i UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 870 3 1822 01961 1 Social Sciences & Humanities Library University of California, San Diego Please Note: This item is subject to recall. Date Due MfOpI ,-04.1991; NOV Z 7 i995r ^ SEP 1 ^ 19^ft ADD 7 onni f\rH 4 ' cijm CI 39 (2/95) UCSD Lto. BOOKS AND PAPERS HENRY MORLEY 1850 — 1870 III BALLANTVNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON S^ayrfJidcrricn'':y^al^'^''^^^^^^^^^ M E M O I R S OK BARTHOLOMEW FAIR 1!V HENRY MORLEY, LL.D. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITER ATCRF. IX UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON FOURTH EDIT I OX LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Limited Broadway, Ludgate Hill GLASGOW, MANCHESTER, AND NEW YORK 1S92 Previous Editions : iSS", iS'/4, and iSSo EPILOGUE, 1892. Schoolmaster Time, who keeps us to liis lessons and who does not spare the rod, has been admhiistering correction to one chapter of this book. It was a common error when these Memoirs were fust published, in 1857, to beheve that Fielding, after he had come as a young man to London and connected himself with the players, had part, for some years, in a booth at Bartholomew Fair. It was likely enough. The Fair was an institution then of mark and profit. London theatres were closed when the Fair opened, and actors thought it worth their while to set up booths in Smithfield. Now, there was truly a Fielding in the Fair, just in those years when Henry Fielding might have been there. The belief that he was Henry Fielding had been adopted by Mr. F. Lawrence in his Life of Fielding, published in 1855. Nobody then questioned the fact. Dr. Rimbault, in Notes and Queries — that most serviceable of small journals, rare example of a happy thought as happily worked out through many years — observed that I had fallen short of what I might have said. For I had given 1738 as the last year of Fielding in the Fairs, and " a little research," Dr. Rimbault said {Nofes a?id Queries, May 21, 1859), "would show us that this was not tiie last year of Fielding's career as a booth proprietor. Indeed, I have some very curious matter on the subject now before me, but I shall reserve it for a separate paper on Henry Fielding." That paper did not appear. Mr. Frederick Latreille had in those days privately ex- pressed suspicions which he completely verified in 1875. The Fielding in the Fair was Timothy Fielding, an obscure actor of Drury Lane, who rose to be the keeper of a public- house. Mr. Latreille's evidence was quite conclusive. His letter in Notes afid Queries of the 26th of June 1875 dealt, it is true, only with possibilities, but a postscript added evidence that proved his case. He wrote ns follows : — V i i i Epilogue, 1892. " The first time the name of Fielding appears in a ' bill of the play' is in connection with a scratch company, who had taken the Little Theatre in the Haymarket for a limited number of nights. Tliey described themselves as ' a new company who never appeared on that stage before,'" and they produced there, on May 24, 17 28, The Beggar's Opera, ' with all the songs and dances set to music, as it is performed at the Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields.' The opera ran, almost consecutively, for sixteen nights ; ' the last time of performing it till Fairs are over ' being on August 22nd. The names of the actors of the opera were not printed, but on August 9th and 12th The Spanish Friar had been played by the same company, ' the part of Torrismond by Mr. Fielding.' No further description was given of the performer, nor was it stated to be his first appearance. In September of the same year (1728) Messrs. Fielding and Reynolds, also one of the Haymarket company, opened a booth at the George Inn, Smithfield, and subsequently migrated to Southwark Fair, where they repeated the performance of The Beggar's Opera, ' by the company of comedians from the Haymarket.' In the season 1728-29 Fielding was engaged at Drury Lane, and remained there till the autumn of 1733: but although he had occa- sionally a share in a benefit, he never rose beyond inferior parts, such as, for example, Cepheus in Perseus ajid Andro- meda, Truncheon in The Strollers, John in Whig and Tory, one of the mob in The Cofitrivances, Furnish in The Miser, and so on." Mr. Latreille next quoted the following paragraph from the London Daily Post of August 21, 1738 : — "On Saturday morning early" (that is. August 19th) " died at his house, the Buffalo Head Tavern, Bloomsbury Square, Mr. Fielding, formerly belonging to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane." " This," Mr. Latreille said, " there can hardly be a doubt, was the showman of the Fairs, who, up to 1734, had always been identified as a member of the Drury Lane company; for, after 1738, the name of Fiehling appears no more in any play or fair bills. In 1739 the booth w'nich had been advertised as ' Fieldinsj and Hallam's' was under the Epilogue, 1892. ix management of Hallam alone. On searching the Burial Registers of St. George's, Bloomsbury, I find the following entry: '1738. August 22. Timothy Fielding, of King Street.' " Here was a case of strong presumptive evidence. If Dr. Rimbault had sent to Notes and Queries his promised paper upon " Henry Fielding at Bartholomew Fair," and proved, as he said he could, that Henry Fielding was in Bartholomew Fair after the year 1738, the facts given in Mr. Latreille's letter would not have proved their case. But the letter had a postscript, and that made the chain of evidence complete: '' P.S. Since writing the above, I have discovered the following paragraphs in the Daily Post of October 15th and 20th, 1733 : — "Oct. 15. 'We hear that Mr. Fielding of Drury Lane Playhouse, who has entertained the Town so agreeably with his Company of Comedians at the George Inn, in Smithfield, during the time of Bar- tholomew Fair, has taken that commodious Tavern at the corner of Bloomsbury Square known by the sign of the Biiffler, and has pro- vided good wines to entertain all gentlemen that please to favour him with their company,' "Oct. 20. ' Mr. Fielding (late of Drury Lane Playhouse) designs to open the Buffaloe Tavern at the corner of Bloomsbury Square on Monday next' {i.e., the 22nd\ 'when several gentlemen of the neighbourhood design to favour him with their company.' '' This is conclusive; and it will remain so even if there should come out of the West a Cryptogram to prove that Timothy Fielding of the "Bufifier" wrote To7n Jones. Of course, there is a Cryptogram, In the seven lines, in- cluding the heading, of the very first announcement of performances at " Fielding and Reynold's Great Theatrical Booth " (on p. 314 of this volume), there will be found, in their right order, the letters that form the sentence " I am going to write tom iones.'"' As if to remove suspicion of error, the letters of the word "tom" are consecutive, and they are followed at the shortest mystic interval of three by the " i " for ''• iones." The " J " is here expressed by " I " as a third repetition of that personal claim to the book, in the name itself '• tom iones," which had been empha- sised by duplication in ti.e name of F/eld/ng, and does not X Epilogue, 1892. occur in the name of his partner Reynolds, On the con- trary, if you ask of that other name whether it may not be Reynolds who is "going to write torn iones," you will find that, in its exact middle, it contains your answer, no. When these Memoirs were being written, friendly search was in vain made on my behalf for the book of the Pie- powder Court in the Guildhall library. It was found afterwards, and I sent a Note on it to Notes and Queries, June 18, 1859. The book found covered the time from the year 1790 to the close of the Fair by cessation of the Lord Mayor's proclamation. Three printed forms were used by the Court. One, headed by the royal and 'city arms, placed side by side, gave public notice that the Court was to be held, on three days of September therein named, " at the house known by the sign of the Hand and Shears, in Cloth Fair, West Smithfield," and that all persons were " to pay their Stallage, Siccage, Customs, Tolls, and Duties at the said Court before they attempt to make any exhibition or show, or otherwise vend or expose to sale any Goods, Wares, or Merchandizes." Notice was on the same paper given to freemen, that they would be required to produce copies of their freedom on taking out their licenses. This notice, dated on some day in August, and printed by the printer to the City, was signed by the Steward. The business to which this notice referred was done with help from two other printed forms, each headed by the royal arms and initials, with the style and title of the Court, which was as follows : — "Court of Piepowder, held wiiliin the I-iberty and Precinct of Great St. Bartholomew, West SniitJiJidd, London, during the time of the Fair and Market called Bartholome^v Fair, holden within the same Liberty and Precinct, and in West Sntithficld aforesaid." One is to this effect : — " It is ordered that be allowed to have a . in the Fair and Market aforesaid. "To the Officers of ) the said Court \ Steward of the said Court." Epilogue, 1892. xi Tiie otlier, with the same subscription, is to this effect : — "It is ordered that__ show cause to this Court immediately why in tiie Fair and Market aforesaid, without taking out a License from this Court for that purpose. In defauU of liis Attendance, the officers of this Court are commanded to remove the from and out of the said Fair." The form of proclamation to which the original long form used by the City had been abbreviated corresponds with that given on page 349 of this volume, as used by " Lady Holland's Mob" at midnight before the day of the Lord Mayor's proclamation. I find a difference only in' two words, which are obviously the variations of a copyist : "strictly" for " straitly," "the disturbance" for "dis- turbance." The tolls of the Fair were : Fourpence for every cart or waggon, dray with shod wheels, or coach with goods ; four- pence for every ram, or bull, or score of sheep ; twopence for every unshod dray ; twopence a head for cattle ; one penny for hogs or calves ; twopence for every horse burthen or bundle ; one penny for every foot burthen or bundle. These were the fees of the Fair : " For every show under the Master of the Revels, 3s. 4d. ; whereof the Judges have 2s. and the Clerk of the Papers is. 4d. If under the Great Seal, 6s. 8d. ; whereof the Judges have 4s. and the Clerk of the Papers the rest. If a foreigner, he is to pay double for his License." There were a good many fees connected with the legal action of the Court. They varied in amount between fourpence and four shill- ings. Thus it is " for finding a prisoner Guilty, 4d. to the Gaoler ; " but " for turning the key on him, 3s. 4d." The person who received most profit from fees was the Clerk of the Papers. The Weather at Piartholomew Fair time is to be found chronicled among the records of its Piepowder Court, from the year 1790 to the year 1813, both included, with acci- dental omission of a note of it for three days of the year xii Epilogue, 1892. 1806, and for one day in each of the years 1792 and 1794. From this chronicle we may infer that no fairs could have been held, under the English climate, at a more propitious season than this in West Smithfield. In four-and-tvventy years there is a record of but one wet day for the fair- goers, and even on that day there were gleams of sunshine in the morning. Of the other sixty-six days noted for us only five were showery throughout ; nine were showery only in the morning or in the afternoon, and otherwise entirely fine ; three days were dry but lowering ; the other forty- nine were days of bright, warm autumn weather, with an eclipse of the sun (Sept. 5, 1793) as a gratuitous show on one of them. It is to be regretted that this chronicle was not continued after the year 18 14 until 1833, between which year and 1839 there are again a dozen entries of the weather upon fair-days. Of the twelve days one is wet and all the rest are fine. Will not the Learned Pig find here a special etymology for Fair Weather ? When the Piepowder Book opens, at the date of 1790, the records are kept with elaborate care : there are six Sergeants-at-mace ; two for the Lord Mayor, and two each for the Giltspur Street and Poultry Compters, with a con- stable, who is a distinct individual. In 1839 and the following years, after the disappearance of the Giltspur Street Compter from the record, there is only one Sergeant- at-mace from the Mayor's Court ; and of the two from the Poultry, one serves also as constable and one as toll- collector. Lord Kensington's Steward was, till the City bought his lordship's interest in the tolls, the acting Magistrate. The Associate entitled to preside on behalf of the City never made his appearance, although, in 1790, "Newman Knowlys, Esq., attended at this Court, alleging to be Senior Counsel of the City of London, and in that Capa- city claimed a Right of presiding at this Court ; but he not producing any Authority whatever from the Lord Mayor of the City of London for that purpose, Therefore such claim was disallowed; and no other person attended as Associate at this Court." Epilogue. 1892. xiii In 1790, the fees to tlie Piepowder Court from showmen and stall-keepers were £,1^^ 4s. They did not reach ;^3o till the year 1800. They rather exceeded ;^30 in the years 1802 and 1803. In 1805 the fees to the Court were only ;^i8, 12.S. ; ninety-seven persons refused pay- ment, or quitted before demand by the Collector. For the seven years following 1807 there is a tendency to steady increase in the receipts of the Court for licenses, whicli rise from ;^3i to ^37. By 1817 they have again fallen to about ^30. In 1818 they were ;;^23, i6s. 8d. In 1819 they were ^^13, i6s. In 1820, the first Bartho- lomew Fair held under George IV., the receipts of the Piepowder Court were only a few shillings above ;^io, and they stood at nearly the same level, never reaching ^13 and sometimes falling below ;^io, until, in 1S39, there" ■was again a sudden fall, and the receipts were only ^4, 17s. ;^io, ;;^8, ;^6, J^^'^, los. are sums tliat follow, and the decay is at last to 14s. in the year 1853, which was the last year of the Fair's proclamation. An addition to my record was supplied to Notes and Queries of the 22nd of January 1859 by John Payne Collier, in a description of a fragment of six pages of " Newes from Bartholomew Fayre," printed in black-letter, which I had not mentioned, because, as he rightly supposed, I had not seen it. Mr. Collier thought this must have been, when complete, a quarto sheet of eight leaves, and that only the first and last leaf had been lost. He sug- gested that its unknown date was before 1600. It was written in verse of many measures, and was chiefly a play- ful tippler's proclamation of the death of a Nos viaximiis otfiniiun, with other uses of the Latin nos for " nose." This is a piece of it : — "Be it known to all noses red, A'os maxivius oi/tntutn is gone and dead. This is strange and this is true ; Therefore, mine Host, belongs to you, And all that sell good beere and ale. To have regard unto my tale, And send imto the Vintners' hall Present word, to warn them all To make ready his funeral), xiv J^.pilogue, 1892. And bury him in malmesey tunne For the good deedes that he hath done : For he was free of the old Haunce, And mucli good wine procured from France, With sack and sugar out of Spaine, Whereby he did more noses gaine Under his banner for to be, Than all the noses that be free, And a very conmrodious nose had he." Upon this I suggested {Notes and Queries, Feb. 5, 1859) " a suspicion (not quite a belief) founded ratlier upon instinct than upon reason," that if any one had a perfect copy of the painphlet, he might find even so late a date as 1658 upon the title-page. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, immediately afterBartholomew Fair, on the 3rd of September. The piece professes to be written after Fair time, to give London news, and after a prelude about the Fair, suddenly breaks out into a proclamation that Nos viaximiis omnium is dead. Cromwell's nose was a convenient target for tlie jester. The jest seems to be too elaborate to be entirely purposeless, and may have been a caricature of somebody or something — one of those blunt shafts aimed wide of its mark, which passed for wit with its marksman, and with other men too while there was a public satisfied with in- spirations of the Smithfield Muses. To Dr. Rimbault's two papers of "Gleanings for the History of Bartholomew Fair," in Notes and Queries for May 21 and August 27, 1859, I am indebted for one correction and two additions of facts that should have been recorded. On pages 321, 322, there is an error. The Cibber who came into the Fair was not CoUey Cibber, but his son Theophilus. Thomas Walker was omitted from my re- cord, and he ought not to have been passed over. He was born in 1698, became an actor in Bartholomew Fair in a Mr. Shepherd's Company, and was discovered there by Barton Booth playing the part of Paris in T/ie Siege of Troy. Transferred to the London theatres, he soon won fame as the Macheath of The Beggar^s Opera. He wrote two operas for Bartholomew Fair — The Quaker's Opera in 1728, and Robin Hood'xw 1730. \x\ the last chapter, wliich tells of the decay of the Fair, Ep ilogiie, 1892. XV there should have been a record, under the year 1803, of the appearance of the famous traveher, Giovanni Battista Belzoni. He was then twenty-five years old, a poor barber's son who had quitted study for the priesthood when the French republican troops took Rome, and with a strong bent for the study of mechanics, found his way from Holland to England. He visited Bartholomew Fair, and, being six feet seven inches high and without money, accepted the offers of a showman, who dressed him up with Oriental splendour over flesh-coloured tights, and caused him to exhibit feats of strength as " the Young Hercules" or "the Patagonian Samson." He performed also at Sadlers' Wells and elsewhere, to earn a living. Belzoni's nobler career was opened to him when his zeal for mechanical studies caused Mehemet .\li to invite him to Egypt to construct a hydraulic machine for the irrigation of his gardens near Cairo. That was in 1815. Once in Egypt, Belzoni's attention was diverted to the study of Egyptian antiquities, and his enduring fame was earned in the remaining eight years of his life. The writer of this Memoir, living as a child in Hatton Garden, near the Fair, was taken to it to see the wonders and the shows in and before 1S30. It has left a memory of twilight with the glare of fires, candles, and oil lamps, dirt, drums, trumpets, spangled dancers, glittering booths, peep- shows, the tented gingerbread all armed in gold, cheap sweets, and dirty people asquat over sausages and kindred meat-stuffs, cooking at rows of fires upon the ground on each side of a dirty path into the Fair. The bliss to be found inside the shows of the poor players was always ail too short. If there was vice or violence about the Fair, a child's eyes would be blind to it. It was noisy, but not rough in the hours when children went to it. Its rougher hours would come, no doubt, when it was time for all good children to be a-bed. How Bartholomew Fair struck Words- worth, who saw it near the close of the last century, he hns told in the seventh book of the "Prelude," entitled " Resi- dence in London." Seen from a showman's platform, " What a shock For eyes and ears ! What anarchy and . The Waxwork, Clockwork, all the marvellous craft Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows, All out o' the way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats All jumbled up togellier, to compose A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill. Are vomiting, receiving on all sides, Men, Women, three-years' Children, Babes in arms. Oil blank confusion ! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity by differences Tiiat have no law, no meaning, and no end — Oppression under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free." MEMOIRS OF BARTHOLOMEW FAIR By HKlSMiY MORLEY WITH FRIENDSHIP TO JOHN FORSTER, BY WHOSE LIFE OF GOLDSMIl H THE HOME FEELINGS ARE REFINED : AND BY WHOSE STUDIES OF THE COMMONWEALTH THE WISDOM OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP IS ENLARGED AND STRENGTHENED. PREFACE. Sii^CE I am here occupying virgin soil In a part of tht wild district beyond the bounds of cultivated history, I may be par- doned perhaps if my ground is not at once staked out in the best manner, and my fields are not so trim as those combed by tht ploughs and harrows of successive generations. This is not 07ily the first history of Bartholomew Fair, but the first serious history of any Fair ; even the general subject of Fairs, as far as I can learn, has never been thought worthy of a book. Yet what a distinct chapter in social history should be contained in the story, rightly told, of any Great National Fair I When I first resolved upon the writing of these Memoirs, I knew simply that Bartholomew Fair was an umvritten portion of the story of the people. Bound once to the life of the 7iation by the three ties of Religion, Trade, and Pleasure, first came a time when the tie of Religion zvas unloosened from it ; then it IV as a place of Trade and Pleasure. A few more generations having lived and worked. Trade was no longer bound to it. The nation still grew, and at last broke from it even as a Pleasure Fair. It lived for seven centuries or more, and of its death we are the witnesses. Surely, methought, there is a story here ; the Memoirs of a Fair do not mean only a bundle of hand-bills or a catalogue of ?nonsters. And thus the volume was planned which is now offered to the reader, with a lively sense of its shortcomi?tgs. Conscious of what such a book might have been, and ought to be, I feel hozu much of crudity there is in this, and only know too well how dimly the soul of it glimmers through its substance. There has been no lack of iriatter to make substance. In the Library of the Corporation of London at Guildhall is a valu- XX Preface. able collectioJi of cuttings, handbills, and refere?ices to autlw- rities, made by a gentleman 70/10 had designed the publication of a book upon Bartholomew Fair. There is in the British Museum another collection, inade with a like purpose, less valuable, but containing much that is not found in the collec- tion at GuildhaU. In the Guildhall Library there are also handbills bought by the City, rare tracts, and various MS. notes, from which illustration of the story of the Fair was to be dra7vn. To the Committee of St. Bartholomew's Hospital / am indebted for permission to examine the old records in their keeping. Let me add that the fault is mine if I have not made use enough of the great courtesy with which this fo7'mal per- mission was carried out in practice, and of the ready kindness 7vith 7vhich help was offered me by Mr. White, the Treasurer, Mr. Wix, the Secretary, and the Rev. Mr. Mitchell, Chaplain of the Hospital. Here also let me acknowledge the good humour with ivhich the Rev. Mr. Abbiss, rector of St. Bartholomew's the Great, permitted the irruption of a stranger into his vestry, and sent him aiaay not empty of the information that he sought. Private friends do not need public thanks, but even here I must not pass without acknowledgment the help I have had from my friend Mr. James Gairdner, of the Record Office, who has not only saved me all trouble of search among the Public Records, but who, by his exact knotvledge of old sources of history, has noio and then given the book valuable help. Moreover, it 7vould be a capital omission if I did not spe- cially thank Mr, Henry Hicks, of Highbury Crescent, for access to some of the papers of the late Mr. Richard Hicks, Deputy of Castle Baynard Ward. Mr. Richard Hicks bound his name in the memory of fellow citizens with the later history of Smithfield, and was the member of the Corporation engaged most prominently in the final suppression of Bartho- lomew Fair. He took notes at the time, and many of them are preserved. There is enough extant evidence of his research to have impressed me greatly with a sense of the co?iscientious xvork Preface. xxi that may be done even by a member of the City Parliament, when he devotes his public energies in all sincerity to any ques- tion. The jottings up07i Mr. Hicks's papers bring together, _ -from all sorts of books and Corporation records, a great nu/uber of details about Smithfield, about tht history of tolls, and about the relation of the City to the Fair. As to the suppression of the Fair, they contain extracts from the books of the City Lands' Committee, now and then also notes written by him- self at the time in the committee-room. It needs not many tt'ords to tell of how inuch use those papers have been to me. Thus, while I may expect allowance to be made for the rough 7vay in which I have staked out my little claim upon virgin soil, yet is the soil so rich that I fear I must go unpardoned if it shall prove to have yielded to my tillage but a scanty harvest. Though I have raised and garnered all the knowledge I could get about the Fair, there certainly was more attain- able: there are pamphlets and collect iofis, doubtless, that I have not seen ; collectors whom I have not sought. I feel convinced also that I must have overlooked, through igfiorance, facts know7i to many of my readers. Therefore I shall be jnost thankful for all further information that may come to me from any source. For as much as this volume can tell of Bartholomew Fair / have especially wished to entitle it to credit as, at any rate, an honest record. For aid in this respect it is my djity to thank Mr. H. Sydney Barton, the excellent draughts??ian employed by Messrs. Dalziel the wood-engravers, in taking sketches and facsimiles for the pictures, varying between copies of the rudest of old 7voodcuts and the imitation of fine etching upon metal, with which it is illustrated. Mr. Barton has exactly met my wish for minute faithfulness in the copying of everything repre- sented. Even 7vhen, as in the case of the design for a Bar- tholomeiv Fan, or Rowlatulson^ s scenes of the Fair, compre- hensive pictures have been broken up into the sroeral groups which they contain, no artist's liberty whatever has been taken with any one of the fragmejits so detached. Acairate work is very hard to find. Most of the illustrations in this book are now for the first time drawn {usually on a reduced scale) from xxii Preface the i/linnifiafiojis, loose engravings, or handbills, in 7vhich they first appeared; about half a dozen of them, however, have been reproduced before in other works, and fiot even in one instance has the copy truly represented the original. In this book, with the exception mentioned in a ?iote upon page 5, nothing of luhich the origitial is extant has been represented from a copy. A second exception, mentioned by anticipation in that note, was set aside after the sheet had gone to press, by the discovery of an original 7nap older and more fitted to the text than that of which a copy 7vas to have been used. Outside oration is the Fashion of the Fair ; therefore I hope, that I have not said too muchfr-om the platfor77i of my little show. Secretly I fear that, like all other shows, it will be found more tempting iti promise than sufficietit in per- formance. But it is not the part of a wise showman to say that. He has his owti appoi^ited peroration. Let him, there- fore, discreetly rej?iember that he must ask Gentlemen, Ladies, <7;z^ Children, to walk in. To maids and boys I sitig. Tlie place about our standing is well swept, and there is no dirt of the Fair here to ofi^end them. — Never Before Exhibited. BARTHOLOMEW the Royal Smithfield Giant. Seven hundred years of age. His Mother's at Rome AND his Father's at Bradford. To be seen A-live. Vivat Regina ! — " Shall there be good Vapour V dejnands an acquaintance of Ben Jonsoiis, Captain Kfiockem Jordafi. The little o of the Fair is vapour now, and it was vapour from the first — Sith all that in the world is great and gay. Doth as a vapour vanish and decay — As much alive as ever, then. The show is open. — BAR- THOLOMEW THE Ancient King of Smithfield, in HIS Royal Robes, surrounded by his court of cele- brated Monsters, All alive! Just opened! May it please you to look in ! H. M. 4, Upper Park Road, Havicrstock Hill, CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE THE FOUNDER OF THE FAIR . I CHAPTER n. THE FIRST FAIRS . . ' 13 CHAPTER III. BARTHOLOMEW JUGGLERS 20 CHAPTER IV. THE FAIR IN THE PRIORY CHURCHYARD . . , . . 34 CHAPTER V. OLD CHRONICLES 52 CHAPTER VI. LITERATURE AND COMMERCE 64 CHAPTER VII. THE CITY FAIR 80 CHAPTER VIII. A CHANGE OF MASTERS : LONDON AND LORD RICH . . .86 CHAPTER IX. TO THE YEAR SIXTEEN HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN . . . 94 CHAPTER X. IN BEN JONSON's TIME 1 14 CHAPTER XI. OLIVER'S DAY I42 XX iv Contents. PAGE CHAPTER XII. I'^^GON .178 CHAPTER XIII. THE HUSTLING OF THE POPE I97 CHAPTER XIV. REVELLERS 210 CHAPTER XV. AFTER THE REVOLUTION 232 CHAPTER XVI. MONSTERS 245 CHAPTER XVII. AT THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . 259 CHAPTER XVIII. THE PLAYHOUSE AT THE FAIR— ELKANAH SETTLE . . . 277 CHAPTER XIX. THE CITY AGAINST THE FAIR . . . . , . . 293 CHAPTER XX. UNDER THE FIRST GEORGES 300 CHAPTER XXI. Fielding's booth at the george inn yard , . .313 CHAPTER XXII. state papers 329 CHAPTER XXIII. last years of the condemned 344 CHAPTER XXIV. earth to earth 386 INDEX 391 LIST OF ENGRAVINGS. PAGE An Evening in Smithfield : Fair time t8o8 [Extract from a picture b)' Rowlandson], fage 390 ; Fair time 1739 [L. du Guernierj Title-Page Initial Letter [from AIS. Book of the Foundation of the Priory, now in the British Museum] i Priory Seal : St. Bartholomew [from a copy by Mr. W. A. Delamotte] 6 Priory Seal : Rayer [from the same] . . . . . .11 Pike and Gudgeon [from John Cok's MS. Rental at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 20 Fox and Goose [from the same] ........ 21 Effigy of Rayer [irom his tomb in the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great] 25 Cripples at a Shrine [from a MS. of Gregory's Decretals (13th century), formerly belonging to the Priory of St. Bartholomew, now in the British Museum] ....... 33 Middlesex Passage : fragment of the old Priory [drawn on the spot] . 35 From the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great : fragment of the old Priory [drawn on the spot] 37 Head of Rayer [from the effigy on his tomb, drawn on the spot] . 38 A Knight from the Horse Market [MS. Decretals] .... 42 Smithfield Games (13th century) : whip-top, bat and ball, bowls, nine- pins, dice [MS. Decretals] 44. 45 Female Tumbler, Stilt-walker, Acrobats of the 13th century [MS. Decretals] .......... 46, 47 Wrestling, Buckler-fighting, Putting the Stone : I3ih centiu'y [MS. Decretals] 48 The Monk at the Fleshpots [MS. Decretals] 48 Mediaeval Demon [MS. Decretals] 52 Smithfield Jousts [MS. Decretals] 61 XX vi List of Engravi7igs. PAGE A Martyrdom on the site of the Fair [from the first edition of Fox's Martyrs] 62 The Hell Mouth of the Miracle Plays [MS. Decretals] ... 64 Satan Vanquished : Persons of a Miracle Play [MS. Decretals] . 68 A Soul Saved : Persons of a Miracle Play [MS. Decretals] . . 70 West Smithfield with the Priory and Hospital, 1533 [from the oldest extant Map of London, at the City Library, Guildhall] . . 87 Houses in Cloth Fair [drawn on the spot] 96 Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair [frontispiece in Whalley's edition, issued as a loose engraving 131 The Hare of the Tabor [from an illuminated MS. of Hours of the Virgin : Harleian, No. 6563] 133 Blowing the Serpent [facsimile of woodcut on the title of Bartholomew Faire, era Variety of Fancies, ^c, 1641] .... 144 The Hand and Shears [no longer standing ; copied from Wilkinson's Londina Illustrata'] . . , 184 The Foppish Rope-Dancer [from the title-page to News fro7ii Bartho- lomew Fair (circa 1663)] ........ 