For over a thousand years, the area known as Smithfield, north of St Paul’s, has been home to London’s principal meat market. Live animals were banned from Smithfield in the 19th century, but until then the ten-acre site was filled with sheep and cattle pens, nearly two million animals bought and sold there every year. Except for two or three weeks in August, when the pens were cleared away, and Smithfield filled with human herds, come to marvel at the wonders of the Bartholomew Fair.
It all began, believe it or not, with a juggling prior back in the twelfth century. Rahere, a jester to King Henry I, was renowned for his wit, his stories and his music, as well as his abilities at juggling and his tumbling tricks. After the death of the King’s son, Rahere underwent a spiritual conversion and decided to dedicate his life to the church, founding the great priory of St Bartholomew at Smithfield in 1123. But his desire to entertain never left him, and in 1133, he convinced Henry to grant him a charter to hold a fair on the grounds of the abbey. It is said that Rahere even performed his old juggling tricks for the paying crowds.
By the 18th century – when my new novel, The Square of Sevens, is set – the Bartholomew Fair was the largest charter fair in all of Europe. In the days leading up to the fair, the site echoed with the sounds of carpentry, as makeshift theatres, booths and stalls were built, some of them towering constructions two or three storeys high. The taverns that ringed the perimeter of Smithfield were also taken over by the fair, with groups of travelling players putting on plays and operas in their yards.
Londoners flocked to the fair in their thousands, and many tourists from further afield too. The showmen had to devise ever more ingenious ways of parting them from their coin. Games of chance and skill included the ‘Wig Dip’, a lucky dip where every prize was a wig; the cock-shy stand where stones were hurled at a live cockerel, the killer of the bird taking home the prize; and the forerunner of the coconut shy, in which balls were thrown at a wooden effigy of a woman, the goal to smash the clay pipes in her mouth. Stalls sold gingerbread and oysters; fans painted with scenes of the fair; puppy-dogs and kittens; quack medicines and musical instruments; and painted wooden dolls known as ‘Bartholomew babies’.
Entertainments were similarly varied and bizarre: dogs that played dominoes or spelled their own name; high-wire-walkers; waxworks of celebrities; ‘crocodile shows’; prize-fighting bouts; and ‘living skeletons’. Many showmen amassed considerable fortunes. Isaac Fawkes, one of the forefathers of modern conjuring, appeared regularly at the fair and was invited to perform his magic tricks at court. He left a fortune of over ten thousand pounds in his will, a huge amount at the time.
Celebrity-spotting was another popular pastime at the fair. In 1732, the Prince of Wales and all the royal princesses attended incognito. Prominent aristocrats, famous actors and comedians from the west end theatres, and well-known artists and composers were regular visitors. Sometimes they would perform in disguise at the fair’s plays and operas, the secret gigs of their day.
Many of today’s modern fairground rides originated at city fairs in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rickety swing-boats and ‘giant windmills’ turned by strongmen (that resemble our Ferris wheels) both appear in 18th century prints of the Bartholomew Fair. They look thoroughly unsafe, but also a lot of fun, a description which could apply to the fair more generally.
Pickpocketing, muggings, prostitution and fraud were rife. The London authorities fought a continuous battle to curtail the duration and lawlessness of the fair, but Londoners voted with their feet, determined to party whether the Lord Mayor liked it or not. Victims of theft or fraud, or squabbling merchants in dispute, could take their grievances to a makeshift tribunal, the ‘Court of Piepowder’. Derived from the French pieds poudrés or ‘dusty feet’, justice was said to be done there ‘as swiftly as the dust could fall from the foot’. The court sat the Hand and Shears tavern, at nearby Cloth Fair, and could issue fines or sentence men and women to the tumbril or the pillory.
The hand of the magistrates was strengthened in 1735 when Parliament passed a new Witchcraft Act. This was an often overlooked moment of great significance in the course of the British Enlightenment. Prior to the Act, witchcraft was considered by English law to be a diabolical instrument of the devil, often punished by death. Yet such executions were increasingly rare by the 18th century and many in Parliament thought claims of witchcraft to be a backward product of superstition. The new Act was the first time the British state stated in law that witchcraft did not exist. Thereafter, those practicing it or otherwise claiming magical powers, were tried, convicted and sentenced as fraudsters guilty of the exploitation of the credulous. A year in prison, a whipping, and a few spells in the pillory were the usual punishments for those found guilty of these crimes.
The Bartholomew Fair was a hotbed of fortune-telling, astrology, scrying, tasseomancy (the reading of tea leaves or sediment in wine), and the sale of charms and spells. In my novel, my main character, a girl called Red, tells fortunes at the fair using an ancient method of cartomancy known as the ‘Square of Sevens’. In so doing, she risks arrest, imprisonment, humiliation, injury, and even death – the pillory being a brutal and unpredictable tool of mob justice.
I am far from the first author to immortalise the Bartholomew Fair in print. Samuel Pepys records his visit to the fair in August 1661, where he saw monkeys dance and met (of course) two ladies named Jemimah and Paulina. Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair, a colourful Jacobean comedy, populates the fair with thieves, gallants, prostitutes and puppeteers. Daniel Defoe’s heroine Moll Flanders meets a well-dressed gentleman at the fair, who takes her to a house to make love to her, after which she steals his watch, purse, periwig and gloves. In Wordsworth’s The Prelude, he describes the fair’s ‘Parliament of monsters’, to him the embodiment of the noise, chaos, violence and confusion of London herself.
It was this violence and chaos that eventually led to the fair’s demise. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the City of London authorities stepped up their attacks on the fair. Because of Rahere’s original charter, they couldn’t abolish the fair entirely without an Act of Parliament. However, they could make life very difficult and expensive for all concerned. First, the shows were forced to close at ten, then the rents were raised, the exotic animals banned, and the numbers of stalls each year gradually declined. By the mid-19th century, there were just a few gingerbread booths left. In 1855, the Lord Mayor went to the site to read the opening proclamation only to find nobody there. Five years later, the fair officially ceased to exist, except in the pages of novels like The Square of Sevens.
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