in Saxony, the mart at Frankfort-on-the-Main, or the fairs at Nuremberg, or Augsburg, any way to compare to this fair at Stourbridge "2. Though credited with a Roman origin3, it was founded by John, who granted it to the lepers of the Hospital of St. Mary Magdalene. Costly works of embroidery, velvets, silk and cloths of gold, were among the commodities which made the fair renowned, and here also the Oxford Colleges bought their stock of salted herrings for Lent 5. An important fair, exceptional in the fact that it was not owned by the Church, was St. Botolph, which seems to have been founded in 1200. Henry III. gave it (1241) to Peter de Savoy, the uncle of Queen Eleanor, whose relations with the citizens of Lincoln were marked by considerable friction. The fair attracted visitors from a great distance, and here the canons of Bridlington laid in a stock of wine, groceries and cloth for their convent. Three other fairs may be mentioned: Westminster, Northampton and Bristol. The fair at Westminster was established by Henry III., who forced the citizens of London to attend it, and would allow no other fair to be held or shop to be open in London at the same time. Northampton fair was one of the four terms in the year, when the king made his purchases from merchants and met his obligations to them, the other three being St. Ives, St. Botolph and St. Giles. The fair at Bristol, known as St. James's fair, appears in the sixteenth century to

1 Survey, ii. 27.

2 D. Defoe, Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722, ed. H. Morley (1888), 164. Defoe has left a vivid account of Stourbridge fair in the eighteenth century, copied in Nichols, Bib. Topog. Britann. v. 80 seq. 3 Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, i. 12, 34. 4 Ibid. i. 171.

Thorold Rogers, Agriculture and Prices, iv. 150.

• Patent Rolls, 1216-1225, p. 157.

'Thompson, Boston, 39, 45. It escheated to the king in 1282: ibid. 332. For the grievances of Lincoln: supra, p. 219.

8 M. Paris, Chronica Majora, v. 28, 333. The fair lasted 32 days, and the same customs were observed as at St. Giles's fair: Patent Rolls, 12921301, p. 589. Ibid. 1232-1247, p. 239.

Decline of English fairs.

have ranked with Stourbridge and Bartholomew.1 Besides those already enumerated there were many smaller fairs, some of which were held for a particular object, the fair of Leeds, for example, for the sale of cloth, and that of Weyhill for cheese. The herring fairs, Yarmouth and many others on the sea-coast, acquired special prominence in the Middle Ages on account of the observance of Lent; yet an act of Henry VIII. enumerates Stourbridge, St. Ives and Ely, as "the most notable fairs within this realm for provisions of fish".

3

It is difficult to determine with any degree of certainty the period at which English fairs began to decline either in numbers or importance. In 1335 it was said that "foreigners do not come to St. Botolph's fair as they used to do "4, while in 1416 we are told that the holding of St. Botolph's fair had entirely ceased "now for many years past", and doubtless other fairs also decayed. This, however, only means that the tidal waves of commerce had receded from certain places, and now visited more convenient centres. The decay of St. Botolph's fair, for example, which was very marked in the Tudor period, was largely due to the withdrawal of the Hansards. "The Easterlings", says Leland, "left their course of merchandise to Boston, and since the town sore decayed". Another factor in the decline of the city was the decay of the river and the development of new trade routes. In every century, in fact, there were the inevitable changes in the localization of trade, and in the nature of things one fair superseded another. In 1363 a patent recites that the fair of St. Ives had not been held "for twenty years and more", on account of the absence of foreign traders, and a similar assertion was made in 1442; apparently in the interim the fair had recovered its old position. St. Giles's fair undoubtedly declined in the fourteenth century, and the revenue drawn from its receipts fell off considerably. Complaints of the decay of Wycombe

1 Burnet, History of the Reformation, v. 110.

* Thorold Rogers, Agriculture and Prices, iv. 146.
3 Statutes, iii. 440.

5 Letter Book I, 159.

Law Merchant, i. p. xxx.

4 Cal. Inquisitions post mortem, vii. 426.

• Leland, Itinerary (ed. L. T. Smith), iv. 181. 8 Vict. County Hist. Hampshire, v. 39-40.

fair 1 were uttered in 1527: "Now there cometh but few or else none of this town and borough thither for to keep and maintain the aforesaid fair there in that place, whereas of old custom was wont for to be kept; but keepeth their shops and their stalls at home there as they do dwell here within the said town". But while at different times one fair rose and another fell, no proof appears to have been adduced of a general decay in the fifteenth century of the system of periodical marts. On the contrary, the Patent Rolls for the last nine years of Yorkist administration record at least ten grants of fairs 2, of which one gave to the bishop of Norwich two annual fairs at his town of Lynn, each for forty-one days. This shows that fairs were still a profitable source of revenue. As in earlier centuries, we find one town (Lincoln) petitioning to hold two fairs on account of its poverty, and another (Wainfleet) allowed to set up three fairs because it was in great ruin and deserted by its inhabitants 3. The indictment brought against the piepowder courts in the statute of Edward IV. can scarcely be regarded as evidence of the dissolution of fairs since, as we have seen, the burden of its complaint can be traced back at least a century, and in one form or another was probably coeval with the existence of the fairs themselves. In the seventeenth century Cardiff alleged that the rivalry of a neighbouring fair had reduced it "to much poverty, and their poverty doth daily increase by means of the said fair": language which not only recalls that of earlier times, but indicates that the fair was still a source of profit 4.

condition

The opinion has gained currency that the fairs of the Their fifteenth and sixteenth centuries underwent a change in in the character, and were given up to purposes of amusement sixteenth rather than to trade. But this view is unsupported by any evidence, and it is certainly wrong to suppose that even at the close of the Middle Ages English fairs had lost their

1 Parker, Wycombe, 29.

2 Patent Rolls, 1476-1485, PP. 5, 9, 17, 93, 131, 154, 158, 204, 326, 471. Examples can easily be multiplied: Norwich (Records, i. 42) received two fairs in 1482, each for 3 weeks. Similarly: Records of Leicester, ii. 296, etc.; Wood, City of Oxford, ii. 457; A. Ballard, Chronicles of Woodstock (1896), 25. Rot. Parl. iv. 418 a (Lincoln, 1432); Vict. County Hist. Lincolnshire, ii 320 (Wainfleet, 1458). Records of Cardiff, i. 367.

century.

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