185 Jacob Hall, the Rope-Dancer [from an engraved copy (published 1792) of a rare print after Van Oost, formerly possessed by Sir John St. Aubyn] 191 Ballad Singers [from a detached print, the drawing by N. Lauron, part of a series, "sold by H. Overton, without Newgate "] . 220 Mountebank [from the same] 221 Merry Andrew : William Phillips [from a detached print, drawing by N. Lauron, one of the same series] 228 The Bartholomew Fair Musician : W. Phillips [from a loose print, of another series] 229 Mountebank and Zany [from the frontispiece to The Harangues of Famous Mountebanksl . . . . . . . -231 Joseph Clark, the Postiure Master [from a loose print] . . . 275 Gin-Stall, 1728 [from the facsimile of a drawing on a Bartholomew Fan, of the year 1728, published (as Bartholomew Fair, 1721) by J. F. Setchel] 305 Pickpockets' Harvest, 1728 [from the same] 305 Familiar yet Distant [from the same] 306 Peepshow of the Siege of Gibraltar [from the same] .... 306 Lee and Harper's Booth, 1728 [from the same] 307 List of Engravings. \xvii PAGR Rope-dancing Booth, 1728 [from the same] 308 Fawkes, the Conjuror's Booth 1728 [from the same] .... 309 The Ups and Downs, 1728 [from the same] . . . . .310 Delicate Pig and Pork [from the same] . . . . . .311 Tiddy Doll, the Gingerbread Baker . . . 1750 . . . [from a loose print, a copy of this figure from Hogarth's Idle Apprentice at Tyburn] 339 Powell the Fire Eater . . . 1760 . . . [from a loose print] . . 342 Roger Smith, of the Cap and Bells . . . 1760 . . . [from the same]. 342 A cause before the Court of Pie-powder [loose print] . . . 347 Booth-actors' Refreshment [from a loose print, drawn and engraved by Theo. Lane] .......... 348 Punch's Puppet Show [the title to a folding sheet sold in the Fair, 1790] 355 Scene in a Puppet Show : Pull Devil, pull Baker [from the folding sheet] 356 Mr. Lane the Conjuror [from his bill of performance] . . . 357 Kelham Whitelamb [from a pen and ink sketch in the Collection of Cuttings, Sac, on the subject of Bartholomew Fair, at the British Museum] 359 The Unicom Ram [from a loose print to be had at the Show] . . 360 The Ram with Six Legs [from the same] 361 The Show Booths of the Fair [from a print by Rowlandson, in which the drawing is ascribed to John Nixon, Esq.] .... 363 Grand Theatrical Booth, exit and entrance of the public [from the same] 364 The Swings [from the same] ' . . 365 Quiet People leave the Fair [from the same] 36P Gambling and Feasting in the Sausage Market [from another scene of the Fair by Rowlandson and Pugin] 366 Noise of the Fair [from the same] 366 Miss Bififin [from a lithograph published in 1823] .... 367 Master Vine [from a loose print, published by G. Smeeton, Old Bailey] 368 The Beautiful Albiness [from a mezzotint, published, 1816, by John Bell] 369 Mrs. Carey [from a coloured lithographic miniature] . . . 372 xxviii List of Engravings. PAGE Madame Giradelli, the Fire-proof Lady [from a loose print, vi\ndly coloured, C. 'W. fecit] 373 Mr. Simon Paap, the Dutch Dwarf [from a portrait by S. Woolley. engraved and published by W. Worship] 374 His Autograph [from the Collection of Bartholomew Fair Cuttings, &c., Brit. Museum] 374 James Sharp England, the Flying Pieman [from a loose engraving"' . 376 Hot Gingerbread ! [from the same] 377 A Long-tail Pig or a Short-tail Pig [from the same] . . . 378 Toby, the Learned Pig [from his bill of performance] . . 378 The Amazing Pig of Knowledge [from the same] .... 379 The Beautiful Spotted Negro Boy [from the same] .... 381 Among the Wild Beasts [from one of Wombwell's bills] . . 383 Elephant and Zebra [from the same] 383 The Mermaid [from a coloured etching by George Cruikshank, 1822]. 383 The Learned Cats [from their bill of performance] .... 384 Tail-piece [from the Head-piece to a Seven Dials reprint of J^Iathews's Htimours of Bartholomew Fair] ....... 385 An Evening in Smithfield : Fair time, 1858 [drawn on the spot, at the gateway leading into Cloth Fair, the place of Proclamation] . 389 B OF BARTHOLOMEW FAIR, CHAPTER I. ffiirst sljal be sbcfcojib ixiho bus ffaubcr of ofocre ffairc. HE beginning of Bartholo- mew Fair was a grant from Henry the First to a Monk who had been formerly his Jester. It was that Jester, Rayer, who founded the Priory of St. Bar- tholomew, in later times transformed into a Hospital for the Sick Poor. By a friar who lived in the Priory not long after the death of Rayer (or as he was called in Latin, Rahenis, Englished back into Rahere,) the life of the Founder was written ; all its last incidents being supplied from the me- mory of persons on the spot. By two other friars who lived afterwards in the Priory, this life — in Latin and in later English — was engrossed on parchment, carefully adorned with ornamental, scrolls and gay illuminated letters. 2 Memoii's of Bartholomew Fair. chap. i. Among the gilt ornaments and the iUuminations we find the beginning of the story of the Fair.* Rayer of good remembrance, as the manuscript informs us, founded the Priory in honour of the most blessed Bartholomew Apostle, after the rule of the most holy Father Austin, and lived in it twenty-two years, using the office and dignity of a Prior ; not having cunning of liberal science, but having that which is more eminent than all cunning, for he was richest in purity of conscience. Among all the virtues set down to his credit we find bright manners and prudent business in temporal ministration. Busy he was ; and it concerns us that his busy mind begot the fair ■ for the advantage of his order : he had also a cunning suited to the present meaning of the word, for in his friar's robes he made much money as a juggler. But, says the biogra- pher, " in what order he set the fundament of this temple, in {q\v words let us shew as they testified to us that saw him, heard him, and were present in his works and deeds ; of the which some have taken their sleep in Christ, and some of them be yet alive and witnesseth of that that we shall after say. " This man, born of low lineage, when he attained the flower of youth, he began to haunt the households of noble- men and the palaces of princes, where, under every elbow of them, he spread their cushions with japes and flatterings, delectably anointing their ears, by this manner to draw to him their friendships. And yet he was not content with this, but oft haunted the King's palace, and among the noise- ful press of that tumultuous court inforced himself with jollity and carnal suavity, by the which he might draw to him the hearts of many one there. In spectacles, in meats, in plays, and other courtly motleys and trifles intending, he led forth the business of all the day. And now to King's attendance, now following the intent of great men, — pressed in proffering service that might please them, — busily so * In the British Museum, Cotton MSS. Vespasian B ix., IJber Fundacionis ecdie sancti Bartholomei Londinarum ptinent. prioratui eiusdem in Weste Smythfelde (Latih and English). The initial letter to this Chapter is that of the Manuscript. The heading also, with change of a word, is that of its first English chapter. A.D. 1 1 20. The Founder of the Fair. 3 occupied his time that he might obtain the rather the peti- tions that he should desire of them. Thiswise to king and great men gentle and courteous, known, familiar, and fel- lowly he was. This manner of living he chose in his beginning, and in this exe.'cised his youth." So runs the record. So — in spectacles, meats, plays, and other courtly motleys — were laid the foundations of the Royal favour that bestowed on Bartholomew in West Smithfield the site of his Priory and of his Fair. Henry the First was the king upon whom Rayer waited as jester, or minstrel. He was a king easily moved through superstition. In one year, we are told by Fabian's Chronicle, he had divers monitions and visions ; for, among other fear- ful dreams, he saw a great company of clerks, with divers weapons, which menaced him for debt that he should owe unto them ; and, when they were passed, he was menaced to death of his own knights ; and lastly appeared to him a great company of bishops, which threatened him, and would have smitten him with their crosses. By this monition, he took remorse in his conscience, and did great deeds of charity in Normandy and England. One of them was the building of Reading Abbey, which was founded at about tlie same time as Rayer's Priory of St. Bartholomew. When Henry died he left two characters behind him. " The fame of him said that he passed other men in three things, in wit, in eloquence, and in fortune of battle ; and others said he was overcomen with three vices, with covetise, with cruelty, and with lust of lechery."* Of our next king, Stephen, Malmesbury records the '* readiness to joke." Even Henry the Second, by whose charter, soon after Rayer's death, the fair was confirmed, relished buffoonery. A robust man, who kept down a tendency to corpulence by incessant activity of body, he was a mighty hunter, and, when not reading or at council, had always in his hand a sword, a hunting-spear, or a bow. In discussing business, he stood or walked. Yet his wit was lively, and with his intimate friends he was exceedingly familiar. In the day of Becket's power, he and Becket, * Fabian's Chronicle, cap. 229. B 2 4 Memoh's of Bartholomew Fair. chap. i. after they had made an end of serious affairs, would play together like two boys of the same age. Fitzstephen, who says this in his Life of Becket, gives an instance, which will shew clearly enough that there was yet vocation for a jester at the court of the wisest and most vigorous of the Plan- tagenets. One day the king was riding by the side of his chancellor through the streets of London, in cold, stormy weather, when his Majesty saw coming towards them a poor old man, in a thin coat, worn to tatters. " Would it not be a great charity," (said he to the chan- cellor) " to give this naked wretch, who is so needy and infirm, a good warm cloak ? " " Certainly," Becket replied, " and you do the duty of a king in turning your eyes and thoughts to such objects.'' While they spoke the man came near. The king asked him whether he wished to have a new cloak, and, turning to the chancellor, said, " You shall have the merit of this deed of charity ; " then, suddenly laying hold on a fine new scarlet cloak lined with fur, which Becket wore, he tried to pull it from him, and, after some struggle, in the course of which they both nearly rolled from their horses, Majesty prevailed. The poor man had the cloak, and the applauding courtiers were loud in mirth. In any such scenes, Rayer could perform a part, until he was converted. His conversion was made manifest in his desire to go to the court of Rome, " coveting in so great a labour to do the worthy fruits of penance. He took his way, and whole and sound whither he purposed came. Where at the martyrdom of the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, he, weeping his deeds, and reducing to mind the scapes of his youth and ignorances, prayed for remission of them, behesting further- more these utterly to forsake. There the clear lights of heaven, the men of mercy, Peter and Paul, he ordained mediators between him and the Lord of all earth. And while he tarried there, in that meanwhile he began to be vexed with grievous sickness, and his dolours little and little taking their increase, he drew to the extremity of life ; the which dreading within himself, and deeming the last hour of his death drew him nigh, he shed out as water his heart in the sight of God, and all brake out in tears. Then he A.D. 1121. The Founder of the Fair. 5 avowed that if health God him would grant, that he might lawfully return to his country, he would make an Hospital for recreation of poor men, and, to them so therein gathered, necessaries minister after hL power. And not long after, the benign and merciful God beheld the weeping man, and gave him lais health. So of his sickness recovered he was, and in short time whole made began homeward to come, his vow to fulfil. " Now, when he would pursue his way that he had begun, in a certain night he saw a vision full of dread and of sweet- ness, when, after the labours and sweating that he had by days, his body with rest he would refresh. It seemed him to be bore up on high of a certain beast having four feet and two wings, which set him in an high place, and when he from so great an highness would inflect and bow down his eye to the lower parts downward, he beheld an horrible pit, whose horrible beholding impressed in him the beholder great dread and horror, for the deepness of the same pit was deeper than any man might attain to see. He fremished and for dread trembled, and great cries out of his mouth proceeded. To whom dreading, appeared a certain man pretending in cheer the majesty of a king, of great beauty and imperial authority, and, his eye on him fastened, he said good words : ' O man,' he said, ' what and how much service shouldst thou give to him that in so great a peril hath brought help to thee ? ' " Anon he answered to this, saying, ' Whatsoever might be of best and of mightiest diligently should I give to my deliverer.' " Then said he, ' I am Bartholomew the Apostle," come to succour thee in thine anguish. Know me truly by the common favour and commandment of the Celestial court and council, to have chosen a place in the suburbs of * This seal and the seal of Rahere (next woodcut) were copied by Mr. Delamotte, Professor of Drawing at King's College, London, from the originals among the arciiives of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and first published in a litde book of his, "The Royal Hospital of St. Bartholomew and Priory, illustrated by W. A. Delamotte." Only in these two instances, and, on a later page, in a fragment taken from a modern engraving of an old pictorial map of London, are any of the illustrations to this volume copies of a copy. 6 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. i. London at Smithfield, where in my name thou shalt found a church. The asker in it shall receive, the seeker shall find, and the ringer or knocker shall enter. Of the costs of this building doubt thou nothing, only give thy diligence. and my part shall be to provide necessaries. Of this work know me the master and thyself only the minister. Use diligently thy service and I shall show my lordship.' In these words the vision disparyschydde. " Therefore Rayer came back to London and of his know- ledge and friends with great joy was received. With which, also with the barons of London, he spake familiarly of these things. And what should be done of this he counselled, of them took he this answer, that none of these might be per- fected but the king were first counselled. Namely, sith the place godly to him shewed was contained within the King's Market, of the which it was not lawful to princes or other lords of their own authority anything to manumit, neither yet to so solemn an obsequy depute. Therefore, using these men's counsel, in opportune time he dressed him to the king, and before him, and the Bishop Richard being present (the which he had made to him favourable beforehand), eflfectu- ally expressed his business, and that he might lawfully bring his purpose to effect meekly besought. And ineftectual these prayers might not be whose author was the Apostle, his word therefore was pleasant and acceptable in the king's eye. And he, having the title of desired possession of the A.n. 1 123. The Foiuider of the Fair. 7 King's Majesty, was riglit glad. And after the Apostle's word all necessaries flowed unto the hand." The church was founded in the month of March, 1123. The only fruit that had been exposed in this part of the King's market before the building of the Priory was that which hangs upon the gallows tree. "Truly this place," says our informant, " aforn his cleansing pretended none hope of goodness. Right unclean it was, and as a marsh dungy and fenny with water almost every time abounding. And that that was eminent above the water, dry, was deputed and ordained to the gibbet or gallows of thieves and to the torment of other that were condemned by judicial authority." Upon another portion of the ground now known as Smithfield (that is, smooth field), bordering upon the marsh, great elm trees grew, and it was known as The Elms. The king's market perhaps was held among the trees ; but on the marsh the Priory was founded, around which was held the fair. When Rayer had applied his study to the purgation of this place, he was not ignorant of Satan's wiles, for he made and feigned himself unwise, and outwardly pretended the cheer of an idiot, and chose for a little while to hide the secret of his soul ; and the more secretly he wrought the more wisely he did his work. In sportive wise, as an idler, he drew to him the fellowship of children and servants, assembling himself as one of them, and, with their use and help, stones and other things profitable to the building play- fully he gathered together \ he played with them, and from day to day made himself more vile in his own eyes, until that that was hid and secret openly began to be shewed to all men. Then in marvellous wise he instructed with cunning of truth in divers churches. And the multitude both of clerks and of the laity constantly was exhorted to follow and fulfil those things that were of charity and almsdeed. Thus in brief time, clerks in the same place were brought together to live under regular institution, Rayer obtaining care and oflice of the poorhede, and ministering to them necessaries, not of certain rents but plenteously of oblations of faithful people. 8 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. r. " Some said he was a deceiver. Before the hour of his last disseverance his household people were made his enemies. With pricking of envy many privately, many also openly, against the servant of God ceased not to grudge and in derogation to the place and prelate of the same brought in many slanders." We Avill here wickedly press against the holy prior no heavier slanders than one or two of the many anecdotes of his juggling — or of the wonders worked by St. Bartholomew for the establishment and enrichment of his house, which form the chief part of this history of its foundation. As our historian says, "let us draw near to the narration of miracles." AVhen the oratory was being built, " many and innumer- able were shewed tokens and miracles, but what for the great plenty of them and negligence of writing of the same, they be almost unremembered." When the church was being built, a light was seen at evensong to play upon it for about an hour, then suddenly flash up into the sky and dis- appear. A man who had for many years appeared in the streets of London dragging his body after him, and who begged alms in St. Paul's Church, inviting pity for the languor that de- prived him of the use of all his limbs, was carried in a basket to the new altar of Rayer's Priory, where, having prayed, he lost all crookedness and straightway recovered the use of his limbs. And from that time the noble matrons of the city kept their night watches before St. Bartholomew's altar, and the church became greatly frequented. Again, says the historian, " a certain man took away a book from this place, that we call an Antiphoner, the which was necessary to them that should sing in the church, in that specially there was not at that time great plenty of books in the place; when it was sought busily, and not y-found it was told to Rayer the Prior what was done of the book. And he took the harm with a soft heart patiently," The rest of the story is that Rayer was admonished, by a vision in the night, to ride next morning to the house in the Jew's quarter where the book was, and where he had of course taken good care that it should be. A woman's tongue could not be contained in her mouth. A.n. 1123-33. The Founder of the Fair. 9 Rayer touched it with reUcs, and painted a cross on it with holy water. In the same hour it went back between her teeth. A rich man, upland dwelling, came to the church, having heard of the deeds done in it, and saw miracles. Then he said to the Prior, " Sir, I shall commit me and all mine to Saint Bartholomew, advocate of this place, and to his ser- vice I shall me subdue, and with my substance, as he will inspire me, his clerks honour." Then said Rayer, " Well hast thou purposed, and doubtless a wise keeper of thy goods thou hast chosen." Some time afterwards that man's kitchen took fire, and he said, " Have not I late me and mine committed to blessed Bartholomew the Apostle. And him I have made keeper of my head and of all thing that pertaineth to me. If therefore it pleaseth him his to keep to himself, he shall not need our help." So no man troubled to put out the fire, and it did not spread farther than the kitchen. Sailors in peril said to each other, " What dread we, men of little faith, the which have blessed Barthilmewe the doer of so great miracles at London." They appealed therefore to him for rescue and were rescued, in return for which help they offered to the church of tapers a great quantity. There was a young man, Osbenie by name, whose right hand stuck to his left shoulder, and whose head stuck to his left hand. He was unglued at St. Bartholomew's estab- lishment. At the high festival of Saint Bartholomew, a boy said to have been born blind was led into the church, one leading him, fother and mother following. And as he entered the church he fell down to the earth, and there awhile turned himself, now this w'ay, now that w-ay. Then he rose up with blood running down his cheeks, declared that he for the first time saw his parents, and called sundry things dis- tinctly by their proper names. Rayer joined to himself a certain old man, Alfuin by name, to whom was sad age with experience of long time. This same old man not long before had built the church of St. Giles at Cripplegate. And that good work happily he had ended. Deeming this man profitable to him, Rayer io Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. i. deputed him as his companion. Alfuin, who had shown skill as a collector, carried about the vessel in which to collect offerings. A surly butcher, who was named Godrich, called him a truant, and would give nothing. Alfuin was importunate, Godrich was obstinate. Alfuin then broke out in these words, " O thou unhappy, O thou ungentle and unkind man ! to the Giver of all goods wilt not come ? Take in experience the virtue of the glorious Apostle, in whom, if thou trust, I promise thee that every piece of thy meat that thou givest me a portion of shall sooner be sold than other, and nothing to the minishing or lessening of the price." The butcher cast a bit of meat into his vessel, and so bade the friars leave him ; to whom Alfuin answered, " I shall not go till my word and promise be fulfilled." He waited, therefore, in the shop until a man came, who bought from the heap of meat that had supplied the Priory, and paid without questioning the price asked by the butcher. But Godrich had charged this customer for the meat taken by St. Bartholomew, as well as for his own, " And from that time they began to be more prompt to give their alms, and also fervent in devotion, and strained how they might pre- vent one another in giving" — that is to say, they competed for the sanctifying of extortion. Here are miracles enough to assure us who contrived the tale of a conspiracy against the life of Rayer, which a penitent conspirator revealed. Such a tale gave the cunning Prior opportunity to go before the king "with a lamentable querele expressing how with untrue despites he was deformed, and what fastidious outbreaking had tempted him, beseeching his royal munificence that his person and the place he had granted him he would defend. The king answered that he would apply him to his just and necessary petitions, and that furthermore he behested himself to be a defender of him, and of his ; therefore he made his Ghurch with all his pertinence with the same freedoms that his crown is libertied with, or any other church in Phigland that is most y-freed ; and released it all customs, and declared it for to be free from all earthly service, power, and subjection, and gave sharp sentence against contrary malignants. Such liberties A.D. 1133. Rio/iis of the Fair. 1 1 he confirmed with his charter and seal, and commended to the ui^holding and defence of all his successors. Rayer, when with such privileges he was strengthened and com- fortably defended, glad he went out from the face of the king. And when he was come home to his, what he had obtained of the Royal majesty expressed to some that they should joy with him, and unto some that they should be afraid. " Also this worshipful man l^roposed for to depose the complaint of his calamities afore the See of Rome, and of the same see writings to bring to him and to his aftercomers profitable, but divers under-growing impediments, and at the last letting the article of death, that he would have fulfilled he might not." Thus it was that Rayer prospered greatly by his wise investment of the wit of a Court Jester in the speculation of a Priory ; and there can be no doubt that if as a court wit he was lean, as a monk, according to the record we are following, " the skin of his tabernacle dilated." It was in the twelfth year of his prelacy, ten years before his death, that Rayer obtained from King Henry the First, upon the plea of danger from his enemies, that ampler charter to which reference has just been made. 1 2 Memoirs of BartholGmezv Fair. chap. i. The Fair had been from the very first connected with the Church, and in this charter, bearing date in the year 1133, the king declares, after providing for independent election of a new Prior by the monks in the event of Rayer's death, and confirming piivileges and possessions of the Priory : — " I grant also my firm peace to all persons coming to and returning from The Fair which is wont to be celebrated in that place at the Feast of St. Bartholomew ; and I forbid any of the Royal servants to implead any of their persons, or without the consent of the canons, on those three days, to wit, the eve of the feast, the feast itself, and the day following, to levy dues upon those going thither. And let all the people in my whole kingdom know that I will main- tain and defend this Church, even as my crown ; and if any one shall presume to contravene this our Royal privilege, or shall offend the Prior, the canons, clergy, or laity of that place, he, and all who are his, and everything that belongs to him, shall come into the king's power." A.D. 300-1300. The First Fairs. i J CHAPTER II. The first fairs were formed by tlie gathering of wor- shippers and pilgrims about sacred places, and espe- cially within or about the walls of abbeys and cathedrals on the feast days of the saints enshrined in them. The sacred building often was in open country, or near some village too small to provide accommodation for the throng assembled at its yearly feast of dedication. Then tents \vere pitched, and as the resources of the district would no more suffice to victual than to lodge its flying visitors, stalls were set up by provision dealers and by all travelling merchants who look to a concourse foi opportunity of trade. Thus in the time of Constantine, Jews, Gentiles, and Christians assembled in great numbers to perform their several rites about a tree reputed to be the oak Manibre under which Abraham received the angels ; at the same place, adds Zosimus, there also came together many traders, both for sale and purchase of their wares. St. Basil,* towards the close of the sixth century, complained that his own church was profaned by the public fairs held at the martyr's shrines. Under the Fatimite Caliphs, in the eleventh century, there was an annual fair held even on Mount Calvary. We m^ not be justified in deriving the word Fair, from the Church festivals under their name oi Fcricz : it may be derived through the French Foirc, from another classical root, and mean only a place to which merchandise is brought. Germans, however, keep the origin of a fair * De Asceticis. 14 Memoirs of BartJiolomeiu Fair. chap. ii. in mind by calling it Messc, or Mass ; in some regions it is called, as in Brittany, a Kirmcss, or Church Mass. There is a second opinion upon almost every point in etymology, and there are some who say that Messe is the German for a fair, because men seized upon a word v.hich signified the end of Church and the beginning of chaffer : ecclesia ?nissa est, the Church is dismissed. Bishops and abbots, of course, never overlooked the reasonable source of profit to their shrines and the main- tainers of them, which would be derived from tolls upon the trade occasioned by themselves, and carried on within the bounds of their own lawful jurisdiction. Because traders obtained from the Bishops and patrons of the churches and monasteries, whose dedication feasts they visited, licences called Indidtus, there still are to be found in South Germany some fairs called Dulte ; there is, for example, the Jacobi-Dult at Munich, on St. James's Day. Every such fair was called after the saint whose feast day brought it into life. There Avere the fairs of St. James, St, Denis, St. Bartholomew, and at first their duration used to be for the natural period of three days : the day of assembling on the eve of the feast ; the feast day ; and the day following ; when there were farewells to be said to friends, matters of business to further among strangers, and fairings (relics perhaps, or images of saints, the ancestry of our small figures in gilt gingerbread) to be procured for relatives at home, before the general dispersion of the holiday assembly. Until a date later than that of the foundation of the fair in Smithfield, fairs were held very commonly in the church- yard of the sacred building about which they were assembled, or even within the church itself In the fourteenth year of Henry the Third the archdeacons within the diocese of Lincoln were instructed to inquire into this practice, and it was in that diocese soon afterwards prohibited. In the same reign a royal mandate forbade the keeping of Northampton fair within the church or churchyard of All Saints. In the thirteenth year of the reign of Edward the Second, the holding of a fair in any churchyard was pro- hibited by statute. The Abbot of Ely, in king John's A.D. 300 I300. The First Fairs. 15 reign, preached against the liolding of fairs on a Sunday. In earlier times, special precautions had been taken to enforce order upon sacred ground ; and it was not unusual, when a fair was held within cathedral precincts, to oblige every man to bind himself by an oath at the gate not to lie, steal, or cheat, till he went out again. The right of levying toll, sometimes even a right of coinage, like that once granted during Magdeburg fair to the church of St. Moritz, was derived by tlie clergy from the crown ; and to this day, throughout Europe, no fair can be lawfully held, except by grant from the crown, or by prescription supposed to arise from a grant, in cases where no record of it can be found. Since the small size of the towns and villages of Europe during the infancy of modern nations, and the infrequent resort of strangers to any place except upon occasions of religious festival, allowed few towns to become centres of trade, the fairs of the most popular saints, to which men flocked from afar in greatest numbers, became the chief marts in every country. They prospered especially, because the privileges granted by the crown to the clergy for the holding of fairs were equivalent to a concession of some channels for free trade, through the midst of a wilderness of taxes. Thus, in France, before a way was opened for trade by the fair of St. Denis, of which the origin is found in the reign of Dagobert, rights of sahdaticuni, ponialiaiiii, rcpaticum^ and portulaticum, ab- sorbed one-half of a foreign merchant's goods upon their first arrival and debarcation. But to the fair chartered by Dagobert, " in honour of the Lord and to the glory of St. Denys at his festival," traders came, exempt, not only from imperial taxation, but from many of the ordinary risks of travel ; and it became, therefore, under the name of forum indidiiin (whence rindid and its corruption to landii) an emporium for the iron and lead of the Saxons, for slaves, lor the jewellery and perfumes of the Jews, for the oil, wine and fat of Provence and Spain, for the honey and madder of Neustria and Brittany, for merchandise from Egypt and the East. The fair, which lasted for ten days following the tenth of October, was opened by a procession of monks from the Abbey of St. Denis ; and, in later times, it was 1 6 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. n. usual for the Parliament of Paris to allow itself a holiday called Landi, in order that its members might take part in the great marriage-feast of commerce and religion. The granting of the King's " firm peace," or " firmest peace/' to all persons coming to, staying in, or returning from a fair, was not a mere technical form.' Otto the Great used the same phrase on behalf of German fairs in the tenth century; breakers of such peace were set under ban ; and, where the right of private feud was recognised, it was suspended during fair time. Traders, on their way to or from a fair, and in the fair, were free from arrest, except for debts arising out of commerce in the fair itself. This immunity was defined in the case of the then ancient Frankfort fair, by Charles the Fourth, in the fourteenth century, as freedom to fau-goers for eighteen days before and after the fair, during which they were to fear nothing from Imperial mandate, interdict, ban, or arrest. As further security, Frederic the First had ordained that such traders should carry swords tied to their saddles, or fastened to the vehicles in which they rode, "not for the hurt of the innocent, but for defence against the robber." Again, because there was no settled provision for the feeding and lodging of a large number of travellers, who passed but once a year over roads usually unfrequented, and through towns but thinly peopled, special licence was given to the inhabitants of any district so traversed to convert their houses during fair time into inns. The Free Fairs of the continent were those which invited foreign trade, for to them all merchants might enter from abroad exempt from every public impost, and secure against all detention of their goods ; they had simply to pay the tolls of the fair to the church, city, or person on whom they had been conferred by royal grant. But this privilege was forfeited if goods were sold out of the fair, or if the trader did not remain during the whole fiiir time, seeking or awaiting purchasers. There were also in France and Ger- many small fairs that received only local privileges, and to which foreign trade was not brought by a free opening of ports; but the great national fairs were always centres of free trade, and the resort to them of merchants from •abroad A. p. 300-1300 The First Fairs. 17 was not only expected, but sometimes even solicited. Thus in the year 13 14, Philip the Second, of France, complained to our King Edward the Second, that British merchants had ceased to frequent the French fairs with wood and other goods, and desired that they might be persuaded or compelled to do so. To add to the attractions of a fair, and more especially to induce the rich and powerful to resort to it with full purses in their pursuit of pleasure, amusements were introduced. The best entertainment offered to the curious in the first days of modern history was to be found, not in fixed cities, but among the tents of those great shifting capitals of trade. Thus the nobles of Languedoc betook themselves in plea- sure parties to the fair of Beaucaire, the nobles of Normandy to that of Guibray, German princes and lords amused them- selves once a year at Frankfort and Leipsic, and in Bartho- lomew Fair there was entertainment good enough for royal visitors. Grant of the tolls of a fair was then a concession from the crown of no mean value. It would help largely to the establishment and enrichment of a religious house, and was prudently secured by Rayer when he laid the foundation of his priory of St. Bartholomew. Stourbridge Fair, at one time perhaps the largest in the world, is traced back to Carausius ; but it was specially granted by King John for the maintenance of a hospital for lepers, which had a chapel in the neighbourhood. Sometimes a fair was granted for the restoration of a town or village that had been consumed by fire ; this was, in the reign of Edward the Third, the origin of a fair held at Burley, in Rutlandshire. Owners and governors of fairs were bound to take care that everything was sold according to just weight and measure ; all goods sold were sold absolutely, however bad the title to them of the seller, saving only the rights of the King. In every fair there was its own court of prompt justice, or Pie Poudre Court. Proprietors of fairs were authorised also to appoint a clerk to mark and allow weights, and to take reasonable fees. By extortion they might lose their franchise, or the franchise might fall by voluntary aban- donment or disuse for ten years, and might be forfeited by c 1 8 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. ii. revolt or excommunication, or if the market was kept open beyond the period specified in the grant, a time that was to be declared at each opening by proclamation. Any person selling goods in the fair after its time was expired, forfeited double their value, one fourth of the forfeit being due to the prosecutor, the rest to the King. Such strictness was the more necessary, because these institutions, however free to those using them, were commonly oppressive to adjacent traders. Not only was it unlawful for any two fairs to be set up within seven miles of each other, but it was usual to compel all shopkeepers to cease from independent business in the neighbourhood of any such privileged market. Thus in the year 1248, when Henry the Third ordered a fair at AVestminster, he compelled the city tradesmen to shut up their shops while it was open, and even suppressed the fair at Ely for the further lessening of competition. " Which was done," says Holinshed, " not without great trouble and pains to the citizens, which had not room there, but in booths and tents, to their great disquieting and disease, for want of necessary provision, were turmoiled too pitifully in mire and dirt, through occasion of rain that fell in that unseasonable time of year." The fair on St. Giles's Hill, given to the Bishop of Win- chester by William the Conqueror for thi-ee days, and by Henry the Third for sixteen days, closed the shops not only in Winchester but also in Southampton, which was a capital trading town. Wares sold out of the fair within seven miles of it were forfeit to the Bishop. Officers were placed on roads and bridges to take toll upon all merchandise travel- ling towards Winchester. The Bishop received toll on every parcel of goods entering the city gates. In the fair itself was a tent of justice called the Pavilion, in which the Bishop's officers had power to try causes for seven miles around. No lord of a manor could during fair time hold a court baron within that circuit, except by licence had from the Pavihon. On St. Giles's-eve the mayor, bailiffs, and citizens of Win- chester gave up to the Bishop's officers the keys of the four city gates, and while the fair lasted the Church appointed its own mayor, bailiff, and coroner. Foreign merchants came to this fair and paid its tolls. Monasteries had also shopsf A. D. 300-1300. The First Fairs. 19 or houses in its drapery, pottery, or spicery streets, used only at fliir time, and held often by lease from the Bishop. Such was the place occupied in social history by the first fairs of modern Europe. For many years after the death of Rayer they continued to be the chief resorts of trade, and even in the sixteenth century there was so little of com- mercial life in English towns, that stewards of country houses made annual purchases of household stores at fairs that mi"ht be a hundred miles distant from the establishments for which they were providmg. Robbery from booths was a capital offence, for which two persons were executed in the reign of Henry the Eighth. Many a purchaser, however, suffered robbery at booths, if the complaints of old writers against cheating in trade be credible. Thus the monk who wrote in the fourteenth cen- tury the Vision of Piers Ploughman, makes covetousness tell us : — First I learned to lie : wickedly to weigh was my first lesson. To Wye and to Winchester I went to the Fair, with many manner merchandise, as- my master me hight, and it had been unsold this seven year, so God me help, had not there gone the Grace of Guile among my chaffer. c 2 20 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chm'. m. CHAPTER III. ^artbolomcfo luqglcrs. N the the name of the holy and un- divided Trinity, I, Henry King of England, William of Canterbury, and George Bishop of London, to all Bishops and Abbots, Counts, Barons, Justices, Gentlemen, and all men and faithful citizens greet- ing, grant to Rayer the Prior and the regular Canons, their Hospital free of all authority beyond epis- copal usage, defend all the rights of Rayer and the Canons, and for- bid that any one molest Rayer. I grant also my firm peace and the fullest privileges to all persons coming to and returning from the Fair of St. Bartholomew." The charter of 1133, whereof this is a summary, and from which the pas- sage that especially concerns us has already been quoted, was written in a book with other records, and especially ^the Rental of the Priory, by Brother John Cok, in the middle of the fifteenth century. His massive volume (worded, of course, in Latin) is superscribed " The Rental of the Hospital of Saint Bartholomew in West Smithfield, London ; of all the returns pertaining to the same Hospital, whether within or without the city of London. Compiled and written A. p. I 133. BarthoUwiew yiiQ-criers. 21 by Brother John Cok, Treasurer of tlie Hospital, at Easter, A.D. 1456 ; and in the thirty-sixth year of King Henry the Sixth, in the time of Master John Wakeryngs, the thirty-fifth year of his Masterslii]), the thirty-seventh of the profession of the aforesaid J. Cok, and sixty-fourth of his age." At the end we read : " Written by Brother John Cok in the evening of his life, a.d. 1468. To whom may God be merciful Amen." Brother Cok, therefore, spent twelve years in copy- ing into one volume the charters, bulls, and other vital docu- ments, relating to the Priory, and in the compilation of its then very extensive rent-roll. His age was almost fourscore when he had finished, and still he had left the initial letters, chief ornaments of a manuscript, to be inserted by another hand. In Queen Elizabeth's time there was extant a manu- script Bible written by John Cok, aged sixty-eight, of which Stow says it is " the fairest Bible that I have seen." After John Cok's death, there arose within the Church a spirit of resistance against Church corruption ; and there seems to have been a friar in the Priory of St. Bartholomew, perhaps even a treasurer, who had licence to complete the decora- tions of the Rental, and supplied the vacant spaces in a paler ink, with grotesque letters, among which are two that prove him to have been of doubtful faith. Of his initial letter to the first charter establishing the power of the Prior and the Canons, a tracing is prefixed to the summary at the beginning of this chapter. Having illustrated this document with a pike swallowing a gudgeon, he, on a later page, adorns a bull of Pope Honorius for the raising of alms from 2 2 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. m. the faithful on behalf of the poor sustained in St. Bartholo- mew's, with an initial letter H, presenting this sketch of a pastoral kiss from the fox faithfully accepted by the goose. The Grace of Guile undoubtedly assisted in the founding of the Priory. Even in its first days it contained friars who before his decease said that Rayer was a deceiver. Cor- nelius Agrippa, whom the world has denounced as a juggler, was an honest spiritual man ; Rayer, whose fame as a saint nobody has questioned, was a juggler. Yet the honest man lived a waste life, and the cheat laid the foundations of what is now one of the noblest charities in Europe. I can com- pare only the men themselves. In old times the Church saved or the Church destroyed a reputation, but the Church was very fallible indeed, and not disinterested. It was by the production of false miracles at the feast and fair of St. Bartholomew, that Rayer made his institution famous and drew crowds to Smithfield. In his church, on St. Bartholo- mew's day, there lay among the glitter of the votive tapers wretched men, women, and children : some truly wretched, hoping in vain for miraculous relief; some noisily wretched, who were in the presence of God mocking his dispensations, and intending, with connivance of the Prior, to perform a lie before the altar. After the death of Rayer miracles became more scarce ; " Forasmuch," says the monk who in the next generation wrote their history, " forasmuch as the beginning of great things needeth greater help, when the remembered prior was yet alive there was then plenty of ministered / grace." He distinctly established miracles as a means of ^ attraction to his feast and fair. It was a solemnity, we read, " for obventions and gifts, in money, in household, in corn, and in moveable goods, great number : and then after a jocund feast, busy in this place was had of recovering men into health ; — of them that languished, of dry men, of con- tract men, of blind men, dumb men, and deaf men : for this cause when the day of his" [the saint's] "nativity into heaven was known," [in ancient times there had been two opinions about it] " it was solemnised and honoured with great mirth and dancing on earth." The twenty-fourth of August is this day of St. Bartholomew, on which in the first years of the Smithfield Priory and Fair, " men pressed hither thickly for various causes, and shouldered together," and A.D. 1133-43- Bartholomew JiLgglers. 23 their press was compared to that of the sick men round the well, at which they waited till the angel stirred the waters. Though Rayer was an impostor, and denounced as such in his last days by his own people, it does not follow that every miracle worked at the Feast of St. Bartholomew in his time and in the days of his immediate successors was invented at the Priorv. The customs of the festival offered to dis- honest persons who desired profit or notoriety direct tempta- tion to stand forward as people on whose behalf there was a divine interposition. Thus, in the time of Rayer, there was a carpenter of Dunwich-by-the-Sea, professing himself to have been contracted and twisted in all his limbs, to have prayed to St. Bartholomew and received promise of help. Brought to London by a shipper, and received among the poor men of the Hospital, he gradually recovered ; first using his hands in woman's work, such as the making of distaffs, then v/hen other limbs strengthened, hewing timber with an axe, then squaring it with the chopping axe, until finally blessing God, he exercised his trade of carpentry within the church in presence of the congregation, and established fa himself a business in London. In cases like this, it is natural to suppose that the Prior was less a deceiver than a man content to be deceived. But there was a special class of miracles relating to the larder of the Priory, in the publication of which nobody could have been more interested than the Prior and the Canons. Rayer's colleague and collector, Alfuin, was appa- rently a man of kindred genius. We have read the Miracle of the Butcher's Meat ; now let us add to it the Miracle of Malt. Alfuin, when collecting the materials for a brew of ale by the monks, went to a pious woman in the parish of St. Giles, Eden, the wife of Edred. This woman had but seven sieves of malt, from which, if she spared any, her own brewing would be spoilt ; nevertheless, rather than send the holy man empty away, she measured him a sieve full. Then she measured what remained, and there were still seven sieves full. Surprised at this, she tried again, and lo, there were eight sieves full. She measured again, and there were nine sieves full. She took her increase to the church, and publicly bore witness to the marvel. A stifif-jointed child, who always "lacked bowableness," 24 MejJioirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. m. was healed in the church, "and," it is added, " sen-ed the Canons there in the kitchen ; and, for the gift of his health, he gave the service of his body." In Raver's time also the wonder-working relics visited the provinces. A certain man of Norwich, who had not taken enough care of himself after bloodletting, lost the power of sleep for almost seven years, became lean, shrivelled, and discoloured about the mouth. Unable to work, he fell from a condition of wealth into poverty. In the seventh year of his misfortune, when the relics of St. Bartholomew were brought and put into the Oratory of St. Nicholas at Yarmouth, " this man drew to the same relics devoutly, and he found that he sought ; he rang at the door, and our porter opened to him, and showed him magnificently the bowels of his mercy." He grovelled on the ground, slept, rose, and was well. Let it suffice to cite, from the other miracles performed at the Feast of Bartholomew in Rayef s time, one piece of very clumsy jugglery. A dropsical man rolled on the pavement, and, it is said, " at the last, in the sight of all men, he cast out wonder venom, and his inwards were purged from this deadly filth, and all whole returned to his own house." It is to be recorded, also, that the Priory, when altogether new, was furnished with traditions. Edward the Confessor had a vision of this place, " when he was in the Church of God, replete with manifold beauty of virtue, as the book of his gests declareth," and shone as a holy man, full of the spirit of prophecy. Also, three men of Greece, pilgrims, enter- ing England of old time, desired to visit the bodies of saints ; and, coming to West Smithfield, prostrated themselves in the marsh on the site of the Prior^', and preached to the mocking bystanders of a temple that was to stand there, whose fame should " attain from the spring of the sun to the going down." In the year 1143 Rayer died, "after the years of his pre- lacy twenty -two and six months, the twentieth of September, the seventh month, the clay house of this world he forsook," and there was left by him, says the record, " a little flock of thirteen Canons, as a few sheep, with little land and right few rents; nevertheless, with copious obventions of the altar, and helping of the nigh parts of the populous city, they were holpen." The author of the record, written about thirty A.n. 1 143. Bartholomew Jugglers. 25 years afterwards, adds : " Soothly they flourish now, with less fruit than that time when the aforesaid solemnisations of miracles were increased." Upon the monument raised over the tomb of the de])arted shepherd is an effigy that represents him in death, with an angel at his feet, and two of his sheep with Bibles open at this text in the 51st chapter of Isaiah: " The Lord shall comfort Zion : he will comfort all her waste places ; and he will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the garden of the Lord." About a year after the Founders death, in the year 1144, and in the reign of King Stephen, who made Theobald archbishop of Canterbury, Robert, Bishop of London, ad- mitted as Prior, Thomas Hagno, one of the Canons of the Church of St. Olave. This Prior's rule lasted for thirty years, and it was very soon after his death, and in the reign of Henry the Second, that the Manuscript History of the Foundation of St. Bartholomew's was written. In the charter of King Henry the First it had been pro- vided, that after the death of Prior Rayer out of the same congregation should be chosen he who was worthy ; but that no one should be chosen from elsewhere, whether by the demand of Pope or Prnice, unless, on account of manifest crimes (which Heaven forbid), none of the house were found worthy of the office ; in that event, they were to have power of choosing a Prior from some other reputable place. We will infer no evil, however, from the fact that after Rayer's death the office of Prior remained for a whole year in abeyance, and that it was a canon of St. Osyth whom the Bishop of London then confirmed in the office. In those 26 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. m. days tliere was civil war in the nation, and there might well be dissension in a priory. If the household was divided against Raver when he died — and there are said even to have been plots against his life — the Bishop might have refused to accept a Prior from among its inmates ; or they may have themselves agreed to cancel in a friendly spirit rival claims, by choosing from the church without their walls a second Prior who was able to maintain the fame of their establishment. The first prior was a lay jester transformed into a clerical juggler, and the second prior was an improvisa- tore. Prior Thomas, unlike Rayer, was a scholar, and he had the power of delivering himself copiously in impromptu rhyme ; therefore, whenever he wished to attract the people to his ministration, it was his custom to preach in doggrel. " This Thomas,'' says the historian among the friars, "as we have found in common, was a man of jocund company and fellowly jocundity; of great eloquence and of great cun- ning, instruct in philosophy and in divine books exercised ; and he had it in prompt whatsoever he would utter to speak meterly. And he had in use every solemn day when the case required to dispense the word of God, and flowing to him the press of people from without on this account, He added to him glory who had given him this grace within. He was prelate to us meekly almost thirty years, and in age an hundred winter almost, with whole wits, with all Christian solemnity he deceased and was put to our fathers the year of our Lord 1174, of the Papacy of the Blessed Alexander the Third the i6th year, of the coronation of the most unskunfited" (invictissimi — undiscomfited) "king of Eng- land, Henry the Second, the 20th year, on the 17th day of the month of January." The flock of canons in the Priory had then increased to thirty-five, " increasing with them temporal goods evenly." The steady increase in the wealth of the establishment had been due not merely to the learning and the rhyming of the Prior Thomas. As a rhymer and a jocund man it is iust to believe that the Prior of St. Bartholomew's furnished something more than pulpit oratory for the celebration of the yearly festival. Possibly he wrote miracle plays. Cer- tainly also the church still boasted of its miracles, which. A.D. 1144-74. Bartholoview Juo-olcrs. 27 though less numerous than in the days of Rayer, — "as a plant, when it is well rooted, the oft watering? of him ceaseth," yet were in particular years especially abundant. In the year 1 148, the twelfth after the death of Henry the First King of England, when the golden path of the sua brought round the desired joys of festival celebration, at a new solemnity of the Blessed x'Vpostle there were beheld new miracles. Feeble men loaded with various diseases lay prostrate among the lights in the church, imploring divine mercy and the presence of St. Bartholomew. Presently some were heard rejoicing at release from headache, some from lameness, or from singing in the ears, some from bleared eyes ; many joyed at relief from fevers, giving thanks to the honour of tbe Apostle, " certain while everywhere for such thing was given applause and gladness of all the people." In the left corner of the church — I abridge but retain the substance and the manner of the narrative — some were heard weeping amid the gladness, where lay a certain damsel deaf and dumb, whose parents, waiting, lay grovelling on the pavement, and ceased not from ])rayer till all things was finished of the clergy that was expedient to so great a feast. When the canons sang the second evensong, the maid be- came more grievously tormented, frothing at the mouth, beating her breast, knocking her head against the ground. When they came to the hymn of our Blessed Lady, where the altars should be lighted, the foresaid maid began with a sharp voice to cry and her members she stretched out. Anon joyfully skipping forth, her eyes, now new and now clear, with the linen cloth that she was clothed in she wiped and dried. And thus with stedfast standing, when she was repaired of hearing and of the acceptable light of seeing, she ran to the table of the holy altar, spreading out both hands to heaven. One Spilman, ploughman at Berwick, an epileptic, was brought to the church at the feast of the Apostle, then, receiving his health, kissed the altar, " and not a little he amended into devotion all that were then present." Others received eyesight and bore witness ; women were cured of the palsy ; a crippled girl received the saint's word of healing in a dream. 28 Memoirs of Bartholoinezu Fair, chaimh. In the year 1159 at the feast of St. Bartholomew, many tokens were showed in his holy church. A certain woman, grievously sick, borne to the church on a horse litter in the vigil of the Apostle, about the hour of complin began to recover, rose out of her litter and came to kiss the high altar, the convent of the church and many people being present. After the octaves of the same feast, a child was brought by its parents which had been mad since the feast of St. Lawrence, and his mother said that he had been borne to many places of saints but had obtained no remedy. The child was cured by St. Bartholomew and shown to all the people on the Sunday following. In addition also to the king's firm peace and the usual j)rivileges, there was suggested by a miracle the special care of the apostle over those braving the perils of a journey to the Festival and Fair. Thus it Avas taught that a Kentish priest, "coming near the gladness of the glorious feast," rode a good horse that was dear to him, and was, with other men, bound to the same church. At night, they needed their inn, and found no hostelry, for which reason they camped and turned tlieir horses out to pasture under watch. All fell asleep, and the priest's horse broke loose. Then there appeared to the sleeping priest a certain man with shining cheer, and shook his vestment softly. The priest, so awakened, missed his horse, found him two furlongs off, and skipped upon him. At London, he bore witness that the image he saw in the Priory was most like to him that waked him, and "his horse that so deliciously he loved, and so neghgently had lost, mightily restored." The author of the record says that many marvellous things for the prolixity of this treatise and the similitude of miracles he has omitted to write, but he candidly defines the object of all these miraculous interpositions. The moral of them all is, Give, give ! " that freely they bring, kindly and joyfully, not only men but women," A poor woman at Windsor lost, in a murrain, all her cows but one, and that was sick. She measured the animal's length for the size of a taper to St. Bartholomew, and im- mediately it recovered. — Ihere was a pestilence among A.D. 1144-74. Bartholomew Jicgglers. 29 cattle at Enfield. A pious clerk lost nine oxen, and theiti remained but a sick heifer. He vowed it to St. Bartho- lomew if it recovered, or the price of its skin if it died. Suddenly it was well and began to eat hay. It was duly sent to Smithfield. — A woman living by the castle of Mont- fichet (that castle built by Gilbert de Montfichet, a follower of the Conqueror, was afterwards pulled down to make room for the great house of the Blackfriars), who, though she stood in the bonds of marriage, lived as a nun, saw her cow in peril of life over calving. She said to her servants that if the cow calved without hurt, she would mark the calf in the ear, and when it was weaned give it to the church of St. Bartholomew. The cow ceased to suffer, and the calf was immediately born, notched already by the Saint himself in both ears. Never did a blessed Saint look after the perquisites of his office more strictly, let it even be said more greedily, than the Saint Bartholomew, who was magnified by the Prior and Canons in West Smithfield. He would even, when it was made worth his while, consent with thieves. Once, when the King of England besieged Wales, a merchant had made money by extortion in his traffic with the King's army at Colchester, and vowed to St. Bartholomew a part of his unhallowed gains. But the Saint's share he kept by him. This man took ship to London, and then travelled further, till upon the way one of his fellow-travellers robbed him of his money, which he had placed under his pillow. The Saint then appeared and lectured the afflicted merchant most devoutly on the sin of extortion. But to the prayers of the plundered thief he accorded the infonnation, that he had miraculously caused the man who took his wealth to keep it undiminished, and the Saint agreed to contrive its quiet restoration, on condition that he received for his share all that had been vowed to him — and more. A poor man, accustomed to come annually with his wife to the Feast of St. Bartholomew, and bring oblations, was seized as a known offender against the laws (wrongfully, says the record) by a beadle, carried off, and chained in a house near the Priory. There, in the night, at the sound of the bells and hymns of the monks, his chain miraculously 30 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. m. parted from its fastening, and he was able to escape, dragging it after him. The beadle hearing the clank of the chain of his escaping prisoner, leapt out of bed, reached his door in time to see him running through the moonlight to the church, and was miraculously deprived of the power either of shouting or pursuing. Tlie escaped man fled to the church, and then gave praise to the protecting Saint. Again, we are told that a man, bound by his enemies, was carried by them in a cart. When passing the church his bonds were loosened, he skipped out of the cart, entered the churcli, and was safe. The church of St. Bartholomew became only a pleasanter and safer sanctuary for the prison- breaker when, before the congregation, he ascribed his escape to a miracle worked in his favour by its patron Saint. London, being a port, it was advisable that the brother- hood in Smithfield should lay stress on the power of their Saint to assist sea-faring men who brought gifts to the Priory. Eleven ships from a port in Flanders being sepa- rated in a storm, one of them ran aground, and was buried half its depth in sand. On board this vessel, among the weepers, wallers, and mistrusters, was one, riper and sadder of age, who, preaching to them, said : " I have heard specially of one saint and heavenly citizen, I have heard of St. Barthilmewe, that, among the knights of the heavenly king, is worthy to be called upon, who pleasantly conde- scendeth to the prayers of devout askers. Let us, tlierefore, lift up our hands to Heaven, and avow, with clear devotion, that, when we come whither we purpose, to London, we shall bear thither, in the honour of St. Barthilmewe, a Ship of Silver, after the form of our ship, made on our costs, offering it to that church in mind of oui deliverance." The vow was made, and immediately the S aint, " with his holy hand, drew forth the ship by the fore-end."' The story ends with the delivery of the silver to the Priory. St. Bartholomew himself is elsewhere represented, in the midst of the storm, touting for custom. A merchant was brought to the chapter-house, who had a story for the canons. At sea, in a storm, when he and all his shipmates prayed to many saints, he " heard a voice saying, What cry ye upon so many names of saints, and your patron, by A.n. 1144-74. Bartholoiiicw yiigglcrs. 31 special privilege granted of God to you, ye laches to calL To whom I said, Who is that, my Lord ? And he said, Most blessed Bartholomew call ye in to you, and him y^i shall feel most prompt helper in this present peril." They called, therefore, upon St. Bartholomew; and thereupon the elements gave way to them, and served their will. The merchant, having told this story, presented his oblation. — A merchant of Flanders was taken by the saint from a wreck in the midst of the sea, and landed dryfoot on the English shore.' — A sailor, clinging to a mast after a shipwreck, ap- pealed to St. Bartholomew, who came to still the storm, told him that there would pass a ship from Dover for his rescue, and, before departing, gave him a piece of bread. This morsel of bread the sailor produced at the church, where it was kept as a token and a relic ; so that we must number this among the exhibitions popular in the first days of Bartholomew Fair. It was not Saint Bartholomew alone who had a business to look after in Smithfield. In the eastern part of its church the Priory maintained an oratory and altar to the Virgin. To Hubert, a mild and pious priest, worshipper there, once appeared " the Mother of Mercy saying, with a honey and sweet mouth : Canons, she said, of this church, thy brethren, my darlings, in this place consecrate to my name, sometime paid to me solemn office of mass, and devout service of faithful reverence gave to me. And now hath undercrept them negligence, charity chilleth, that neither have the holy mysteries of my Son been haunted, neither to me has wonted praise been given. Therefore, from the high de- scense of heavens, by the consent of my son, hither I descend, for your given obsequy of honour to give thanks," &c. The comment upon this fiction was. How holy must the shrine be to which Mary herself came down ; and thus, no doubt, there was secured for the Priory a sensible addition to its income. I am not founding an opinion about these miracles on the citation of a itw, but, at the risk of being tedious, have told nearly all of them ; the reader can judge, there- fore, of the drift of the whole mass. Only the monotonous details of a few healings in the church on Festival day will Alenioirs of BartJiolomeiu Fair. chap. m. have been passed over when four more stories have been detailed. These relate to the power of the Saint over the devil. A young courtier, Robert, on the way from Northampton to London slept in a wood. In dreams the enemy came to him, sat at his head in the shape of a fair woman, and, before departing, put a little bird into his mouth. He awoke mad, and ran about the country until he was caught and brought to London. Him the Saint cured. — A certain knight, Radulph, of the household of William de Montfichet, became mad on his way from Essex to London, slid down from his horse, rent his clothes, scattered abroad his money, and threw stones at those he met. He wandered in woods and about hills, was dangerous in crowds, and, after he had been captured, withstood violently those who conveyed him to the church of St. Bartholomew, in which, after he had dwelt two nights, he was restored to his whole mind again. — Wymund, who ruled St. Martin's church, situate in the corner of the way that leads to Westminster, and dean of neighbouring churches, was beyond equity given to volup- tuous life; but he trained virtuously his illegitimate daughter, who trod all things carnal under-foot. Then the Serpent transformed himself into the likeness of a fair young man, adorned with precious ornaments, as one who was a gentle- man of the king's blood, and suddenly slid into her chamber. He talked with her in vain. When the nurse came she heard the talking, but saw only the maid. The Serpent reappeared again and again, with increased beauty, and offering increased temptation ; at last, being still discom- fited, he smote that maiden, and deprived her of her wit. A great crowd gathered where she fell ; when she could speak, she explained what had happened, and was borne on a carpet to the church of St. Bartholomew. The Serpent was by her side, and said : " Whither art thou borne ? Trowest thou that the Apostle shall deliver thee from my hands?" At the church door he redoubled his temptations; but, as she resisted him still, she was tormented more than ever. By the Saint she was delivered from the fiend, and this feat also " was published everywhere to his praise." Of the last miracle recorded we are told, " there be A.Tx 1144-74. Bartholomew yngglcrs. 33 o almost as many witnesses as men dwelling in the port of Hastings." The town of Hastings was on fire. There was a venerable matron there, named Cealia, whose husband, named Helyas, having come from abroad into London, not not knowing of the hurt at home, went with his offering to the church of St. Bartholomew. In the meantime, his wife Cealia at Hastings, seeing the flames, called on the same Saint, and, having vowed lights to his church, she began anon with a long thread to compass the house, and left it there fixed. The fire flowed on to the next houses, and did not presume to touch the thread or the house it measured. The house, added the spinner of this yarn, is yet to be seen, with its pinnacles half-burnt, while new houses close by are utterly destroyed. What wonder if to see the miracles worked at the cele- bration of the Feast of St. Bartholomew in the first years after the foundation of his Priory in Smithfield, the people came from far and near, and were to be found " shouldering each other," as well as " dancing and rejoicing," in a con- course at the Fair ! 34 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap, i v. CHAPTER IV. C^c <^air in ilje priori) ^buubnarb, In the network of London there are few meshes closer and more intricate than those in which the broken frag- ments of the Norman Priory of St. Bartholomew now lie entangled. Tall houses, some adorned with grotesque figures, bury between them narrow lanes ; pent-up alleys lie in the shade of factory walls that were once Priory walls, or that contain stones from the ruin of the Priory mortared among their bricks. Within the bounds of the old Priory enclosure, approached by gateways which have lost the fence in which the}- were built and even the passages to which they led, this district situated in the heart of the dense central quarter of the town corresponds in every sense to its name of Bartholomew Close. One open piece there is in it, a small paved square from which the houses seem to have been not removed, but swept aside and crowded into a confused heap with the surrounding buildings. Out of the square of the Close, one may pass into another part of the maze through a fragment of Priory, now a dim public thoroughfare called Middlesex Passage. This looks like the cloister of a dungeon, but is no cloister at all. It is a fragment of the great crypt of the Priory, overhung by the wreck of a great hall. The hall is broken up, divided into floors and adapted for use as a tobacco factory. Into separated portions of the crypt there is access by the doors on each side of the Passage. In one section there is tobacco stored, and in another pickles. The way among the pickle barrels is between pointed Norman arches under a high vaulted ceiling, on ground much above the level of the ancient floor. The A.n. 1133-1300. Fair in Priory Churchyard. 35 entrance to the crypt was by a descent of five-and-twenty feet until earth and rubbish were poured in, and the floor thus was raised for the convenience of traffic. Tradition holds that at the end of the long vaulted subterranean hall there was a door opening into the church. But when he has come horn under these vaults, the stranger may search for a little time in vain before he tinds the remaining fragment of the church into which that closed gateway was supposed to lead. Probably he will first reach, through an alley, a door and bit of church wall hemmed in between factories. That D 2 ;t6 Memoirs of Bartholomezu Fair. chap. iv. is an entrance by which it is most unhkely that he will obtain admission ; should he propose then to walk round to the other side, he must needs turn his back on the church altogether, and plunge through the chaos of brick that hems it in. With trouble, if unassisted, and by mere accident at last, he finds another gateway deep set among buildings, and after further search he may find, or may fail to find, an iron railing fixed before the main entrance of what is now the church of a small parish. It was the centre of the Priory ; the choir from which its tower rose. The nave is entirely gone. The last line of a complete square of cloisters, used in its later days as a stable, tumbled down about a score of years ago. The apse is broken off, and its place filled up with a beggarly brick wall. But there remains still perfect the massive side walls, the arches and their strong pillars like the pillars of a fortress. Half way between capital and base of the pillars of that oratory of the Virgin which a miracle commended once to reverence, now stands the floor of the vestry of the parish church. Except a window opened for himself by a much later Prior through which he could see the monks at their prayers without crossing the threshold of his house, the walls and aisles on either side of the church of St. Bartholomew the Great are as they were when Rayer caused them to be built. The "ampler buildings" with which in the second Prior's time "the skin of the tabernacle was enlarged" could not have included that part of the church from which everything else radiated. One of the first miracles also was associated with the building of the oratory. Upon this point stones can speak. High columns and arches massive as rock itself, enriched only with the rude ornament and zigzag work used by the oldest of our Norman builders ; unbuttressed walls, firm in their own solid breadth ; windows raised far above the ground that they might afford no easy way of entrance to the enemy, and arcades before them on which fighting monks or knights might stand if danger pressed to beat back the besiegers ; these, in their sturdiest and simplest form, are the main feature of the building. The tomb of Rayer, under its stone canopy, is against one of the old walls, and is of younger date. Common A.D. 1 133-1300. Fair in Prioiy Churchyard. 1 h 0/ opinion, however, holds the painted stone figure upon it to to be older than the tomb ; to be, in fact, a portrait statue, executed when the features of the first Prior were known, by an artist competent to reproduce them. Undoubtedly the statue was a real and individual, not a conventional face, and answers very well to our impression of the person whom it represents. If the efligy be trustwortliy we have but to copy its head faithfully, as in the annexed sketch, set it upright, and receive it as the only extant portrait of the founder of the Fair. Saint Bartholomew chose his site shrewdly when he asked 38 Memoirs of Bartholomciu Fair. chap. iv. for ground in Smithfield. It was simply the best situation ior a London Prior}^ that wit could find. Rayer was not afraid to make the Saint ask for a piece of the king's market, — the great market held every Friday for the necessary com- -^^^<^^^M! raerce in horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and larm implements, between the country and the town. To this great weekly gathering the brotherhood could look for many of those offerings to the altar, upon which they depended for a main part of their income. But that is not all. Smithfield was not only a market, but also the daily gathering place of Londoners in search of active recreation. It was there that A.D. 1 133-1300. Fair in Priory CJmrcJiyarci. 39 Rayer began his enterprize by playing with the boys and the apprentices, and inducing them, as the legend runs, to accept as a jest the work of filling up with stones the piece of marshy ground on which he had resolved to build. There was a daily throng to Smithfield of persons who, when there, had leisure to think about the wonder-working shrine, or to seek entertainment in the ministrations of the second Prior, Thomas, when he exhorted them to godliness and liberality in jocund rhyme. We need look but little farther than to the account of London, written in the year 1174, by the Norman Londoner and clerk, William Fitzstephen, inmate in the house of Thomas a Becket, remembrancer in his chancery, subdeacon in his chapel, and eye-witness of his death, for sufficient fulness and accuracy in describing the position of the Priory when it first opened its gates beside the king's market in Smithfield. At the same time we shall be able to make some direct addition to the story of the first days of the Fair. London was then assured in her rank as the capital of England. Winchester, her rival, had lost ground for ever since the "ruin suffered by it in the civil wars, when Maude besieged the bishop in his castle in the town, and was herself besieged by Stephen's army. The fires launched forth by the defenders of the castle destroyed much of the city, forty churches, and two abbeys. Another abbey, in which citizens sought refuge, was stormed and sacked. We may observe, in passing, that such incidents show what is meant by the thick walls of Norman keeps and churches. The hand of Manza, Norman bishop, was almost as fiimiliar with the sword as with the crozier. After the breaking of the Anglo- Saxon church, bishoprics of which the seat was in defence- less places, were transferred to walled towns, as Sherborne to SanuTi, or Selsey to Chichester. In other places that re- tained their bishops, as Durham, Rochester, and Exeter, — though Exeter had been upon similar grounds, under half Norman influences, a transfer from Crediton, — strong castles were set. In harmony with such a temper of the times, the Norman churches, priories, and abbeys, were always, to some extent, built with a regard to soldiers as well as saints. 40 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. iv. London included, when St. Bartholomew's Priory was newly founded, thirteen large conventual and twenty-six parish churches. Its great length was from east to west, along the course of the Thames ; from the Tower on the east to the two western castles, both well fortified by Bay- nard and Montfichet. It was a city contained on three sides within high and thick walls, through which there was egress by seven double gates. To the north wall, beyond which lay the Priory of St. Bartholomew, there were many towers and turrets. London had once been walled also on the south or river side, but the tides had undermined and destroyed that defence, and it had never been repaired. Trust was put in the Tower and the Bridge. It Avas but a wooden bridge until a few years after the date to which we now refer. Two miles out of town, on the west, the royal palace, said Fitzstephen, exalts its head and stretches wide, an incomparable structure, furnished with bastions and a breastwork. The palace of Westminster was then, however, considered to be united to the city by a kind of suburb, as there was the village of Charing, and there were some river- side houses of great men on the intervening ground. Out- side the city walls there were suburban gardens, rich in trees. The citizen who looked from the north wall with his face towards West Smithfield and the Priory, would see open country : moorland, runlets, brooks, and pools ; a larger sheet of water ; the smooth field, partly shadowed by its elms, lying between the marshy ground and a rich landscape of " cornfields, pastures, and delightful meadows, intermixed with pleasant streams, on which stands many a mill whose clack is grateful to the ear." The whole was then bounded in the distance by the outline of the great forest of Middle- sex (not disafforested until the reign of Henry the Third), " beautified with woods and groves, and full of the lairs and coverts of beasts and game, stags, bucks, boars, and wild bulls." The way to West Smithfield was through Alders' Gate, or through the Cripplegate beside which cripples assembled to beg alms of the pleasure-seeker, for it was the gate of ijleasure haunted by remembrances of pain. Imme- diately outside Cripplegate was a suburb of a {^\n thatched houses, and the church of St. Giles, lately built by Alfuin, A.D. 1 133-1300. Fair in Priory Ckurckyard. 41 whose genius as a deviser of miracles had also aided Rayer in establishing his Priory. The church was built beside a pool. London was then a city of which the inhaljitants depended solely for fresh water on their springs. Within the city itself springs bubbled up and ran as streamlets to the Thames. Old Bourne rose from the earth upon the site now occupied by Holborn Bars, and ran down a steep hill into the River of Wells at Old Bourne Bridge. Langbourne broke out in Fenchurch Street. The River of AVells was formed partly by brooks from the three great rural Wells, Holywell (afterwards made filthy by the heightening of ground for garden plots), Clement's Well, and Clerkenwell, these being the best frequented both by scholars from the schools and by the youth of the city on a summer's evening : partly it was fed by runlets from some lesser wells near the Clerks' well, known as Skinner's Well, Fag's Well, Tode Well, Loder's Well, and Radwell. The River of Wells flowed by a bit of the path outside Cripplegate, and entered lower down to pass through London as a stream up which, as far as Fleet Bridge, ten or twelve of the small ships then built could come abreast. Attached to the moor fields on one side, and to the partly fenny, partly firm ground of the green plain and playground of West Smithfield on the other, was a considerable sheet of water, called the Horse Pool. There the beasts were watered at the Friday cattle market. Thither in winter went the citizens for sport upon the ice. Fitzstephen speaks of the pool as " that vast lake which waters the walls of the city towards the north ;" and describes the sliding on it by the youth of London when it was hard frozen, the riding on blocks of ice dragged over it as sledges, the pulling of one another in long chains of players holding hand to hand, the skating upon primitive skates made of the leg bones of some animal, an iron-shod staft' being used by the skater for pushing himself along " with the velocity of a bird." Sometimes the skaters met in playful battle, when whoever fell had his head split to the skull or his leg broken. Citizens also went out through the Cripplegate on fowling expeditions with the hawk and merlin, and they had the right of hunting in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, the Chilterns, and in Kent as far as the river Cray. Our Smithfield was 42 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. iv. distinguished as West Smithfield from East Smithfield, near the Tower. In East Smithfield, again, there was an old monastery, distinguished as East Minster from the West Minster at the opposite end of the town. Of Smithfield Market, Fitzstephen, writing in the twelfth century, tells us that there was without one of the city gates, and even in the very suburbs, a certain Smooth Field, such both in reality and name. Here every Friday, unless it should be a solemn festival, there was a market for fine horses, whither came, to look or to buy, earls, barons, knights, and a swarm of citizens. There were prancers. ^C^^^A^4^ draught horses, hacks, and charging steeds, the last named being those used as racehorses. There could be found a trotting horse for an esquire, or an ambling horse worthy to be a knight's gift to a lady. In the Friday market was another quarter for the sale of peasants' wares, implements of husbandry of all kinds, pigs and cows, oxen, plough mares, and cart mares, some with foal. In Fitzstephen's account of the entertamments of the town, Smithfield again occupies a conspicuous position. Our citation can, on some points, be illustrated by the pencil of an almost cotemporary artist, one of the monks of the Priory, who, in its early days, illuminated a book of Decretals, from which we have extracted the above sketch of a lady's horse, and of which we shall say more hereafter. A.t). 1 133-1300. Fair in Priory Churchyard. Instead of the ancient shows of the theatre, to wliich Fitzstephen as a scholar can refer, London, he says, "has entertainments of a more devout kind, either representations of those miracles which were wrought by holy confessors, or those passions and sufferings in which the martyrs so rigidly displayed their fortitude." Shrove Tuesday was a schoolboy's holiday. The Church had in its hands all the education of the rich, and every cathedral was bound legally to provide free instruction for poor scholars. London had flourishing schools connected with three churches which are not named by Fitzstephen, but which he says were privi- leged by grant and ancient usage. They were St. Paul's, St. Peter's, Westminster, and St. Peter's, Cornhill. The last-named school was attached to the most ancient church in London, of which the foundation was ascribed to Lucius the first Christian king, who lived in the year 160. There was once a well-furnished library attached to that church for the use of scholars, which in the beginning of the seven- teenth century no longer existed. But there was then " yet belonging to the churcli a school wherein are taught such arts and learnings as are taught at St. Peter's, Westminster, music excepted."* On Shrove Tuesday Stow records that every boy took to the school his fighting cock, " and they were indulged all the morning in seeing their cocks fight in the schoolroom." After dinner all the youth went into the field of the suburbs and played football, while the elders and rich men of the city went to the field on horseback to look on. On the Sundays in Lent troops of young men, sons of the citizens, rushed out at the gates with lances and shields to engage in sham fights, and if the king happened to be in the neighbourhood, young men of rank who sought advance- ment hovered about him and combated together in his presence. At Easter there were games at striking the target on the water, when many were drenched, and there was the Bridge crowded with laughing spectators. On summer evenings the youth would run, leap, wrestle, cast the stone, or contend with bucklers, swords, and arrows. Maidens danced to the tabor by moonlight, boys whipped large tops * The Third Universitie of England, (S:c. &c. A pamphlet by G. B. Knt. (Sir George Buck), 1615. 44 Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fair. chap. iv. or joined in a game with bat and ball. Bowls and ninepins, (here allow for the friar's bad perspective J^^), where among the sports, even dice-casting, when homes were scarcely habitable, seems to have been accepted as an out-door game. Since these sports natural to Smithfield must have been among the recreations sought on the great Smithfield holiday provided by the Fair, we turn to the old friar of St. Bartholomew for pictures of the games as they were played six centuries ago. A.D. 1133-1300. Fair in Priory Churchyard. 45 Appeal was made to the sense of wonder on such hohday occasions not by the monks only. Among the first curious feats of skill jierformed for money at the Fair may have been that of a woman, who is displayed among the illu-' minations in our gay volume of Bartholomew Decretals, balancing herself to the music of tabor and pipes, head downwards and feet in the air, by the palms of the hands, upon two sword points. Again, though walking upon stilts with bosses on the legs to prevent them from sinking hopelessly into the quagmire, was not a rare accomplishment among the dwellers by the great fens with which England then abounded, probably the woman shown in another of the monk's pictures walking on long stilts with an infant in her arms and a water jug balanced on her head, claimed applause and reward for her achievement. To us it certainly will seem more difficult than that of the ancient acrobat, who pipes in triumph, 46 Memoirs of BartJiolomeiv Fair. cHAr. iv. while he shows a child at work upon the alphabet of tumbling The volume from which these sketches are taken is a manuscript of the thirteenth century, containing the text of Gregory's Decretals, with a commentary. It is now in the British Museum,* but belonged originally to the Priory of St. Bartholomew. It is lavishly adorned with pictures, which are valuable illustra- tions of the manners, arts, and literature of the time. At the foot of every page there is some incident depicted. First, scripture stories, as of Joseph and his brethren, or of Samson, are told each in a series of litde paintings ; then profane stories, jests, satires, legends of the saints. There is a series illustrating the old satire of Reineke Fuchs, with many noticeable variations, which does not flinch from representing Bishop Fox as pastor to the * King's MSS. 10 £. IV. A.D. II33-I300- ^i-^i^' ^^i Priory Chm'chy a I'd. 47 geese Another series represents a dog hunted, caught, tried, dragged to execution, and hung by the hares, one of whom bites his thumb in defiance of the criminal. Here again there are hares bringing a man before their court, and on another page we see a stag chased by a snail. There are pictures, illustrating stories known and unknown ; men ply their trades or play, or fight by land and sea ; knights joust, foir ladies ride, hawk, hunt, are courted, are attacked in castles, — one of them snips at the head of an inva- ding knight with swords crossed scissar- wise, — the mind of the pious illustrator dwelt with an obvious pertinacity upon the other sex. Giants, dragons, hostile kings are slain. Wild men and women abound in these picture stories. Gene- rally, after we have been shown how wicked a monk can be, the pictures go on to tell that he ran wild in the desert until he became a saint, and had his rewards often in the flesh as well as in the spirit. Even the large picture appended to the first book of these solid and grave Decretals is a caricature, having on one side a monastery, on the other side a fair lady's pavilion. The lady in her doorway, while her hus- band peeps out of window, beckons to the monk, upon whom, as he passes through the monastery gates, there is a jar of water emptied from above. There is no denial of the strength of appetite after the flesh. On one page a priest kisses the cookmaid while he steals her capon from the pot. A. monk, surprised with the miller's wife by the miller himself, who carries a large mallet, gels possession of the mallet and therewith murders the miller. He runs wild, becomes first hairy, then holy, and is finally represented as a favourite of Heaven, whose feet wild beasts come from afar to lick. A monk and a woman are shown in the stocks together. They both fold their hands towards the Virgin, 48 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. iv. wlio releases them, and in their places fastens the two devils by whom they had been tempted. So it is through- out. A monk tears from a mother her child, then murders the woman, and conceals her under the high altar, lie runs wild, becomes hairy, and, when he is holy, receives from the Virgin the mother and child alive again, mira- culously revived or preserved. To another class of stories belongs that of the knight who served too weakly the lady A.ii.iiy:,-\T>oo. Fail"- in Priory CJmrchyard. 49 of his love. She becomes exacting, and with every admitted exaction more imijcrious. He takes to the wash for her garments, over which she holds her nose, washes them, spins for her, makes bread for her, unlooses the latchet of her shoe. Her aspect is angrier in every picture until, in the last, she kills him. So it was that the friar of St. Bartholomew's drew in his cell pictures of the world to which he clung, the world to which his gates especially were opened upon the three days that centered in the feast day of his Saint. Of such matter was, in the first days of Bartholomew Fair, the speech or song of the story-tellers, who abounded at all holiday gatherings. We have but to give voice and life to all those pictures, and we have the spirit of the concourse at the Fair. Cripples about the altar, miracles of saints, mummings of sinners, monks with their fingers in the flesh-pot,, ladies astride on the high saddles of their palfreys, knights, nobles, ciUzens, and peasants, the toilers of idleness and industry, the stories that were most in request, the lax morality, the grotesque images which gave delight to an uncultivated people, the very details of the dresses that were worn, are told to our eyes with a wonderful fidelity. In the next chapter of these memoirs, reason will appear for inferring that, from very early tmies, if not from the beginning, there were practically two Fairs held in Smith- field, one within and one without Priory bounds. The outer Fair was possibly composed of the mere pleasure givers and pleasure seekers, who attended on the com- pany of worshippers and traders then attracted to the Priory, and whose tents were pitched in the open market of Smithfield, outside the gates, not free from toll to the church. Within the gates, and in the Priory churchyard, the substantial fair was held. Three centuries later we learn from Stow, that there was observed in the Priory churchyard the same practice which Fitzstephen thus de- scribes as having been estabhshed from the first : — " On fes- tivals at those churches where the feast of the patron saint is solemnised, the masters convene their scholars. The youth on that occasion dispute, some in the demonstrative way, and some logically. These produce their enthymemes, £ 50 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. iv. and those more perfect syllogisms. Some, the better to show their parts, are exercised in disputation, contending with one another, whilst others are put upon establishing some truth by way of illustration. Some sophists endeavour to apply, on feigned topics, a vast heap and flow of words, others to impose on you with false conclusions. As to the orators, some with their rhetorical harangues employ all the powers of persuasion, taking care to observe the precepts of art, and to omit nothing opposite to the subject. The boys of different schools wrangle with one another in verse ; con- tending about the principles of grammar, as the rules of the perfect tenses and supines. Others there are who in epigrams or other compositions in numbers, use all that low ribaldry we read of in the ancients ; attacking their school- masters, but without mentioning names, with the old fescen- nine licentiousness, and discharging their scoffs and sarcasms against them \ touching the foibles of their schoolfellows, or perhaps of greater personages, with true Socratic wit, or biting them more keenly with a Theonine tooth." The schoolbooks upon which these wits had been trained were chiefly Priscian's grammar with the commentary of Remigius, Aristotle's Logic, and the Rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian. Though by the custom of the Normans every great house, noble or religious, was, to the utmost degree, bountiful in almsgiving, yet it was not in the power of the Priory to feed or lodge all pilgrims, merchants, and idlers who came to the feast of St. Bartholomew. There was wine sold in ships, but otherwise only one house in London at which food could be bought ready for immediate use ; that house was on the Thames bank, andthere might be had such dainties as sturgeon or guinea-fowl, as well as coarser meat. " It is a public eating- house," we are told with some pride, " and is both highly convenient and useful to the city, and is a clear proof of its civilisation." Nevertheless, it was but one, and it was distant from the Priory. Law, also, however relaxed in Fair-time, was strict against the entertainment of strange guests in any house. There is a painful reminder of the civil struggles and the distrust set by them between man and man, in an edict very recent at the time of which we are now speaking. It was ordained by King Henry the Second that A. D. 1133-1300. Fair in Priory CJmrcJiyard. 51 no stranger should be lodged for more than one night, by any man who would not be made answerable on his behalf, unless upon reasonable excuse, which was to be shown by the host to his neighbours ; and when such a guest departs, let him depart, said the ordinance, in presence of the neigh- bours, and in daytime. On the first night a stranger lodged in a house was accounted unknown, on the second a guest, and on the third a member of the household. Also it is to be remembered that on St. Bartholome\v's Day there is, or ought to be, warm autumn Aveather. Reason enough, therefore, appears for the belief that during the three days of the fair there were many who not only played or worked by day, but slept by night in the encampment outside the gates of St. Bartholomew, and that in the sale, century after century, of certain forms of cooked meat, we have, partly, the continuance of a custom that arose out of the necessities pressing upon the fair when it was first established. In the churchyard of the Priory, the fair chiefly consisted of the booths and standings of the clothiers of all England and drapers of London, who were there closed within walls of which the gates were locked every night and watched, for safety of men's goods and wares. 52 Memoirs of BartJioloiTtew Fair. chap. v. CHAPTER V. ©lb Cbronkks. XCEPT when the}'' also constitute the annals of the Fair, we must refuse attention to the annals of the Priory. The general prospe- rity of the establishment, and a few points in the character of the Black Canons, by whom it was occupied, concern us, for the strength of the Fair at first lay in their privileges and their power. In the days of Stephen, and of his successor, not less than the king, even in England, as a source of power, was the Pope of Rome. Rayer, as we have seen, designed to obtain for his foundation a substantial blessing out of Rome, but died before his purpose was accomplished. '• After his decease," writes the recorder of his life, " three men of the same congregation, whose memory be blessed in bliss, sonderly went to sonderly Bishops of the See of Rome, and three privileges of three Bishops obtained — that is to say, of Saints Anastase, Adrian, and Alexander — this church with three dowries as it were with an impene- trable scutcheon warded and defended against impetuous hostility." The three successive Popes whose Decretals provide, together with the first royal charters, the foundation of the power of the Priory, where Anastasius the Fourth, Adrian the Fourth (Nicholas Breakspear, the one English Pope), and Alexander the Third. Anastasius was Bishop A. D. 1223-44- Old Chronicles. 53 of Rome in the last year of Stephen's reign, and the other two Popes were contemporaries of King Henry the Second. A pleasant note of royal patronage bestowed upon the poor men maintained by the friars of Bartholomew in the hospital, which was a part of their foundation, I find in the close rolls. By successive warrants to Henry de Cigeny in 1223 and other years, Henry the Third granted an old oak from the forest of Windsor as fuel for the infirm in the Hospital of St. Bartholomew. In the reign of the same king there ruled over Rome and its spiritual dependencies Pope Gregory the Ninth, of whom we read in Capgrave's Chronicle that " v;ith him dwelt a friar preacher cleped Raymond. He was Penitencer under the Pope ; and by his commandment the friar gathered out of many books that book which they clepe ' Decretals.' And the Pope wrote to the Doctors of Law that they should in school use this compiling." Of the text book thus imposed upon all students of ecclesiastical law, a copy was made for the Priory of St. Bartholomew. It is that copy of manuscript Decretals to which I have before referred as the source of the illustrations which, in this part of our nan^ative, represent views of life as sketched in Smithfield by a draughtsman of the thirteenth centur}'. ^Vhat sort of men they were by whom, in its first days, the Fair was managed, this record may also tell. Boniface, a wrathful and turbulent man, elected to the See of Canter- bury in 1244, came, during a visitation, to the Priory of St. Bartholomew in West Smithfield. He was received with solemn procession, but, he said to the friars, he passed not for honour; he was there to visit them. The canons answered that they, having a learned Bishop, ought not, in contempt of him, to be visited by any other. This answer so much offended the archbishop, that he smote the sub-prior on the face, saying, " Indeed ! indeed I doth it become you En-glish traitors so to answer me ? " Then raging with oaths, he rent m pieces the rich cope of the sub-prior, trod it under foot, and thrust him against a pillar of the chancel with such violence, that he had almost killed him. The canons, seemg their sub-prior thus almost sl?"'n, came and pulled away the archbishop so vigorously that they overthrew him backward, 54 Memoirs of Baj^tholoniew Fair. chap. v. whereby they saw that he was armed and prepared to fight. The archbishop's attendants, who were all his countrymen, born in Provence, observing their master down, fell upon the canons, beat them, tore them, and trod them under foot. At length, the canons getting away as w^ell as they could, ran, bloody, miry and torn, to the Bishop of London to complain, who bade them go to the king at Westminster, and tell him hereof : whereupon four of them went thither, the rest were not able from being so sore hurt. When they arrived, the king would neither hear nor see them. In the meantime the procession of the bleeding canons had raised the city in an uproar, where the citizens were ready to have rung the common bell, a.nd to have hewed the Archbishop in pieces had he not escaped to Lambeth. Thither they pursued him, and not knowing him by sight, cried aloud, " Where is that ruffian, that cruel smiter ? He is no winner of souls, but an exacter or money, whom neither God nor any lawful or free election brought to this promotion, but the king did unlawfully intrude him. He is unlearned, he is a stranger, and he has a wife." But the Archbishop conveyed himself over the river, and went to the king with great complaint against the canons. The control even of the Bishop of London was by the first charters left open to a doubt that was not urged. The general character of ancient fairs we find illustrated, when, four years later, on the 13th of October, 1248, King Henry the Third with many prelates and magnates met at London to celebrate the memory of the Translation of St. Edward. The king then caused anew fair to be proclaimed at Westminster, which should continue fifteen days, and prohibited all other fairs that used to be kept at that time of the year throughout England, and also all trading in the City of I>ondon, within doors and without, during that time ; that this Fair at Westminster might be the more plentifully stored and frequented with all sorts of goods and people. Upon a special point of privilege relating to the Fair of St. Bartholomew, appeal was made by Ralph Sandwich, custos of the city, to King Edward the First at the time when he was engaged in Scotland upon those discussions which resulted in tlie establishment of Baliol as a vassal king. The A. i^. 1248-92. Old Chronicles. 55 king's taxes had by royal charters been remitted to the traders at the Fair. The Priory took all the tolls, but there was no special exemption of it from any claim that could be put in by the city. Tliough the valuable wares of the clothiers and others were displayed within the shelter of the Priory walls, not only much of the concourse at the Fair, but at least also its traffic in live stock must have been without the sacred bounds. As the Fair throve, its chief articles of traffic were, in the first instance, cloths, stuffs, leather, pewter, and live cattle. It spread beyond the Prior's bounds, and a claim was made therefore by the Gustos for a half share of the tolls, the claim being heard before King Edward the First at a time when the receipt of all tolls of the city had been trans- ferred from the city to the sovereign. The King being at Durham, and the matter being laid before him a i^w weeks before the usual time of the Fair, he signed this order : " Dominus Rex, &:c. The Lord the King has commanded the Gustos and Sheriffs in these words : Edward, by the grace of God, to the Gustos and Sheriffs of London, greeting. Whereas the Prior of St. Bartholomew, of Smith- field, in the suburbs of London, by the charters of our Pro- genitors, Kings of England, claimeth to have a certain Fair there every year, during three days, viz., on the Eve, on the Day, and on the Morrow of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, with all Liberties and Free Gustoms belonging to the Fair ; a contention hath arisen between the said Prior and you, the said Gustos, who sue for us, concerning the use of the Liberties of the said Fair, and the Free Gustoms belonging to it. And Hindrance being made to the said Prior, by you the said Gustos, as the said Prior asserteth, to wit, concern- ing a Moiety of the Eve and of the whole Morrow before said, concerning this, We Will, as well for Us as for the fore- said Prior, that justice be done as it is fit, before our Treasurer and Barons of the Exchequer, after Michaelmas Day next, within a month. We Gommand you that sufficient security be taken of the said Prior for restoring to us on the said day the proceeds of the foresaid Fair, coming from the Moiety of the foresaid Eve and from the whole Morrow, if the said Prior cannot then show something for himself, why the said proceeds ought not to belong to us. We Gommand 56 Memoirs of Bartholoinew Fair. chap. v. you, that ye permit the same Prior, in the mean time, to re- ceive the foresaid proceeds, in form aforesaid ; and thereto you may have this Brief. Witness myself at Durham, the 9th day of August, in the 20th year of our Reign." The reply to the inquiry was unfavourable to the claim of the city, and the charter of the friars was again confirmed. The question of tolls possibly remained in some degree a vexed one between City and Priory, until, after the lapse of more than another century ; it will be convenient, therefore, to reser\-e for a future chapter what more has to be said of the place occupied by London in the early story of the Fair. A very slight suggestion of the filthy state of the Black Canons' quarters will show what they must have suffered who were crammed within the churchyard of the Priory at Fair time. Among documents in the Patent Rolls is a licence from King Edward the First, to the master and brethren of the hospital of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, to cover with stone and wood the stream of water running through the midst of the hospital to Holborn Bridge, " on account of the too great stench proceeding from it." The licence is significantly dated (in the midst of the hot weather) on the twenty-ninth of June. On the Eve of St. Bartholomew, the first day of the Fair, in the year 1305, the traders and pleasure seekers, the friars and the jesters, clothiers, tumblers, walkers upon stilts, hurried across the grass of Smithfield from the side on which the Fair was being held to the gallows under the Elms, where officers of state and a great concourse of men awaited a most welcome spectacle. The Priory was in- deed built on the site of a gallows ; but in that suburban gathering-place of the people, — place of executions, place of tournaments, place of markets, place of daily sport, place of the great annual fair, — one gallows tree was not enough to satisfy a justice that loved vengeance and had .slight regard for life. Under the Elms of which already mention has been made — Cow Lane now represents their site — under the Elms, we read in a close roll, so early as in the fourth year of Henry the Third gallows were built " where they had stood before." An execution during Fair time on that ancient exhibition ground, was entertainment rarely A.D. 1305. Old Chronicles. 57 furnished to the pubHc ; for the Church forbade, among other work, fulfilment of a sentence of the law on any holy day of festival, and a Fair was a Saint's holiday. But on this occasion, law was eager to assure the execution of its vengeance. The redoubtable Wallace, hero of the Scottish people, had been taken. The rugged patriot, strong of heart and strong of hand, had been brought to London in his chains the day before the Fair was opened, and on the day of the opening of the Fair was arraigned and con- demned at Westminster as a traitor, and, without even a day's respite, at once sent on to his death. Under the Elms, therefore, in Smithfield, stood all the concourse of Bartholomew Fair, when AVilliam Wallace was dragged thither in chains at the tails of horses, bruised, bleeding, and polluted with the filth of London. The days had not yet come when that first part of the barbarous sentence on high treason was softened by the placing of a hurdle between the condemned man and the mud and flint over which he was dragged. Trade in the fair was forgotten while the patriot was hanged, but not to death; cut down, yet breathing, and disembowelled. JNIummers and merchants saw the bowels burnt before the dying hero's face, then saw the executioner strike off his head, quarter his body, and despatch from the ground five basket-loads of quivering flesh, destined for London, Berwick, Newcastle, Aberdeen, and Perth. Then all being over, the stilt walkers strode back across the field, the woman again balanced herself head downwards on the points of swords, there was mirth again round the guitar and tambourine, the clothiers went back into the churchyard, and the priest perhaps went through a last rehearsal with the nun who was to be miraculously healed in church on the succeeding day. To this we must add the statement of Bartholomaeus de Glanvilla, an Englishman writing at the end of the fourteenth century, that in his time men and women were publicly sold as beasts in the fairs of England. We may add also a chronicle of the pestilence which broke out in London at the time of Bartholomew Fair in the year 1348, and ended about Fair time in the year following. During the interval between fair and fair, so great had been 58 Memoirs of Bartholo^neiv Fair. chap. y. the mortality, that, in addition to the burials in churches and other churchyards, the population of a city — fifty thousand bodies — had been interred in a single burial- ground. It was that of the Carthusians, whose house was not built until twenty years later. The graveyard was there first, and as it adjoined the Fair, it must in that year have been the great object of interest and terror to the slender throng of men who hardly dared assemble, and who, miss- ing from the annual crowd so many familiar faces, spoke to each other with a feeble hope of the apparent lifting of the plague. 'What mirth was there in that handful of the living, camped so near the silent congregation of the dead ! In the fourteenth year of the reign of Edward the Second, there was a writ issued inquiring by what warrant the Priory held its rights over Bartholomew Fair. The writ was part of the machinery of a general inquisition into the rights claimed by subjects, which had in many cases been alienated without licence from the crown, and gave rise often to private oppression of the people. The Prior of St. Bartho- lomew pleaded the royal charters of his house, and testified upon oath that his predecessors had held such a three-day fair since times beyond the reach of memory. The justifi- cation satisfied the king's exchec^uer, and in the seventh year of Edward the Third, the old rights were confirmed in a new charter, which reassured the king's firm peace to all persons travelling towards, staying in, or returning from Bartholomew Fair, and forbidding any servants of a royal or episcopal court to implead any of their persons, " or without the consent of the prior and canons on those three days, that is to say, the Eve of the Feast, the Day of the Feast, and its Morrow, to exact tolls either without the city or within it, whether in the passage of roads or bridges, but let all proceeds that arise according to the usage of fairs belong to the canons of the aforesaid church." The charter again definitely excludes the clami of a moiety of the proceeds which had since the reign of Edward the First been set up on behalf of the city. In the days of Edward the Third there were a few suburban houses with gardens bordering Smithfield, and there were others on the road to the Clerks' well. From A.n. 1337. Old C/iiviiicles. 59 brother Cok's manuscript Rental of the Hospital, I learn that there was a house then on the south side of a bit of ground owned by the friars, called the Bell on the Hoop, and that on the eastern border of the same plot was the garden of the Rose on the Hoop. The whole community was party to all business contracts. Thus, in the same reign wc find William le Fons Master of the Hospital, by consent of its brothers, letting a piece of ground in the Spital Croft to John Dobelyn and Joan his wife. Peter at the Gate and Fulton de Paddington were among the witnesses to the contract, which was signed in Clerkenwell Street. The pious brethren were unwilling to turn money from their doors, and though they could read, in their own copy of Gregory's Decretals, admonitions against the settle- ment of money matters on a day of holy festival, they have left upon record a receipt " in full settlement of all dues from the beginning of the world to the feast of Easter in the year of the reign of Edward the Third, the three hundred and fourth after the Conquest" (1370). The receipt was signed on Easter Sunday. Another entry shows how the Priory was released from law of mortmain by a special decree of the same King Edward when, in the eighth year of his reign, Ealfrid de Catenham, painter of London, left to St. Bartholomew his house in Bishopsgate, and how the testament and the royal release were duly read in full hustings before the citizens of London. The Hospital had at this time houses and lands in many parts of London — Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Ludgate, St. Sepulchre's, St. Dun- stan's West, St. Bridget in Shoe Lane, and so forth — and it had also possessions in the country. The documents copied into its rental — compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century — illustrate many points relating to old London. They do not relate to the Fair, and we must pass them over, but the reader will pardon me for citing one that almost restores a fragment of the rond by the strand of the river between London and Westminster as it was in the year 1337. In that year, the tenth of Edward the Third, there was a grant by the Priory to Ealfrid de Eystan and his wife of a house in the Strand, situated in the parish of St. Mary le Strand, held by Laurence the Tailor — situated 6o Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. v. between the messuage of Robert de Aldenham on the east, and that of Thomas the Linendraper on the west, and extending southward over the high road from I.ondon to Westminster. Brother Cok's volume is a collection of charters, decretals, grants, leases, receipts ; in short, of binding documents received or issued by the friars. There- fore, while it includes the royal charters upon which the Fair is based, it contains no note whatever of the annual receipt of toll. That was a transaction which brought money to the Priory exchequer, but led to the production of no document requiring preservation in the archives. It is to be observed also that, although we rightly speak of Priory and Hospital as one foundation, they maintained two separate establishments, and it was to the Hospital that brother Cok was treasurer. We turn back from the Strand to Smithfield, across the city of low wooden houses, and through Alder's Gate, whence the eye looks upon field and moorland, rills and standing pools, with churches and a few clusters of suburban house and garden. P)efore us is Leyrestowe, the burial- ground of the Jews (the site of Jewin Street), until late in the reign of Henry the Second the only spot of ground in England wherein there was rest allowed to a dead Jew. Not far outside the turreted north wall of London, is the Smooth-field, bounded on one side by the rich Priory, and noticeable for its sheet of befouled water and its Elms. We have seen that Bartholomew Fair was of old associated by position with the city playground and the city gallows, with the Friday market, and the burial-ground of the plague- smitten. There also great tournaments and jousts were held. Combats in sport for love of chivalry, combats for life in the ordeal by battle were to be seen in the lists at Smithfield when the Fair was young. It was a tournament when parties of knights joined together in the conflict. In jousts two only fought together, man against man. In the year 1357 the Kings of England, France, and Scotland, were among the spectators of the jousts in Smithfield. In the forty-eighth year of King Edward the Third, Dame Alice Ferrers, the king's mistress, as Lady of the Sun, rode through Cheap to the lists in West Smithfield, accompanied A.D. 1357. Old Chronicles. 61 by many lords and ladies. Know that, at the day ap- pointed, there rode forth, at a procession pace, from the Tower of London, under the bright morning sun, first a great number of musicians and trumpeters, then sixty coursers, apparelled for the jousts, mounted by esquires. Then sixty ladies of honour, richly apparelled, mounted upon palfreys, every lady leading forth a knight by a gold chain. So they proceeded to Smithfield, whither the King and Queen had come from their lodging with the Bishop of London, and where they were seated in chambers, amid a great company, to see the jousts. The ladies that led the knights were taken from their palfreys, and went up to chambers prepared for them. The esquires yielded up to the knights their horses, and the knights, in good order, mounted. Then, after the helmets were set on their heads, and they being ready at all points, proclamation ^^•as made by the heralds, and the jousts began. For a long time after this date the lists of West Smith- field were in use. The judicial combat between Horner the armourer and his man P-eter, who had accused him of treason, introduced by Shakespeare into the Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, actually took place in the year 1524, between William Cator an armourer of St. Dunstan's parish in Fleet Street, and John David, his false servant, who after- wards was hanged for felony. The armourer, too freely plied with wine by his good friends, was slain, and in the Exchequer Record, printed by John Nichols, we read the order for the preparation of the ground for the duel to be 62 Memoirs of Bartholomezv Fair. chap. y. held upon the thirty-first of January, with details of the cost of men's labour for fetching the barriers from Westminster, expenses for bars, timber, boards and nails, for casting away snov/, for rushes and rakes, for i68 loads of sand and gravel to make level fighting- ground. Also there was " paid to officers for watching of the dead man in Smithfield the same day and the night after that the battle was done, and for horse ^^^^^^^ X>Jlt-^/Ji J^ hire for the officers at the execution doing, and for the hang- man's labour, iis. 6d. Also paid for the cloth that lay upon the dead man in Smithfield, 8d. Also paid for i pole and nails, and for setting up of the said man's head on London Bridge, 8d." At various times also after the accession of Henry the Fourth, and notably during the fiimous days of special per- secution, women and men were burnt alive as heretics in Smithfield, and a part of the Fair was held over the ashes of the martyrs. One of the first of these martyrs was John Bedby, a tailor, burnt in Smithfield in the year 1410. The A.D. 1410. Old Chronicles. 6 o martyr fires were usually kindled on that spot of ground outside the Priory gates, over whicli the lighter i)Ortion of Bartholomew I'air sjn-ead, the ground occupied by the holi- day makers and the tumblers, jesters, and dancers by whom they were entertained. Among the old woodcuts in the first edition of Fox's Martyrs, there is one that includes a rude sketch of the Priory of St. Bartholomew in a plan of the disposal of the ground outside at the burning of three persons. The martyrdom here pictured happens to be that of Anne Ascue and others. She was burnt in Autumn, and the ground must have been still black with the ashes of that Christian heroine, over which the dogs danced, and the devil in the miracle play jested not very many days later at Bartholomew Fair. 64 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. CHAP. VI. CHAPTER VI. URING the middle ages, when the infant nations of Europe waited for instruction at the knee of the Church, their mo- ther, she was ahnost the sole depository of those germs of knowledge which expanded and bore much fruit in her children after they had come of age. Thousands of monks, working, pen in hand, represented our existing cohorts of compositors, and what the printing office is, the monastery was. There are no great national fairs of which the origin was not ecclesiastical, and the beginning ot them all is to be connected with two great services done by the Church to society. In foirs, the manliest form of modern imaginative literature, the dramatic, had its origin. Our playhouse is an offshoot from the Church. In fairs also, as we have already seen, commerce was, by the influence of the Church, loosed from many of her trammels. There was an approach made to free trade ; there was prompt settlement of all disputes, and a complete security as to the validity of contract in all matters of bargain and sale. Rights ot fair were indeed granted to laymen, but no layman had influence enough over the masses to establish permanently as a great popular festival the fair of which he took the tolls. To maintain her influence was the great object of the Church. In an age when men generally, whatever their vocation, A.D. 1390. Literature and Conimerce. 65 seldom had a refined sense of morality, frauds began, of which some have to this day been perpetuated by tradition in the less enlightened parts of Europe. We have seen how, on behalf of St. Bartholomew, miracles were forged, and by the fame of them crowds were attracted to the church and Fair. What other ways there were of strengthening its in- fluence over the people, the Church energetically practised. The fair in the churchyard represented visibly the people in the fold, and there is a large truth of History to be illustrated by movements of the priests among the traders and the seekers after pleasure. The first power of the mind revealed in every child is that of mimicry. The majority of men go to the grave mimics ; in religion, manners, language they have learnt their parts, and acquitted themselves in them more or less respectably. Nearly all child's play is essentially dramatic. Wherever there have been men, therefore, there have been mimics, and some rude kind of dramatic sport over aftairs of life has been a favourite amusement. The Church, seizing upon this element of human character as means of laying a firm hold upon the people, made of Divine worship a show, established a repertory of tales for the enlivenment of sermons, and taught scripture, history and scripture mysteries — afterwards even preached sermons on abstract morality — in plays. From those plays, performed on days of festival, the modern drama has its origin. Many years after our drama was mature, reminders of its old ways lin- gered in the places of its birth ; and to Bartholomew Fair they clung so long that there, perhaps, took place the last performance of a miracle play in this country. The parish clerk of old, deacon in holy orders, Chaucer has painted as a jolly Absolon, in a white surplice, with curly hair, red stockings and fashionable shoes. He could bleed, clip and shave, write title-deeds and receipts, dance, sing, play the guitar, drink, go with a censer on a holiday, and when he censed the parish wives look at them lovingly. The parish clerks of London formed themselves into a harmonic guild, (chartered in 1233,) and their music was sought at the funerals and entertainments of the great. In the year 1390 they played interludes in the fields at Skinner's Well, for F 66 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. vi. three days, Richard the Second, with his Queen and court, being among the spectators. Again, in the year 1409, in the reign of Henry the Fourth, the clerks played at Skinner's Well for eight days "Matter from the Creation of the World," a great assembly of the noblemen of England being present. Jousts in Smithfield then immediately followed. At this well (near West Smithfield), wrestlings were afterwards sub- stituted, and in part continued at Bartholomew tide. The wrestlings were continued, as we shall hereafter find, in close association with the Fair. The Matter from the Creation of the World meant, doubt- less, such a cycle of scripture histories, from the creation downwards, as we find in the extant sets of Miracle Plays performed at York, Chester, and Coventry. In very early times monks acted scripture stories in their church. Three plays, written in Latin for such representation by a disciple of Abelard are extant. They are coeval with the founding of the Priory of St. Bartholomew. Such plays were the drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; they enter- tained both prince and peasant. They came into England with the Normans, and had passed from Latin into French, for the amusement of the court, before they were performed in English for the more complete entertainment and instruc- tion of the people. Latin stage directions to the last bore witness to the clerkly character of those by whom they were to be performed. Legends of saints were at first the chief subjects treated, and these formed the true Miracle Plays. Truths of Revelation, told by dramatic stories taken out of scripture were the Mysteries ; and in a later day came the Moralities, which discussed moral truths upon a stage by the personification of the virtue, and by examples out of history wherewith the human interest in plays began, and out of which our modern drama was then rapidly developed. This rapid development took place in the age of the revival of letters, when the comedies of Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca had become known to the clerical playwrights. Thus, and thus only, did the ancient drama come to exer- cise an influence over that of the moderns, an influence which was in England but a passing breath. For among us there arose a state of society that helped to perfect A.D. 1390-1409. Literature and Cotmnerce. 67 and to force into a ripe dramatic form the expression of that rare genius in which the England of Ehzabeth was rich. So it happened that, before King Herod, Pilate, and the mediceval devil had been foirly banished from West Smithfield, Shakspeare had written, and Ben Jonson was among the booths, turning Bartholomew Fair itself into a comedy. It happens that at Coventry the mysteries were acted by trade guilds at the feast of Corpus Christi, each guild fur- nishing its own stage and acting its own play. It happens also that the old accounts of expenditure kept by these guilds are extant, and, from the research made into these some years ago by Mr. Sharpe, a local antiquary, much has been learnt of the general character of these old entertain- ments. The extant English plays of this description do not, however, belong to the most ancient class ; and, from what we have learnt of these, we must guard ourselves against forming too absolute a rule for all. Of such plays, as has been said, the first stage was the church pavement, upon which they were performed as a religious service to awaken zeal. Setting aside special performances for the de- light of courts, the next step was to act them upon stages in some field, or to present them on festival days in open fair, and upon raised stages, for the delight and instruction of the people. The stages used by the Coventry guilds were moveable vans, drawn from street corner to street corner, so that, during the feast, the plays, which represented a complete cycle of Scripture history, followed each other in every quarter of the town. Chaucer says of his dainty parish clerk, the jolly Absolon, that, " Sometimes, to show his lightness and maistrie, He playeth Herod on a scaftbld high."' Herod suited the fine lady's man, as being the character that was most pompous in speech, and most magnificently dressed. A high scaffold, doubtless, was the stage used by the parish clerks of London at their well, about which spectators stood and sat upon the rising ground \ and the friars also on St. Bartholomew's Day must have thus edified the people at their Fair. Again, the last lines of the proclamation of performance prefixed to the series of plays used at Coventry, have been thought F 2 6S Memoirs of BartJioloinciu Fair. chap, vi, to suggest that INIystery players moved from place to place : — On Sunday next, if that we may, At six of the bell we 'gin our play, In N. town, wherefore we pray That God now be your speed. But it is most probable that this cycle of dramas, written by an old poet, was known and used in several parts of the country, and that N. stands simply for any town in which it was adopted by the clergy or the people. I think it reasonable to believe that the first dramatic entertainment at Bartholomew Fair was on the stage erected by the Priory, and that this stage was for a ' long time the only one erected. Legends of saints everywhere preceded scripture histories, and the first plays at the Fair were, therefore, presentations of great miracles ascribed to St. Bartholomew. There was much latitude allowed for the fancy, and much room for rude stage effects, in the embellishment of stories of this kind. The monks simply put life upon a stage into the pictures with which they adorned their books. I have no doubt that, when they were not representing mysteries of Scripture, they sometimes sat in the stocks on their high scaffold, ran wild till they became saints, and then retaliated on the devil. St. Dunstan seized that popular character by the nose ; and perhaps even, by a well-contrived stage artifice, the Virgin in the picture stretched her hand out to hold up the painter when the envious demon broke the ladder under him. A scene like A.i5. . . 1500. Literature and Coiuuierce. 69 this, sketched by a friar of St. Bartholomew's, in the manu- script of Gregory's Decretals, might have been taken from the platform in the Fair. Satan, issuing from Hell-mouth, has been battering the gates of Heaven ; but is brought into subjection by the Virgin, at whose feet he grovels in the dust. In some, if not in all these representations, separate stages or levels indicated the abodes of the Heavenly Father, of angels and glorified saints, and of men. In a corner of man's stage was Hell-mouth, through which fiends came up and down. It was a grotesque head, which might vary in design, but of which the general character is represented perfecdy in the above sketch, and in the initial letter to this chapter. In a manuscript note to a Mystery of the Passion in the Royal Library of Paris (cited by Hone), it is recorded that, at the representing of such a play in 1437 on the plain of Veximiel, when the chaplain of Metrange played Judas (and was nearly dead while hanging, for his heart failed him, wherefore he was very quickly un- hung, and carried off), that the " Mouth of Hell " was very well done; for it opened and shut when the devils required to enter and come out, and had two large eyes of steel. The devil of the medicEval stage was always a comic cha- racter, and his conventional dress admitted of much variety in the grotesque shaping of the mask, but all the forms abided closely by the one standard conception. Thus there is close likeness in the difference between the demon of the drawing last copied, and that taken from the same source, which serves as initial letter to the fifth chapter of this volume, or between either of those and this, in which Satan is yielding a soul to the Virgin in the presence of its guardian angel. The character was represented in life, as '^he picture shows him, by the use of a leather dress trimmed with feathers or with hair. He was, as the Chester plays describe him, " the devil in his feathers all ragged and rent ;" or, as the Coventry account books show, a person carrying three pounds of hair upon his hose. Having once found his way into Bartho- lomew Fair, this personage never quitted it, and was to the last, with a few variations of costume, a regular performer there, JO Mcmoii's of Bart/iolomeiv Fair. chap, vi. The floor of that first stage was bestrewn with rushes, and the body of the scaffolding was concealed under a decorated cloth. At Coventry there was a canopy, with vanes and streamers, and a standard ot red buckram. A few notes of the more characteristic entries from the Coventry ac- counts will complete a brief reminder of the character of the first stage-plays acted in the Fair. Among the properties were a gilt-cross and rope to draw it up, and a curtain to be hung before it, two pair of gallows, four scourges, and a pillar. A barrel for the earthquake : That was to produce the rumbling. Four gowns and hoods, jackets of black buckram with nails and dice upon them, for the execu- tioners ; four more with damask flowers ; also two jackets, partly red and black, all for the tormentors or executioners. Two mitres for Annas and Caiaphas. In making the next en- tries no irreverence was felt, but I should shrink from quoting them if they were not essential to a proper notion of the manner of these plays. God's coat of white leather (six skins). A staff for the demon. Two spears. Chevreul (or peruke) for God. Three others and a beard, two of them (for our Lord and St. Peter) gilt. A pole-axe for Pilate's A.D, . . 1500. Literatiire and Commerce. 71 son. Gilt faulchion for Herod. This character, repre- sented as a gorgeous boaster, had also a painted head, surmounted by an iron crest painted in gay colours, and decked out with gold and silver foil ; his gown was of blue satin. The contrast to so magnificent a person seems to have been Pilate's wife, called also Procula, who was attired in worn old clothes when better were not to be borrowed. We find such entries as, For mending of Dame Procula's garments, vii^. To reward to Mrs. Grimsby for lending of her gear for Pilate's wife, xii^. For a quart of wine for hiring Procula's gown, ii^. All the characters wore gloves. Those not in masks had their faces prepared by a painter. Among miscellaneous items of charge are some for the mending of hell-mouth, for its curtain, or for keeping up the fire at it, which was a part of the ordinary stage effect There is a charge for souls' coats, one for a link to set the world on fire, and " paid to Crowe for making of three worlds, iii-." In one play we find, also, this graduation of the scale of payment to performers. Paid, for playing of Peter, xvi^. ; to two damsels, xii(/., to the demon, vi^^. ; to Fawston, for hanging Judas, iv^. \ paid to Fawston, for cock- crowing, \wd. Judas, as well as the demon, was a comic character ; the tormentors were all broad comedians ; so also were the soldiers who massacred the innocents, as well as the mothers from whose arms the innocents were taken ; the massacre being presented as an occasion for much lively interchange of buffets and broad jests. Whether Rayer at the court of Henry the First counted entertainments of this nature among the " spectacles, plays, and other courtly motleys," in which he took part, I am unable to say; but in the days of his successor in the Priory, who was a man of wit so lively that he preached rhymed sermons to the people, Fitzstephen, writing at the time (in 11 74), tells us that "London for its theatrical spec- tacles, for its scenic plays, has plays more sacred, represen- tations of miracles which have been worked by the holy confessors, or representations of passions in which shone the constancy of martyrs." Therefore we drew only a just inference, when speaking of Prior Thomas, in suggesting that he may not only have invented miracles, but that he 72 Memoirs of Bartholo^new Fair. chap. vi. may also have written miracle plays. He must have specially avoided the most obvious opportunity for the use of his talent, if he did not mount the clerks or brethren of his church upon a stage in the Fair, and teach them how, according to the custom of the city, they might add to the attractions of the festival. Among some Latin stories written in the thirteenth century, we read of there being seen in a long meadow by the river-side, a great multitude of men assembled, who were now silent, now breaking into laughter. They were " supposed there to be celebrating the spectacles which w£ are accustomed to call Miracles." Solemn as were the subjects treated, it was necessary that there should be in their treatment jest enough to provoke in a rude assembly frequent laughter. Thus we have in the most ancient times of the Fair, a church full of worshippers among whom were the sick and maimed, praying for health about its altar ; a graveyard full of traders, and a place of jesting and edification, where women and men caroused in the midst of the throng ; where the minstrel and the story-teller and the tumbler gathered knots about them ; where the sheriff caused new laws to be published by loud proclamation in the gathering places of the people \ where the young men bowled at nine pins, while the clerks and friars peeped at the young maids; where mounted knights and ladies curvetted and ambled, pedlers loudly magnified their wares, the scholars met for public wrangle, o?cen lowed, horses neighed, and sheep bleated among their buyers ; where great shouts of laughter answered to the Ho ! ho ! of the devil on the stage, above which flags were flying, and below which a band of pipers and guitar beaters added music to the din. That stage also, if ever there was presented on it the story of the Creation, was the first Wild Beast Show in the Fair ; for one of the dramatic effects connected with this play, as we read in an ancient stage direction, was to represent the creation of beasts by unloosing and sending among the excited crowd, as great a variety of strange animals as could be brought together, and to create the birds by sending up a flight of pigeons. Under foot was mud and filth, but the wall that pent the city in shone sunlit among the trees, a fresh breeze A.D. . . 1500. Literature and Commerce. 73 came over the surrounding fields and brooks, whispering among the ehiis that overhung the moor glittering with pools, or from the Fair's neighbour, the gallows. Shaven heads looked down on the scene from the adjacent windows of the buildings bordering the Priory inclosure, and the poor people whom the friars cherished in their hospital, made holiday among the rest. The curfew bell of St. Mar- tin's le Grand, the religious house to which William the Conqueror had given with its charter the adjacent moorland, and within whose walls tliere was a sanctuary for loose people, stilled the hum of the crowd at nightfall, and the Fair lay dark under the starlight. A great part of the Priory was rebuilt in the year 1410, and after this date its general plan was that which it main- tained until the time of its suppression. It became famous for possessing one of the first mulberry gardens planted in this country. The situation of this mulberry garden was to the east of Middlesex Passage, and in later years, it was under the mulberry trees that the scholars, at Fair time, held their disputations. Within the gates, the northern part of the Priory ground w^as occupied by a large cemetery, with a spacious court or yard, now the paved square of Bar- tholomew Close. The old site of the Cloth Fair in the cemetery is now marked by a street bearing that name. In a former chapter it has been shown, how trade throve under the walls of churches, wdth its fetters loosened and defended from taxation by the sovereign. Bartholomew Fair was, in the first centuries of its life, one of the great annual markets of the nation. It was the great gathering, in the metropolis of England, for the sale of that produce upon which England especially relied for her prosperity. Two centuries after the Conquest, our wealth depended upon wool, which was manufactured in the time of Henry the Second, in whose day there arose guilds of weavers. In King John's reign there was prohibition of the export of wool, and of the import of cloth. A metropolitan Cloth Fair was therefore a commercial institution, higli in dignity and national importance. There was trade also at Bar- tholomew Fair in live stock, in leather, pewter, and in other articles of commerce ; but cloth ranked first among the 74 Memoirs of Bart/iolai7zew Fair. chap. vi. products of our industry, and it was as an annual trade gather- ing of English clothiers and London drapers, that the Fair obtained a place for itself in the history of commerce. Live stock was sold weekly. In leather and skins Stourbridge Fair dealt more than that of St. Bartholomew ; but Bartholomew Fair as the chief Cloth Fair of England, as long as need remained for such an institution, was without a rival. In the reign of Edward the Third, by whom most of the guilds of London were first chartered, when, assuming a distinct dress or livery, they became Livery Companies, and exchanged the name of guilds for that of crafts or mysteries, the King himself became a Linen Armourer, or as it after- wards would have been called a Merchant Tailor. This he did that he might manifest his strong desire to establish woollen cloth as a staple manufacture of the country. King Richard Cceur de Lion was a Tailor also. Thus it was made a fashion for the rich and powerful to join the Com- pany of Merchant Tailors, or some other important craft that was thought worthy of especial maintenance, as that of Mercers or of Skinners, who were men of mark when all the great men in the land wore robes of fur. Having compelled his people to make cloth for themselves, of home-grown, wool, and by other measures perfected the wool manufac- ture, Edward the Third (in 1361), removed the woolstaple from Calais to nine English towns, the chief being at Westminster, between Temple Bar and Tothill Fields. Cognisance was taken at these markets of the five staple commodities of the kingdom, wool, wool fells, leather, lead, and tin. In 1378 Richard the Second removed the wool- staple to the ground still known as Staple Inn, by Holborn; and about twenty years later, there was begun at Blackwell Hall a weekly market for the sale of country cloths in London. Such was the position taken by the cloth trade, while this Fair rose in importance by association with it as a great annual mart, to which even the foreigner had unrestricted access. The arms of the Merchant Tailors were engraved upon a silver yard, thirty-six ounces in weight, with which century after century members of their body were deputed to attend in West Smithfield during Bartholomew Fair, and try the measures of the clothiers and drapers. Thus we find in A.D. . . 1500. Litcj'ature and Commerce. 75 their books a direction that fit persons shall be appointed on the Eve of St. Ijartholomew, to see that a proper yard- measure be used. This right of examining the yard-measures was maintained as long as the Cloth Fair had vigour in it. In 1566 we find that a dealer named PuUen was committed to prison by the court, for using an unlawful yard, which was found in his shop at the time of the search. Stands had become shops by that time, so important was the situa- tion. And in 161 2 there is note of a dinner at Merchant Tailors' Hall, " for the search on St. Bartholomew's Eve." All this was done subject to the control and saving the rights of the city. The Drapers were incorporated in the year 1364, when there was special exemption made from prohibitions of the sale of cloth by any who are 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 have fairs in the said suburbs. A draper meant originally one who made the cloth he sold, it was the London name for clothier, very few of the members of the Drapers' Company being resident beyond the limits of the city. Therefore, say the old writers, that Bartholo^ •mew Fair was frequented by " the clothiers of England, and the drapers of London." Drapers sold their goods chiefly by the beam scales ; mercers, by the little balance. INIercers especially frequented fairs and markets, where their stand- ings were gay with haberdashery, toys, and even drugs and spices, the small articles of traffic upon which they throve. Mercers attending the French fairs towards the close of the thirteenth century, paid only half toll when they Avere 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 Auto- lycus, others dealt largely in silk and \elvet, and abandoned to the haberdasher traffic in small articles of dress. Whit- tington, thrice lord mayor of London, was a mercer. The general nature of the court established in all fairs for the judgment of causes arising out of transactions in the fair itself, has been already described. From the earliest times of which there is record, it has been known in England as 76 Memoirs of Bai'tholomeiu Fair. chap. vi. the court of Piepowder. The court of Piepowder for Bar- tholomew Fair was held, of course, within the Priory gates, the Lord of the Fair being the Prior who sat in the court by his representative. It abided always by its original site, being held in Cloth Fair to the last. There is no record to be found of any ordinance by which the court of Piepowder was first established in this country. There never had been known a fair in Europe to which such a court was not by usage lawfully attached. Such courts were held in the mar- kets of the Romans, which some writers regard as fairs, and in which they find the origin of modern fairs. But the mmdi7ics of the Romans were not fairs, they corresponded in character to our own weekly market days. It is true that the right of market was a grant from the state to great lords and landowners, as the right of fair afterwards became a grant from the Crown to monasteries, towns, or men of rank. In this respect, and doubtless also in the use of market courts, the Roman law founded a custom throughout Roman Europe. A law of William the Conqueror, de JEmporiis, shows that there were such tribunals in the ordinary markets of the Normans. But modem fairs, as we have said, had their own natural and independent origin, and are analogous' to nothing in the ancient world but the assemblies formed during the celebration of the Public Games. There were the Greek church festivals, begetting fairs. Thus, a true fair was associated with the Olympic Games ; and we learn from Demosthenes, that all causes relating to the festival of Bacchus were heard on the spot. The same practice arose out of the same necessity. Nobody can assert that the festivals of ancient Greece influenced usages of the Normans in the tenth or eleventh century. The court of Piepowder in Bartholomew Fair, or the ^ corresponding court in any other fair of England, had juris- diction only in commercial questions, and it tried them before a jury of traders formed upon the spot. It could en- tertain a case of slander, if it was slander of wares, not slander of person. It might hold pleas for amounts fixed in later times at above forty shilHngs, and judgment could be deferred until another fair ; but it could sit only during fair time. could take cognizance only of things happening during fair A.D. . . 1500. Literature and Commerce. 77 time and within the fair, and could try a thief who had com- mitted robbery in the fair only when he had also been cap- tured within its bounds. The king himself, if he should sit in a court of Piepowder, could not extend its powers Neither is it in the king's power to resume a franchise that has once been granted ; so that a fair once granted is, by the common law of England, good against the king. But though it was not in the sovereign's power to enlarge the jurisdiction of the courts of Piepowder, private wrong was done in their administration ; stewards and commis- sioners of the Lords of Fairs abused their power in the courts, to their own advantage. They tried causes which they had no right to try, and by the connivance of unprin- cipled accomplices, persecuted honest fairgoers upon whom extortion might be practised. The abuse of these courts, in the seventeenth year of the reign of Edward the Third, was diminishing the resort of men of business to our great fairs ; when the evil was met by a statute which, for the first time, placed upon the statute-book a formal recital of the nature of the courts of Piepowder and of the limitation of their privileges. By the statute 17 Edward the Fourth, it was provided, '' that whereas divers fairs be holden and kept in this realm, some by prescription, allowed before justices in Eyre, and some by the grant of our Lord the King that now is, and some by the grants of his predecessors, and to every of the same fairs is of right pertaining a court of Piepowders, to minister in the same due justice in this behalf, in which court it hath been at all times accustomed, that every person coming to the said fairs should have lawful remedy of all manner of contracts, trespasses, covenants, debts, and other deeds, made or done within any of the same fairs, during the time of the same fair and within the jurisdiction of the same, and to be tried by merchants being of the same fair ; which courts at this day be misused by the stewards, under-stewards, bailiffs, commissioners, and other ministers holding and governing the said courts of the said fairs, for their private profit ; holding pleas by plaints as well of contracts, debts, trespasses, and other feats, done and committed out of the time of the said fair or jurisdiction of the same (whereof, in /S Menioh's of Bartholomew Fair. chap. vi. truth, they have no jurisdiction), surmising the same debts, trespasses, &c., to be done within the time of the said fair, and within the jurisdiction of the same (where of truth they were not so), and some time, by the devise of evil-disposed people, several suits be feigned, and trouble them to whom they bear evil will, to the intent that they for lucre may have favourable inquests of those that came to the said fairs where they take their actions ; and whereas divers persons coming to the said fairs be grievously vexed and troubled by feigned actions, and also by actions of debt, trespass, deeds, and contracts made and committed out of the time of the said fair, or the jurisdiction of the same, contrary to equity and good conscience ; whereby the Lords of the Fairs do lose great profit by the not coming of divers merchants to fairs, which by this occasion do abstain, and also the commons be unserved of such stutf and merchandise, which otherwise would come to the said fairs ;" therefore it is enacted, that the Plaintiff shall swear that the cause in declaration hap- pened during fair time. Such was the character of the Tribunal of Commerce, known to fairgoers as the court of Piepowder. Its name is corrupted from the French for " dusty feet." Spelman thought this was because justice is administered in it more quickly than dust can be shaken from the feet. In Manley's edition of Cowell it is supposed that, because fairs were usually held in summer, feet were dusty. Blackstone adopts Daines Barrington's observation, that Pied puldreaux was the old French name for a pedler. Dr. Pettingall* was troubled with a theory of his own about a " curia rustico- rum," and derived the name from the dirty boots which rustics got among their clods, propping his theory with Plutarch, who says that the lipidaurians called country folk KowTToSes which the French translator represents by pieds poudrcux. Yet Dr. Pettingall while he sets up one theory demonstrates another, and supplies us with a classical quotation apt to it, when he quotes from Cicero on In- vention, " If we see a man with much dust on his shoes, * On the Courts of Pypowder ; by John Pettingall, D.D. Read before the Society of Antiquaries, March 4, 1763. — Archaologia, vol. i. pp. 190— 203. A.u. . . 1500. Litei'atiire and Commerce. 79 it is probable he came off a journey." A trader travel- ling through any place, or selling his wares in it without possessing house or land upon the soil, might be, at Bar- tholomew Fair, one of the small pedlers, or one of the great cloth merchants. He was a traveller, whose part in the soil was no more than the dust upon his foot. He was a Piepowder, or as Dr. Pettingall shews us that he was formerly called in the old Scotch Borough Laws, a Dustifute. The plural ending to the name of the court was subsequently dropped, but in the preamble of the Act just recited, it may have been observed that it was known as a court of Pie- powders in former time. A court for men who travelled from many parts to a certain spot on which they had no residences, and there traded during certain days ; for whom therefore it was necessary to decide by a tribunal of their own, held on the spot during the brief time of their sojourn, such questions of property as might arise among themselves. From several passages relating to "fairand man, or to the Dustifute" in the Scotch Borough Law (published by Skene with the Regiam Majestatem), it is enough for our purpose to take this clear definition of the name : " Gif any stranger marchand travelland throw the realm, havand no land, nor residence nor dwelling within the sherifdome, but vagand from ane place to ane other, — qwha therefore is called pied poudreux or Dustifute." A definition like this sets at rest all doubt as to the meaning of a Court of Piepowders. 8o Memoirs of Bartholomeiu Fair. chap. vn. CHAPTER vn. The question of the right of the city to the tolls arising from use of its ground outside the Priory in West Smithfield, had been decided in or before the year 1445. West Smith- field was just within the confines of the city liberties, their limit in that direction being Smithfield Bars. In the year named— the twenty-third of King Henry the Sixth — it is on record that four persons were appointed by the Court of Aldermen as keepers of Bartholomew Fair and of the court of Piepowder. In that court, therefore, the city was then represented as joint lord of the Fair with the Priory ;' the lordship of the city being founded on its right over the ground beyond the jurisdiction of the Canons. In the first charter granted by King Edward the Fourth to the City of London, dated on the ninth day of November, in the second year of his reign (1462), there is this clause : " We have also granted to the said mayor, commonalty, and citizens, and their successors for ever, that they shall and may have yearly one Fair in the town aforesaid, for three days ; that is to say, the 7th, 8th, 9th days of September, to be holden together with a court of Piepowders, and with all the liberties to such fairs appertaining : And that they may have and hold there at their said courts, before their said minister or deputy, during the said three days, from day to day, hour to hour, and from time to time, all occasions, plaints, and pleas of a court of Piepowders, together with all summons, attachments, arrests, issues, fines, redemptions, and commodities, and other rights whatsoever, to the same court of Piepowders in any way pertaining, without any A. D. 1462. The City Fair. 8r impediment, let, or hindrance of Us, our heirs or successors, or other our officers and ministers soever." Some writers upon the history of London have referred to this charter as containing a grant of a city fair in West Smithfield — a Bartholomew Fair conceded to London, which was held a few days after that of which the Priory received the tolls. But the " town aforesaid '' is Southwark. " To take away from henceforth and utterly to abolish all and all manner of causes, occasions, and matters whereupon opinions, ambiguities, varieties, controversies, and discus- sions may arise," in its previous clause the charter had " granted to the said mayor and commonalty of the said city who now be, and their successors, the mayor and com- monalty and citizens of that city, who for the time being shall be for ever, the town of Southwark, with the appur- tenances." Thus was established Southwark Fair — our Lady Fair — of which the glory is that it was once dwelt upon by the genius of Hogarth; and of which the shame became so great after it had ceased to be a resort of trade that it was sup- pressed before the close of the last century. This was the first great fair granted in whole possession to the city of London. There were other London Fairs yielding no profit to the city : St. James's Fair, granted by Edward the i'irst to the Hospital of St. James, an institution founded by the citizens of London for the maintenance of fourteen women, pious lepers. That hospital with its ground, being sur- rendered to King Henry the Eighth, was adopted by him as the site of St. James's Palace and Park. There was a fair upon Tower Hill, granted by Edward the Third to the " master, brothers, chaplain, and sisters of St. Katherine's to be held upon the king's ground in all places thereof, opposite the Abbey of Graces, next the Tower." The same king had ordained on behalf not only of the city, that " merchant strangers," coming to England to sell mer- chandise, shall be obliged to dispose of it in forty days, and that they shall not keep houses, but sojourn with the citizens. Thus, the foreign Dustyfoot, his business done at the fair, was remitted back to his own land, and was not allowed to enter into settled competition with the English 82 Memoirs of Bartholomeiv Fah-. chap. vh. traders. This had been a city custom in the days of Athel- stan, but was a point upon which Norman legislation often varied. While we speak of the other London fairs, it may be as well also to name and dismiss May Fair, held by a grant to the Abbot of Westminster, with revelry for fourteen days, which began on May Day in Brook Field, on the site of Curzon Street. It was presented as a nuisance by the grand jury of Westminster in 1708, abolished for a time, revived and finally abolished in the reign of George the Second, after a peace officer had been killed in the attempt to quell a riot. A city fair is a city market of a certain kind, every fair being a market, although only a few markets are fairs. For many years before and after the Conquest, traffic was carried on by a great system of marketing. The Saxon laws directed all bargains to be made in open market, called in Norman deeds market ouvert, and in the presence of the boroughreeve or some trustworthy person. The Normans maintained the same rule, and thus it was established as a principle in common law that no transfer of goods is binding against third parties unless made in market ouvert. Nearly the whole trade of the city of London was in Saxon times transacted in a great chepe or market that ran through the town from Tower Street to Newgate, and was known as East and West Chepe. The sites of different branches and divisions of tliis central market, which ran as an alimentary canal through the midst of the city that was to be nourished, are to this day remembered in the names of streets. The hill on which the corn-market was held used to be called, and now is called, Cornhill. Poulterers kept market in the Poultry. Bakers, from that old 'capital of the bread trade Stratford at Bow, came daily with their loaves in long carts to their market-ground in Bread Street. At London, says Active-Life, in the vision of Piers Ploughman, "there was a careful commune when no carts came to town with bread from Stratford." The woodmongers were in Wood Street ; milk was sold daily in Milk Street ; there was a fish-market in Old Fish Street ; and in Old Change were the moneyers. Of this great market ouvert, Cheapside was the centre. On A.D. . . 1500. The Cily J'^air. '^'^^ the site of the Mansion House stood then a pair of stocks in a market named after them, the Stocks Market, used first for meat, and afterwards for wool, and at a mucJi later date for herbs and vegetables. At the time of the Conquest nearly all the cities and towns of England were possessed by the king or his nobles, as private property or in demesne. They paid fixed rents in kind and service ; and in each the superior, whether king or inferior lord, imposed various tolls, dudes, and customs to be paid by those attending the fairs or markets he estab- lished, such demands being made at the lord's discretion during the first years of Norman rule. To evade the oppres- sion of an arbitrary tax, cities and boroughs sought to com- pound with the king by payment of a fixed rent instead of the tolls, which tolls they then levied upon themselves that the lord's rent might be satisfied out of the produce. Toll is a generic term, of Gothic origin, which includes every kind of tribute levied upon the movement from place to place of goods or persons. The term formerly included a multitude of charges, every charge being considered due for service rendered, as the provision of a trading place, a ferry or a bridge, a wharf or a set of public scales known as a beam or tron. But the infliction of these tolls, whether by the king's officers, or by the king's favourite to whom they might have been given, or by the speculator who had with a large price bought of the king the right of farming them, was usually cruel. How cruel we may infer from the fact, that in the reign of Edward the First, it had been sought to restrain the greed of collectors by a stajtute threatening severe penalties ; and in the reign of Edward the Third, parliament was petitioned that those extortioners, the officers of the king's beam, might sufter death for their exactions. The collection of such of the king's tolls as were not farmed, was entrusted by the Norman system to the sherift", who thus became an officer with fiscal powers of such vast interest to the Crown, that his appointment was no longer entrusted to the people. When Bartholomew Fair was annexed to the Priory by Henry the First, West Smithfield was the king's market, and though the Fair might trespass beyond church-bounds, (i 2 84 Mciuoirs of Barthokwicii) Fair. chap. vii. it was not for the city then to claim a moiety of toll arising from it. The same king who gave his first charter to the Prior Rayer, granted the first real charter to the city of London, ard thereby founded its Corporation. That charter granted Middlesex to farm at 300/. a year, and gave to the citizens certain freedoms, which incUided a free passage exempt from tolls and customs over any part of England. In 1 197, Richard the First sold to the city for 1500 marks the conservancy of the Thames. In 1199 King John, for 3000 marks confirmed its ancient rights, and restored the fee farm of Middlesex, which had been revoked by Matilda. But at this time, the rent of the London Exchange was a branch of the royal revenue, farmed to a man who in 1202 was more than a thousand pounds in the king's debt. The city chamberlain was appointed by the king, and paid, besides a heavy entrance fine, 100 marks a year for his ofiice. It was not until 12 15 that the citizens even received liberty to choose for themselves their mayor. Until that date he had been always nominated by the Crown. Thirty years later, the citizens were paying to King Henry the Third more than seven hundred pounds in yearly duties, of which eighty-four were raised by market tolls. It was at this time that the king set up the fair at Westminster, which closed the shops of London for a fortnight. A repetition of that trouble was bought off by a heavy payment \ but five years afterwards the same device was again adopted, and the Londoners were obliged for a fortnight to shut up their shops, and in the middle of winter expose themselves and their goods in Tothill Fields, to the inclemency of all weathers, on a stinking or frozen marsh. After enduring various exactions, the citizens in 1266 obtained from this king, for 20,000 marks, enjoyment of their rights and liber- ties, with title to receive the rents and profits of their lands and tenements. In 1288 Edward the First, upon a quarrel with the city, seized its liberties and did not restore them fully until twelve years afterwards. It was during this time that Ralph Sandwich, appointed custos by the king, first asserted the right of the city to divide with the Priory of St. Bartholomew the tolls of Bartholomew Fair. It was not until the year 1399 that there was granted to the citizens of A.D. . . i^oo The City Fair. 85 London, by King Henry the Fourth, the office of gathering the tolls in Smithfield. Forty-six years later we find the city firmly established in its right to the Fair tolls outside the Priory inclosure, and appointing, as it has been staged at the outset of this chapter, four persons as keepers of Bartholomew Fair and representatives of city jurisdiction in the court of Piepowder. Before the same tribunal the two eldest clerks in the city Sheriffs' court came as attorneys. The sketch here given of the gradual arising of the interest of London in the tolls of Smithfield is incomplete, for the first title to them rests upon prescriptive right, not upon e.xtant evidence. Of the city jurisdiction over the Fair in West Smithfield, I do not say that it began only ir the year 1445 I ^^^^ that certainly it was established then, i:' not before. There were several early recognitions of the city's hold over the soil in Smithfield. Thus in the eleventh year of Henry the Third, the king granted to the widow, Katherine Hardell, a recluse, twenty square feet of land outside the Hospital of St. Bartholomew, whereon to build herself a hermitage. The mayor and sheriffs of Londor were commanded to assign the said ground to the lady, who, as an anchorite among the fair-goers, must in her time have been one of the Bartholomew-tide spectacles. 86 Memoirs of Bartholo77iew Fair, chap.vhi. CHAPTER VIII. % drijange of Pasters : f onboir anir f orb ^itlj. Croyland Abbey, which contained the scourge of St. Eartholomew,was founded for the honour of God, the Virgin, aiid St. Bartholomew of whom the anchorite Guthlac, parent of the abbey, was especially a servant. It was a custom at Croyland on Bartholomew's day, in memory of the Saint's death by flaying, to give knives — Bartholomew knives — to a'.l strangers who came. The abbey was rich. A chief cook in it had given forty pounds — when forty meant in noney, what we should now call four hundred — to provide milk of almonds for the brethren upon fish days ; but Abbot Wisbech, about the year 1475 abolished the practice of distributing Bartholomew knives, " a piece of great and needless expense. Besides this, he obtained a Bull of dis- pensation from the Pope, which permitted the eating of flesh at Septuagesima." As a sign of the changed temper of society, this ready suppression of old custom in the abbey may not have been altogether insignificant. Less reverence for old form, and more hunger for solid meat, was becoming every year more surely a part of the public mind. Thousands of men were looking for emancipation trom a spiritual Lent. The last prior of St. Bartholomew who was acknowledged by a king of England, died in office, and was the last prior but one for the Black Canons in West Smithfield. He was a fastidious man, who seemed to be the head of a luxurious and prosperous community. He repaired the church and opened into it an elegant window marked with his rebus, a bird-bolt in a tun for his name Bolton (there is an inn in London still named after it, the Bolt-in-Tun) ; he built anew A.D. . . 1533. A Change of Masters. 87 the manor at Islington belonging to the Canons of St. Bartholomew, and known as Canonbury. He lived in a handsome priory house behind the monastery church, was sumptuously hospitable in a dining-hall not less fit for a prince than for a prior, and ruled within the precincts of the religious house, not only over the friars in it, but also over a small colony of cooks and other lay attendants. The space within the priory inclosure ranked in London as an independent parish — that of Great St. Bartholomew — and there was a vicar in it, having special charge over the lay parishioners. In the same way, the adjoining hospital, built on the south side of Smithfield, though a main part of St. Bartholomew's establishment and closely bound by charters to the Priory, was in its own inclosure ; was under rule of its own officers, who were answerable to the Prior ; had its own church ; and ranked as the distinct parish of Little St. Bartholomew. We turn to the most ancient map of London extant, Ralph Aggas's (?) Civitas LoJidi?iwn, 1533, and in the part which represents West Smithfield with the Priory 88 Memoirs of Barikoiomew Fair, chap.vh/. and Hospital we have a rude picture of the arrangement of the ground when it was on the point of passing out of the hands of the monks. It is evident that the constructor of the map kept very bad proportion in his sketches, and we may not be absolutely sure that there were no houses where none are shown. On the whole, however, this map is a valuable witness. It tells us that the Priory wall abutting on Long Lane, was not built against in the time of the Black Canons ; that they raised no permanent houses along the line of Cloth Fair, but that they had, north of the church, for the annual use of the trades, an oblong space of ground containing only graves. The houses have throughout the map conventional forms ; but a structure of unusual size indi- cates sufficiently the site of the great dining-hall above the crypt, and the square enclosed by cloisters is defined, though we are not shown the ecclesiastical character of the buildings that surround it. There are the houses fronting outwards upon Smithfield and Little Britain, let to lay tenants and parishioners. We are shown the site of the several detached buildings and outhouses, behind which there was a consider- able garden ; this was the Mulberry Garden, in which, at Fair time, the young scholars of London held grammatical disputes under the trees. On the southern side of the angle of Smithfield occupied by the Friars, with Duck or Duke Street between it and the Priory, we see the old hospital with its church that is still known as the church of St. Bartholomew the Less. The thirteenth Act of the thirty-first year of King Henry the Eighth (May, 1539) confirmed the surrender of religious houses dissolved since the passing of the previous Act, and empowered the king to extend its provisions at pleasure to those that remained standing. The Priory and Hospital of St. Bartholomew then passed through the king's hands, and were for ever sundered from each other. By the same social law that destroyed one, the other was developed. Rayer had founded the Hospital connected with his Priory for the sick and infirm, for lying-in women, and for main- tenance of infants born within its walls until the age of seven. King John, in the fif'.h year of his reign, had confirmed the bond between the Hospital and Priory. There had been A.D. 1533-44. A Chamrc of Masters. 89 many royal grants and charters to sustain the place ; tene- ments had been given by the pious to secure prayer for their souls. Shortly before the dissolution of the monasteries the Hospital received from rents in London, Middlesex, Essex, Berks, Northampton, Somerset, and St. Albans, after deducting payments to be made, about three hundred pounds, equivalent to not much less than three thousand in money of the present day. The suppression of religious houses threw upon the roads and streets many sick, lame, and impotent people ; for the place occupied by almsgiving in the system of the Roman Church was one means of its happy adaptation to the wants of a more barbarous time, and when the endowed asylums maintained by the Church on behalf of sick and poor ceased to exist in England, sudden thought had to be taken for the discharge of a new duty imposed upon men, not as sons of the Church, but as citizens. Anticipating the suppression of religious hospitals in London, Sir Thomas Gresham, the lord mayor, with the aldermen and citizens, in the year 1537 prayed to the king for the governance of the three hospitals of St. Mary, St, Thomas, St. Bartholomew, and the new abbey at Tower Hill, "founded of good devotion by ancient fathers, and endowed with great possessions and rents, only for the relief, comfort, and aid of the poor and indigent people not being able to help themselves ; and not to the maintenance of priests, canons, and monks, carnally living as they of late have done, nothing regarding the miserable people lying in the street, offending every clean person passing by the way with their filthy and nasty savours." \\\ 1544 the king, in order that there might be comfort to the prisoners, visitation to the sick, food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and sepulture to the dead, established on the old site a new hospital of St. Bartholomew, under a master, who was a priest, and four chaplains, namely, a vice-master, a curate, a hospitaller, and a visitor of prisoners in Newgate. But the place was neglected and mismanaged. The king offering to give the city charge of hospitals, if it would provide a portion of the necessary funds, the Corporation at once passed a prospective and conditional vote of five hundred marks a year. At last the Bishop of Rochester announced the king's gift and the 90 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, chap.vui. purpose of it in a sermon at St. Paul's Cross ; and on the 27th of December, 1546, a month before the king's death, the indenture was signed between Henry the Eighth and the city of London, which gave to the city, with other places. Little St. Bartholomew, to be "the House of the Poor in West Smithfield, in the suburbs of the city of London, of King Henry the Eighth's foundation." In the parish of Little St. Bartholomew there was to be a vicar and a hospitaller. London was to give residence and income to the vicar ; and to lodge and tend in the hospital a hundred poor men and women, maintaining one matron, with twelve women under her, for necessary service to the poor, a steward, a receiver and collector, porter, butler, cook, as well as eight beadles, who were to traverse London and fetch in the poor, sick, lame, and impotent found in the city and suburbs, but to expel valiant and sturdy vagabonds and beggars. A physician and surgeon also were to be main- tained, with provision of apothecary's wares. In considera- tion of this charge, the city took the lands of the endowment with a right to acquire lands to the value of another thousand marks. All profit of the establishment was to be spent on the poor. There was no profit, but there was a brave outlay (;f money and exertions. The Hospital was in disrepair, and applied to the use only of a few women with their infants born there under questionable circumstances. It is no part of this narrative to tell how the mayor and corporation were abused because the London streets were not at once cleared of all objects of misery. They acquired St. Thomas's for the city ; the citizens cheerfully bore a tax that was in fact a poors rate. The noble work was nobly done. The hos- pitals for the sick then formed have grown with the growth of society, and — thanks, in no small measure, to the enlightened liberality with which their principle has been supported by the medical profession — they now rank among the soundest institutions of the land. While the Hospital of St. Bartholomew was being thus disposed of, courtiers and others eagerly put forward their requests to purchase houses and lands taken from the several religious bodies ; and among these was Sir Richard Rich, Knight, Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, and in A. D. 1546. A Change of Masters. 91 the reign of the next king, Lord Chancellor. He it was who, as Solicitor-General, gave a turn with his own hand to the rack by which Anne Ascue was tortured. Sir Richard Rich was the son and grandson of two thriving London mercers. He was born in the city, was in youth light of his tongue and quick of wit, a great dicer and gamester, and not of any commendable fame. He bore no good character for honesty as a law student in the Middle Temple, but was esteemed for the quickness of his parts, and throve as a practitioner. In 1532 he was appointed for life Attorney-General of Wales, and in the year following Solicitor-General to the King. He had an easy conscience in the service of the crown — betrayed his friends and served his sovereign. In 1535 he was re- warded with a valuable sinecure, and two years afterwards he was made Speaker of the House of Commons, in which office he was the king's abject flatterer, and an important agent in the reconcilement of the Commons to the suppression of the greater monasteries. When the king had taken their estates, they were put under the management of a royal com- mission, with Sir Richard Rich, under the style of Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, at its head. He proceeded to secure the reward of his service in the augmentation of his fortunes, and the first bargain he made was the purchase (for 1064/. \\s. 2,(^.) of the Priory in West Smithfield, with all that was upon the ground within its enclosure, and all rights thereto pertaining. Among his other bargains made within the next two years, upon the lands subject to his commission, were the manor and rectory of Little Badowe, in Essex ; the manor of Newarks, in Goodester (Essex), with its tithes; and the tithes of Newland Fee, of the rectory of Goodester, and of four prebends late of St. Peter's, Westminster. He received also four manors in Essex that had belonged to Canterbury Cathedral, one that had belonged to the monas- tery of St. Osyth, and four Essex marshes that had belonged to Holywell. These and other acquisitions, with the grant of the dissolved priory of Leeze in Essex, enabled him to endow sufficiently the two earldoms acquired by his des- cendants. The love of money grew upon him. He was made Treasurer of the King's Wars in France and Scot- land. After the king's death he became as Lord . Rich an 92 Jl/cmoirs of Bartholomczu Fair, chap.viu. English baron, and in October, 1547, Lord Chancellor of England. This was the man who prospered in the day of change, when a new world was opened to the minds and hearts of men — when the way of society was not the less surely for- ward and upward, because it was marching with soiled feet upon a miry path. The monks mingle no more with the fairgoers. The Fair has not departed from the Priory ; the Priory itself melted away, and has been lost out of the midst of the assembly of the people. The Prior's house was made into Lord Rich's town mansion in Great St. Bartholomew, and there he lived as Lord Chancellor; for there had been assigned to him, his heirs and assigns for ever, the site and capital messuage and mansion house of the late monastery or priory of St. Bartho- lomew in West Smithfield, and also the close of the said late monastery or prioryj called Great St. Bartholomew Close, and all the limits and precincts of the said close ; also, all those closes, houses, and edifices, called the fermer}-, the dorter, the frater, the cloisters, the galleries, the hall, the kitchen, the buttery, the pantry, the old kitchen, the wood- house, the garner, and the prior's stable, of the said late monastery within the churchyard ; and all those houses (fifty-one tenements), gardens, void grounds, land and soil whatever, within the said close to the said site of the said late monastery and priory belonging ; and also all that water, and the aqueduct and water-course coming from the conduit head of St, Bartholomew in the manor of Canon- bury. By the same letters patent, the king farther granted to Sir Richard Rich, knight, his heirs and assigns, " all that Our Fair and Markets, commonly named and called Bartho- lomew Fair, holden and to be holden every year within the aforesaid close, called Great St. Bartholomew Close and in West Smithfield aforesaid, to continue yearly for three days, viz. on the Eve of the day of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, on the Day . . . and on the Morrow . . . \ and also all the stallage, piccage, toll and customs of the same fair and mar- kets ; and also all our courts of Piepowders within the fair and markets aforesaid" .... (I omit only the legal waste of words; ; "and all our rights . . . whatever, of such court A.D. 1547. London & Lord Rich. 93 of Piepowders . . . : and also, all the scrutiny, amendment, and correction of weights and measures . . . and of other things whatsoever exposed to sale . . . and also the assize and assay of bread, wine, and ale, and other victuals . . . and all and singular fines . . . issues, profits, and other rights ... as fully, freely, and entirely, and in as ample and the like manner and form as WiUiam Bolton, formerly prior ... or any of his predecessors . . . have or hath held or enjoyed, or in anywise ought to have, hold and enjoy, . . . as fully and entirely and freely as all and singular the pre- mises came to our hands by reason or pretext of the dissolution of the said late monastery or priory of St. Bar- tholomew." This grant, it will be observed, saves all the rights of the city to the Fair outside St. Bartholomew's enclosure. It gave, however, to the family of Lord Rich the tolls of the Cloth Fair, and of all that part which was contained within the parish of St. Bartholomew the Great 94 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, chaimx. CHAPTER IX. fo iljc gcnr Si3;t££it puubub mib <^ourfc£iT. We need not ask what characters of men, what combina- tions of events that make up the details of history, produced the change in England that set Lord Rich in the place of Prior Bolton as joint Lord with London over the tolls of Bartholomew Fair. Here it is out of the midst of the Fair only that we may look at history, and we can see nothing but the lawful end to which tended the frauds narrated in the early pages of these Memoirs. The Fair was nurtured upon fraud, joined to a Church worldly or weak enough to seek prosperity through falsehood. The Church was as the men were who sustained it, good men whom the advance of knowledge and experience through many Christian centuries had not raised to the highest sense of Christian honour. Chivalrous knights in those old days did not feel infamy in any falsehood that was not a breach of their troth openly plighted. Let us be grateful to our forefathers for all they did, and blame those of them only who sank lower than the spirit of their age. But, at the same time, there is to be drawn the sharpest line between our sense of error and our judgment of the erring. One, when it is certain, ought to be immutable and stern ; the other, wavering, and full of tenderness. No allowance for a difference of age in man or nation makes a lie other than a lie : yet who does not know that a child's falsehood may be but a fault for an hour's sorrow, wliile in the man false words are a life's infamy. Lies rot the substance to which they belong. It falls to pieces, and the truths in it must join again to form a purer and less perishable compound. The people must be very A.D. 1547. To the Year 1614. 95 wanting in persistent energy who, after long and gradual advance, needed more than the discovery of printing, and the consequent activity of intercourse among all reasoning men, the sowing of old knowledge broadcast by the printers and a brisk suggestion of new knowledge by the thinkers, to get rid of the more palpable delusions that had been associated with the highest form of truth. Englishmen are not lazy, and they are not fickle ; therefore, the Priory, in good time, vanished from the Fair. But the Fair lost also the form and the last vestige of the soul of a religious gathering. The reformed Church took no tribute from it, and paid to it no more heed than to other assemblages of men in pursuit of gain or pleasure. The Fair was a truth still, and it lived. It represented at the time of the change, and for a short time afterwards, the true need of such a gathering-place of traders as Cloth Fair and the Close were then affording. It repre- sented then, and for a long time afterwards, the true need of amusement by the people ; and we shall see how, as know- ledge advanced and refinement spread, better enjoyments than it could offer drew away from it, beginning from above, class after class, till such pleasure as it was in its nature to afford became a true thing only to the lowest. When, even to these, there were offered and made acceptable purer sources of enjoyment, Bartholomew Fair no longer repre- sented any living truth ; and as it had long teased to be a place of worship or a haunt of trade, so, also, it was out- grown by the people as a haunt of pleasure. Therefore, become worthless in its last possible form, it has, in our own time, vanished from the midst of London. Grotwell, or Cartwell, was the name of the man — himself a hangman — who was hanged, .with two others, in Henry the Eighth's time, for robbery of a booth at Bartholomew Fair. They were executed in the wrestling place at Clerkenwell. Lord Rich, as a prosperous political adventurer, having become master of the ground within the old Priory enclo- sure, thought was soon taken for conversion of the soil to its most profitable use as a source of revenue. In the reign of Edward the Sixth, that part of London not being deserted by the rich and powerful, the owner oi the parish lived in it q6 JMcmoirs of Bartholojuciv Fair. chap. ix. while Lord Chancellor. There also lived, soon afterwards, Sir Walter Mildmay, in Queen Elizabeth's day Chancellor of Wi-^AlCON OU- ihe Exchequer. It was presently found that the lines of trade marked at Bartholomew Fair by the standings of the A.D. I550. To the Year 1614. 97 clothiers and others, would yield more money as streets of houses than as streets of booths ; and before the close of the century we have Stow telling us, that "now, notwithstanding all proclamations of the prince, and also the Act of Parlia- ment, in place of booths within this churchyard (only let out in the Fair time, and closed up all the year after) be many large houses built, and the north wall towards Long Lane taken down, a number of tenements are there erected for such as will give great rents." The line of trading-houses was substituted for a profidess dead wall bordering Long Lane, in spite of any one of the many powerless Acts which have been passed by Parliament against too much building in London. Parallel with it, through the ground vacant of building north of the church, which that wall had enclosed, parallel also with one of the church walls, a street of con- siderable houses occupied the site and kept the name of the Cloth Fair, The cloth had been exposed in a line of booths, close under the shadow of the church ; and the sketch flicing this page shows how, on one side of the street, the backs of the old houses built in Cloth Fair by Lord Rich and his immediate successors, crowd in. the same line against the sacred building. Of several of these houses the frontage on the roadway of Cloth Fair has been modernised. Thtir backs are unaltered, and so rotten that the other day a woman fell into the yard through the overhanging floor of one of them. The filling up of the parish with house after house, and that smothering with houses of the piece of Priory retained as church, to which we have already referred, began with the rule of the new masters of the land. The disputations, held at Fair time, of the scholars in the mulberry garden ceased at the suppression of the Priory. John Stow witnessed them in his youth. He says, " As for the meeting of the schoolmasters on Festival Days at Fes- tival churches, and the disputing of their scholars logically, &c., whereof I have before spoken, the same was long since discontinued ; but the arguing of the schoolboys about the principles of grammar hath been continued even till our time ; for I myself, in my youth, have yearly seen, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew the Apostle, die scholars of divers grammar schools repair unto the churchyard of St. Barthoio- H 98 Menwlrs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. ix. mew, the Priory in Smithfield, where upon a bank boarded about under a tree, some one scholar hath stepped up, and there hath opposed and answered till he were by some better scholar overcome and put down ; and then the overcomer taking the place, did like as the first. And in the end, the best opposers and answerers had rewards, which I observed not but it made both good schoolmasters, and also good scholars, diligently against such times to prepare themselves for the obtaining of this garland. I remember there repaired to these exercises, amongst others, the masters and scholars of the free schools of St. Paul's in London, of St. Peter's at Westminster, of St. Thomas Aeon's hospital, and of St. An thonie's Hospital ; whereof the last-named commonly pre- sented the best scholars, and had the prize in those days. This Priory of St. Bartholomew being surrendered to Henry the Eighth, those disputations of scholars in that place sur- ceased ; and was again, only for a year or twain, revived in the cloister of Christ's Hospital, where the best scholars, then still of St. Anthonie's school, howsoever the same be now fallen both in number and estimation, were rewarded with bows and arrows of silver, given to them by Sir Martin Bower, goldsmith. Nevertheless, however, the encourage- ment failed, the scholars of Paul's, meeting with them of St. Anthonie's, would call them Anthonie's Pigs, and they again would call the other Pigeons of Paul's, because many pigeons were bred in St. Paul's church, and St. Anthonie was always figured with a pig following him ; and mindful of the former usage, did for a long season disorderly provoke one another in the open street with ' Salve tu quoque, placet mccum di split are V — ^Placet.' And so proceeding from this to questions in grammar, they usually fell from words to blows with their satchels full of books, many times in great heaps, that they troubled the streets and passengers ; so that finally they were restrained with the decay of St. Anthonie's school." The satchels full of books, with which the boys belaboured one another, really were the weapons that had put an end to the old practice of incessant oral disputation. School- masters and men of learning, years before, had also taken to the thrashing of each other with many books j and books A.I). 1 55 1. To the Year 1614. 99 scattered abroad "many times in great heaps," were the remains also of their new way of controversy. If a man had learning, society no longer made it in any degree necessary for him to go bodily in search of the general public to a Fair, or in search of the educated public to the great hall of a University. Wanting was no longer a solemn business, and writing materials were no longer too costly to be delivered over to the herd of schoolboys for habitual use and destruction. Written, instead of spoken exercises, occupied the ' pigs ' and ' pigeons,' who ran riot over the remains of a dead system. There is a famous digression in Holinshed to the story of a murder that in his time by its numerous strange details seized upon men's minds, a story vigorously told by the old chronicler, and diluted also into a play, which has been improperly enough ascribed by some critics to Shakespeare. Five acts of Shakespeare would at any rate not have been feebler than ten columns of Holinshed. The date of the story is the year 155 1, not long after the suppression of the monasteries ; and one part of it illustrates the position held by Bartholomew Fair under its two separate lordships. When Arden of Feversham, that tall and comely personage, matched with a gentlewoman, young, tall, and well-favoured of shape and countenance, but ill-favoured of heart, after many marvellous and unconscious escapes from the traps laid for his life, had at last been murdered at his own hearth by his wanton wife, her tailor Mosbie, Black Will, and the rest of her associates, his body was carried out by the assassins into St. Valentine's Fair. Master Arden's garden at the back of his house was separated only by a field and by a graveyard from Feversham Abbey, which King Stephen founded, and in which King Stephen had been buried. The fair had been about the abbey, but the tolls for that part of the fair beyond the abbey ground had belonged to the town of Feversham. "The fair," Holinshed writes, "was wont to be kept partly in the town, and partly in the abbey ; but Arden for his own private lucre and covetous gain, had this present year (1551), procured it to be wholly kept within the abbey ground which he had purchased ; so reaping all the gains to himself, and bereaving the town of that portion H 2 I oo Memoirs of Bartholovieiv Fair. chap. ix. which was wont to come to the inhabitants, got many a bitter curse." By the rushes sticking in the dead man's slipper, it was seen that Arden had been murdered in a house ; the footsteps in the snow showed that it was out of the door of his own house that he had been brought. Within the house was other evidence against the guilty. Having told this, and related the punishments inflicted on the murderers, the chronicler returning to the scene at the fair says, " This one thing seemeth very strange and notable touching Master Arden, that in the place where he was laid, being dead, all the proportion of his body might be seen two years after and more, so plain as could be, for the grass did not grow where his body had touched ; but between his legs, between his arms, and about the hollowness of his neck, and round about his body and where his legs, arms, head, or any other part of his body had touched, no grass growed at all of all that time. So that many strangers came in that mean time beside the townsmen, to see the print of his body there on the ground in that field. Which field he had (as some have reported) most cruelly taken from a woman ... for which she not only exclaimed against him, in shedding many a salt tear, but also cursed him most bitterly even to his face, wishing many a vengeance to light upon him, and that all the world might wonder on him. Which was thought then to come to pass, when he was thus murdered, and lay in that field from midnight till the morn- ing ; and so all that day, being the Fair day, till night, all the which day there were many hundreds of people came wondering about him." His body seems to have been left there, as the miraculous print of it was maintained, among the wonders of the Fair, for the well-being of those who profited by its attraction. Arden had been the Lord Rich of that Valentine Fair, of which we are informed that the tolls had of old time been divided between town and abbey. Lord Rich would gladly have procured the whole Bartholomew Fair to be held on the church ground he had purchased ; but this being impos- sible, he made the most of what he had. The old market tolls of Smithfield remained without alteration for three centuries; and it is probable that the tax levied on the A.n. 1551. To the Year 1614. 101 transit of goods through any of the gates of Bartholomew the Great in Fair time in the days of Strype, was that which had been taken from the first : it was a penny for every burthen of goods brought in or carried out ; and to that end, Strype says, " there are persons that stand at all the entrances into the Fair; and they are of late years grown so nimble, that these blades will extort a penny, if one hath but a little bundle under one's arm, and nothing relating to the Fair." Then there were the charges paid inside for house-rent, piccage, and stallage. Stallage at fairs is the rent paid for ground on which a stall is set for the display of wares, or on which any tem- porary structure is erected ; piccage is payment for the liberty of picking holes into the ground for a secure planting of props in the erection of stall or booth. They are, of course, a kind of toll, but simple toll is the due paid upon things taken into the Fair and sold there. If there was no sale, there was no toll due. Thus, there was a charge upon each animal or score of animals sold from the live stock exposed in the City Fair, and there might be tolls upon various commodities, as there is toll in country markets of perhaps a penny or two upon each basket of butter and eggs disposed of in the market-place. Such toll is legally regarded as payment for value received in the witnessing of sales. Thus, in the Smithfield Horse-market, that used to be held on Fridays, and in the Smithfield Hay-market, held on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, there was a collector paid by a fixed salary, and supplied with a house free of rent and taxes, who was liable at all times to be called upon to witness and register sales, especially of horses, and to keep a register of all sales of hay and straw, open to be read by any one on payment of a penny. The toll on the sale was the fee paid for its registration. As to such matters there is but one law for fairs and markets. Very jealously have the dues taken as toll by subjects been watched over by Parliament, lest they should be abused into a simple tax levied by subject upon subject. No private person has a right to levy taxes. All authority to exact market-tolls is, therefore, given in the most guarded form. If the amount of toll be not specified in the grant, it must be ascertained I02 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. ix. by reference to the prescription of long usage. If there be neither a specific grant from the crown nor a scale of tolls fixed by prescription, then the fair or market may be held, but no tolls can be taken. Lords of a fair or market may not increase the established rate of tolls. They may diminish it, as men may abandon that which they possess, but they may not seize what is not theirs. So jealously is this prin- ciple upheld, that when the Corporation, having spent a hundred thousand pounds upon improvement of their old market in Smithfield, asked leave of Parliament, by an increase of toll, to be repaid half that sum in forty years by those for whose advantage the improvement had been, such power was denied to them by a majority of four or five to one. When, in September, 1568, the sheep-pens in Smith- field were let by the city to Richard Selby on a lease for one-and-twenty years, he was bound by a special clause never to increase any toll ; and while markets were farmed, such a clause was inserted in all leases, with a penalty of ten pounds upon every infraction of it. This main point in the law concerning toll taken at markets and at fairs we shall hereafter have occasion to remember. It is, in fact, a main point in the constitution of this country. Edward the First, who confirmed Magna Charta eleven times during his reign, was the first king who by a definite statute (De Tallagio non Concedendo) decreed that no tax should be laid or impost levied without the joint consent of Lords and Commons. At the Revolution of 1688 this principle was rooted firmly in our soil. In the grant to Sir Richard, afterwards Lord Rich, of the dissolved priory of St. Bartholomew, there was reserve made of the parish church, of which the living was placed under Sir Richard's j)atronage. "Whereas, the great close of St. Bartholomew hath been before the memory of man used as a parish church within itself, and distinct from other parishes ; and the inhabitants thereof have had their parish church within the church of the late monastery and priory and to the same church annexed, and have had divine service performed by a curate from the appointment of the prior and convent ; and whereas, a certain chapel, called the Parish chapel, with part of the great parish church, have A.D. 1568. To the Year 1614. 103 been taken away, and the materials sold for our use ; never- theless, there still remains a part fit for erecting a parish church, and already raised and built : we do grant to the said Richard Rich, Knt., and to the present and future inhabitants within the Great Close, that part of the said church of the said late monastery or priory which remains raised and built (namely, the still existing choir, taken according to this grant) to be a parish church for ever, for the use of the said inhabitants, .... and that all the void ground, eighty-seven feet in length and sixty feet in width, next adjoining the west side of the church, shall be taken for a churchyard." Richard Rich was appointed the first patron ; John Deane the first rector. King Edward the Sixth confirmed all grants to Rich, who had paid 1064/. iii-. 3^. for his succession to the Black Canons in Smithfield. Queen Mary, however, in the second year of her reign, restored the church of St. Bartholomew to Rome, by granting it to the Black Friars ; they used it as their conventual church until the reign of Elizabeth who, in the first year of her reign turned them out ; the grants of King Edward were then confirmed by parliament, and the parish has remained until the present day, retaining nothing of its ancient constitution except the possession of some small privileges which, when it was brought within the city bounds, were not withdrawn. Of the Black Canons, as individual men, there was no memory. They were gone and their place knew them no more. I am told by the rector, that it is a custom in the parish on Cood Friday for the churchwardens to proceed to a certain grave and place upon it twenty-one sixpences, which are to be taken up again by twenty-one poor people. A like sum of twenty-one sixpences is then paid to the minister. Not only was the origin of that custom forgotten before modern memory begins, but the very name of the man who is buried in that grave has not been known. There is no document accounting for the usage. The heirs of Richard, Lord Rich, to whom the lordship of the old Priory Fair descended, were the Earls of \\'arwick and Holland. So complete was the change, that in Queen Elizabeth's reign, roods and church images were the victims of the I04 Memoirs cf Bartholomezu Fair. chap. ix. martyr fires ; and Bartholomew's Day, in France chosen as tlie day of triumph for the CathoUcs, by a great massacre of Protestants, was kept in England as a day of triumph for the Protestants, on which the booksellers displayed in their shop windows nothing but bibles. The old days, when it was considered a great honour for London to contain one eating-house, were passed away, taverns abounded in the town, and were especially numerous among the houses which encroached upon the border of the once void space of Smithfield. By the frequency of the weekly markets, taverns were needed. The most famous, and one of the oldest of those opened outside the close, was a corner house, at the Smithfield end of Knightrider, or Gilt-spur-street, the main way into Smithfield, along which, of old time, processions of knights and ladies, sometimes with kings in their company, had come to the jousts. At the sign of the Pie — the bird, not the baker's-work so called — there was such notable entertainment, that Pie-corner became a familiar name, bearing the name of the inn long after its place was occupied by other houses. Within the close there were inns also, of which the chief was one • that claimed alliance with the cloth trade and the merchant tailors, by the sign it bore, "the Hand and Shears." It was in one of the chambers of this inn that the court of Pie- powder was held. But there was other trade to be done in Elizabeth's day with the frequenters of Smithfield. After the gallows had gone west to Tyburn, the ground from Hosier-lane to Chick- lane was rapidly built upon. The site was valuable, and when Pennant in his account of London " cannot help in- dulging himself with the mention of William Pennant, an honest goldsmith, his great, great, great, great, great, great uncle," he supplies us with a not uninteresting social fact, in telling how this goldsmith "at his house, the Queen's Head in Smithfield, acquired a considerable fortune in the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, and the beginning of that of James the First." Bartholomew Fair was upon no unfashionable ground when it was possible for a Chancellor of the Exchequer to reside in Cloth Fair, and for a gold- smith to make a large fortune by his trade in Smithfield. •^•i'- 1575-93- lo the Year 16 14. 105 Yet the worst horrors of Smithfield were sometimes revived to scare the dayhght. Upon the old ground in the year 1575, EHzabeth being queen, two Dutchmen, anabaptists, were burnt "with roaring and crying." There was that liorror before God, and there was the horror before man of deadly pestilence, that sometimes turned Smithfield, when it should have been a place of mirth, into a place of dread. In the year 1593, the keeping of Bartholomew Fair as a resort of small dealers and holi- day makers, was for the first time suspended by the raging of the plague ; and the terms of the proclamation of Eliza- beth then made, not only prove that the Fair still main- tained its character as a great place of commerce, but also furnish us with a few points of special information as to the nature of the traffic carried on in it, and the ground allotted to some branches of its trade. It is ordered by the queen that, " whereas, there was a general resort of all kinds of people out of every part of her realm to the said Fair, that in the usual place of Smithfield there shall be no manner of market for any wares kept, nor any stalls or booths for any manner of merchandise, or for victuals, suffered to be set up, but that the open space of the ground called Smithfield, be only occupied with the sale of horses and cattle : and of stall wares, as butter, cheese, and such like, in gross, and not by retail, the same to continue for the space of two days only. "And for the vent of woollen cloths, kerseys, and linen cloth, to be all sold in gross and not by retail ; the same shall be all brought within the close yard of St. Bartholo- mew's, where shops are there continued, and have gates to shut the same place in the nights, and then such cloth to be offered to sale, and to be bought in gross, and not by retail, the same market to continue but 3 days, that is to say, Even, the Day of St. Bartholomew, and the Morrow after. " And that the sale and vent of leather be kept in the out- side of the ring of Smithfield, as hath been accustomed, without erecting of any shops or booths for the same, or for any victualler or other occupier of any wares whatsoever. " And for notice hereof to be given to such of her Ma- jesty's good subjects as for lack of knowledge of this her 1 06 Meuioirs of Bartholoviezv Fair. chap. ix. V Majesty's princely ordonnance might resort to London to sell or buy small wares by retail, and there receive infection, and carry the same into their countries, her Majesty com- mandeth that the Lord Mayor of London shall cause this her Majesty's proclamation to be presently published in all the usual places of the city, in the time of two or three market-days, and to be also proclaimed by the sheriffs of Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, and Essex, in some places of those counties near to the said city, whereby none may resort to the city at this feast of St. Bartholomew, by pretence of any Fair, but such as shall have cause to sell or buy the com- modities in gross." Imprisonment without bail, during the queen's pleasure, or further punishment, was the penalty for infraction of this ordinance, made about three weeks before fair time, on the 6th of August, in the 35th year of the reign of Queen Ehzabeth. The cardinal inference to be drawn from this procla- mation is, that 'Bartholomew Fair, as a place of wholesale commerce, was not to be suppressed without more injury to trade than fear of plague would force the queen's advisers to inflict. But this consideration must be qualified by the fact, that the chief risk came from the throng of pedlers, hawkers, stall-keepers, showmen, and holiday makers from the country round about ; and that the soberer resort of merchants to the Fair, while it was certainly in one respect a greater good, was in the other respect also a lesser evil. Also, there was a wealthy nobleman at court, unwilling to part with a year's tolls from the Cloth Fair and the close, and able to urge actively from motives of self-interest, con- siderations that were, at the same time, not wanting in justice. In the year 1596, a formal agreement was made between Lord Rich and the London corporation, estabUshing a com position of the tolls of Bartholomew Fair, and as to jurisdic- tion in the Fair, placing both parties exactly in the relative position occupied by the Corporation and the Priory in Henry the Sixth's time. Two years later, Bartholomew Fair was visited by the first man who has taken the trouble to describe what he there saw. Paul Hentzner was a German tutor, travelling A.D. i5y3. To the Year 1614. 107 in the year 1598 through Germany, France, Italy, and Eng- land, who wrote an " Itinerarium " that after his return home was published in successive editions at Breslau and Nurem- berg. He wrote for a stay-at-home public, in the spirit of a stay-at-home, to whom all foreign things are strange. A translation of the part of this Itinerary in which England is described was made by Bendey for Horace Walpole, and printed in 1757 at Strawberry Hill. It was included after- wards in the second volume of Dodsley's collections. Hentz- ner went to Bartholomew Fair. Of course he also saw and described Queen Elizabeth "in the fifty-sixth year of her age (as we were told), very majestic : her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled ; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant ; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to from their too great use of sugar). . . . She wore false hair, and that red ; her bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry ; her hands were small, her fingers long, and her stature neither tall nor low ; her air was stately ; her manner of speaking mild and obliging." Yet under the rule of such a queen, Paul Hentzner counted more than thirty traitors' heads rotting upon the tower of London Bridge. He went to the play, and may have seen Shakespeare acting, as he did that year, in Ben Jonson's ' Every Man in his Humour.' He speaks of the excellent music, variety of dances, and excessive applauses in an English iheatre— of the coming round of oranges, nuts, apples, ale, and beer ; and we shall presently have Ben Jonson's authority for applying to the shows and booths of Bartholomew Fair what Hentz- ner says about one habit of the audiences at the plays, with a provision, indeed, that it is their habit every where else : " At these spectacles, and everywhere else, the Eng- lish are constantly smoking tobacco in this manner." — Truly it is a whimsical thing to look back to the time when, of all countiymen in the world, a German looked upon tobacco with astonishment, and told his neighbour how the English were accustomed to make use of that new thing.— " In this manner : they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the faither end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder ; and putting fire to it. loS Memoirs of Bar tho lorn civ Fair. chap. ix. they draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, hke funnels, along with plenty of phlegm and defluxion from the head." The English of those days, we are told, were serious like the Germans, lovers of show, liking to go followed by troops of servants ; good dancers and musicians ; politer in eating than the French, taking less bread, more meat, and much sugar in their drink ; quick of body and wit, good sailors and better pirates. Three hundred of them were said to be hanged yearly in London. They were much troubled with scurvy — one of the distinguished things, by-the-bye, which is said to have come in with the Norman conquest. " They are powerful in the field — successful against their enemies, — im- patient of anything like slavery ; and " [as Bartholomew Fair could witness] "vastly fond of great noises that fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon, drums, and the ringing of bells ; so that it is common for a number of them, that have got a glass in their heads, to go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for hours together, for the sake of exercise." It is through the eyes of this German observer that we have the following glimpse of Bartholomew Fair in the year 1598. "It is worthy of observation, that every year, upon St. Bartholomew's Day, when the Fair is held, it is usual for the mayor, attended by the twelve principal aldermen, to walk in a neighbouring field, dressed in his scarlet gown, and about his neck a golden chain, to which is hung a golden Fleece, and, besides, that particular ornament which dis- tinguishes the most noble order of the Garter. When the mayor goes out of the precincts of the city, a sceptre and sword and a cap are borne before him, and he is followed by the principal aldermen in scarlet gowns with gold chains, himself and they on horseback. Upon their arrival at a place appointed for that purpose, where a tent is pitched, the mob begin to wrestle before them, two at a time ; the conquerors receive rewards from the magistrates. After this is over, a parcel of live rabbits are turned loose among the crowd, which are pursued by a number of boys, who endea- vour to catch them, with all the noise they can make. ^Vhile we were at this show, one of our company, Tobias A.D. 1603. To the Year 16 14. 109 Salander, Doctor of Physic, had his pocket picked of his purse, with nine crowns, which, without doubt, was so cleverly taken from him by an luigUshman, who always kept very close to him, that the Doctor did not perceive it." Thus, the first sketch of Bartholomew Fair, made by a mere observer, meagre as it is, does not omit the pickpocket. Five years before Hentzner's visit, general resort to the Fair was forbidden by reason of the plague. Five years after, the plague closed the Fair again. James I. then was king, and he first issued a proclamation, dated at Windsor, July II, 1603 : "For the fair which hath been used to be kept on the fields near our house of St. James and city of A\'estminster, commonly called St. James's Fair, about the day of our coronation and for some days after ; to be for- borne for eight or ten days after the first day of the usual holding thereof, the same to be held then as used to do." St. James's Fair, therefore, after the Palace had been substi- tuted for the Feper House, was kept in courtly fashion, not on the anniversary of a saint's coronation as a mart3r, but on the coronation day of his most sacred Majesty. This order for the postponement of the courtly Fair was followed by another proclamation, dated July 29, 1603, to the effect that " The solemnities of our coronation being now performed," the nobility of Scotland and all English noblemen and gentry, not the king's servants in ordinary, are commanded to repair homewards into the country, to prevent the spreading of the contagion of the plague. The knight-marshal is to prevent persons from infesting the court, and petitions of suitors are to be received at Kings- ton. This was followed on the 8th of August by a pro- clamation dated from Hampton Court, ordaining for the " desire of preventing an universal contagion among our people," that Bartholomew Fair and Sturbridge Fair shall not be holden, "nor anything appertaining unto them, at the times accustomed, nor any time till they shall be licensed by us." The next record we find concerns the Fair for the year following, and officially describes some of the ceremonies which helped to impress Paul Hentzner with his admiration of the dignity and splendour of the lord mayor and the 1 1 o Memoirs of Bart/iolomciu Fair. chap. ix. aldermen of London. It is a part of the " order of my lord mayor, the aldermen, and the sheriffs, for their meet- ings and wearing of their apparel throughout the year 1604. "on saint Bartholomew's even for the fair in smithfield. " The aldermen meet my lord and the sheriffs at the Guildhall Chapel, at two of the clock after dinner, in their violet gowns lined, and their horses, without cloaks, and there hear Evening Prayer ; which being done, they take their horses and ride to Newgate, and so forth to the gate entering in at the Cloth Fair, and there make a proclama- tion " Here I breik the text of the order, that the proclamation itself may be heard. THE TENOUR OF THE PROCLAMATION MADE ON BAR- THOLOMEW EVE, IN THE AFTERNOON, AT THE GREAT GATE GOING INTO THE CLOTH FAIR, SMITHFIELD. " The Right Honourable Lord Mayor of the city of London, and his right worshipful brethren the aldermen of the said city, streightly charge and command, on the behalf of our sovereign lady the Queen, that all manner of persons, of whatsoever estate, degree, or condition they be, having recourse to this Fair, keep the peace of our said sovereign lady the Queen. " That no manner of persons make any congregation, conventicles, or affrays, by which the same peace may be broken or disturbed, upon pain of imprisonment and fine, to be made after the discretion of the lord mayor and aldermen, " Also, that all manner of sellers of wine, ale, or beer, sell by measures ensealed, as by gallon, pottle, quart, and pint, upon pain that will fall thereof. " And that no person sell any bread, but if it keep the assize, and that it be good and wholesome for man's body, upon pain that will fall thereof " And that no manner of person buy or sell, but with A.D. i6o4. To the Year 1614. iii 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 to sale, or in buying or offering to buy, any commodities whatsoever, or in sitting, tippling, or drinking in any tavern, inn, ale-house, or cook's- house, or in doing any other thing that may lead to the breach thereof, upon the pain and penalties contained in several acts of Parliament, which will be severely inflicted upon the breakers thereof " And finally, that whatever person soever find them- selves aggrieved, injured or wronged by any manner of person in this Fair, that they come with their plaints before the stewards in this Fair, assigned to hear and determine pleas, and they will minister to all parties justice, accord- ing to the laws of this land, and the customs of this City. God save the Queen ! " The mayor, sheriffs, and aldermen sitting on horseback, robed in their violet gowns, having made this proclama- tion at a point between the city Fair and that owned b}- the Warwick or Holland family, as the rest of the official rule details, " the proclamation being made, they ride through the Cloth Fair, and so return back again, through the Churchyard of Great St. Bartholomew's to Aldersgate, and so ride home again to the Lord Mayor's house." "on BARTHOLOMEW DAY FOR WRESTLING. " So many aldermen as dine with my lord mayor and the sheriffs, be apparelled in their scarlet gowns lined, and after dinner their horses be brought to them where they dine, and those aldermen which dine with the sheriffs, ride with them to my lord's house, to accompany him to the wrestling. Then when the wvestling is done, they take 1 1 2 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. ix. their horses, and ride back again through the Fair, and so in at Aldersgate and so home again to the said lord mayor's house. "The next day, if it be not Sunday for the shooting, as upon Bartholomew's day, but if it be Sunday, the Monday following." Tradition declares that the mayor, when he had read the proclamation, drank ale from a silver flagon, and that thereupon the bustle and the business of the fair began. The proclamation above cited was abbreviated at a later time, and may have been originally shorter than it there appears. It must have been shorter in the days of Queen Elizabeth, unless (as was quite possible) the city of London exercised a stricter than the general rule in the suppression of all traffic upon Sundays. For against one clause in the proclamation we must set an advertisement, made in the seventh year of Elizabeth's reign for due order in the public administration of Common Prayers, enjoining that "in all Fairs and Common Markets, falling upon the Sunday, there be no showing of any Avares before the service be done." Up to this time the old Priory Enclosure, reconstituted as a parish, had not been reckoned among city parishes. It was beyond the precincts. It was not until the 20th of September, 1608, that in a charter granted by King James the First to the city of London, the circuit, bounds, liberties, franchises, and jurisdictions of the city were so extended as to include the ground of the late dissolved Priories of St. Bartho- lomew near Smithfield, (and of its Hospital) Trinity near Aldgate, of the Blackfriars within and at Ludgate, of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, called \Miitefriars, and the Inn or Liberty of Cold Harbour Lane. In the year following, a new question of jurisdiction was raised in connection with the Smithfield Fair. Immediately after Bartholomew Fair, on the 28th of August, in the year 1609, the Drapers questioned the right of search exercised by the Merchant Taylors. The Company's books show that its clerk was "ordered thereon to attend Drapers' Hall, on the next court day, with a message to the following pur- port, viz.. That the Merchant Taylors' Company had right A.D. i6i4. To the Year 1614. 113 to search, and that they had quietly enjoyed the same since the 271)1 of Henry the Sixth, being above 150 years past, and still earlier, as by the Merchant Taylors records ap- peared, wherein is mentioned a lengthened lawsuit between them and the Drapers, about the same question of right of search, wlien a sentence was passed for the Merchant Taylors." In 161 1 the ashes of the last martyr-fire in Smithfield smouldered out. The victim was Bartholomew Leggatt, a pious Unitarian, burnt for distrust of the Athanasian and Nicene creeds by James the First, at the sentence of John King, newly made bishop of London. Then in the )ear 1614, between Fairtime and Fairtime, Smithfield was first paved. I 1 4 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. x. CHAPTER X. v/ Smithfield, three years after the last martyrdom, ceased to be a broken plain of mud, and of the filth of men and beasts. Rain, and the cattle brought thither for sale, had made the place often almost impassable ; and so foul had been its general state, that there were many who would even doubt the power of art to transform it into hard and level ground. Bartholomew Fair, in a wet August before the year 1614, must have been a slough of pleasure, difficult indeed to struggle through. But a king's letter having ordered the Lord Mayor to pave the place, and thereby to remove the scandal brought upon the city by its ruinous and dangerous condition, in the year 16 14 Smithfield was no longer, in that respect, a public nuisance. At an expense of sixteen hundred pounds the paving was accomplished. The ground was greatly raised in the middle, whereby it became a clean and si)acious walk ; channels were made to drain away the water; and a strong railing was set round about the market-place for the security of foot passengers from the danger of coaches, carts, horses, and other cattle, of which Smithfield was then seldom empty. The horse-pool was decayed, and the springs being stopped up, only the land water fell into a small bottom, enclosed with brick, and called the Smithfield Pond. Cow-lane, in which was the old house of the Prior of Sem- peringham, was a lane of houses, not all of them new, built over the site of the ancient gallows. The last elm had been cut down. Hosier-lane, and Chick-lane, were newly become permanent resorts of trade. Long-lane was being lined with tenements for brokers, tipplers, and the like. There were A.D. i6i4. In Ben yon sou's Time. 115 brewhouses, inns, " fair and comely buildings " on the western side of Smithfield, as far as the Bars ; all these erec- tions constituting an encroachment upon, and a reduction to about three acres of, the ancient space, whereby, said Stow, writing in those times, " remaineth but a small portion for the old uses." Returning to Smithfield stones, we should add, it was about this time that the citizens, who were also first enjoying a more ample water supply than was furnished by the springs on their own soil, began to pave the margins of the streets before their doors with broad flagstones for the convenience of foot passengers. These Memoirs at the same time escape from the slippery ill-lighted region over which they have been at pains to keep a steady footing. In the year of the paving of Smithfield, Ben Jonson represented in a Comedy, what Bartholomew Fair, then a most ancient London festival, was in his time. Therefore, we also have at last got even ground to go upon. From its birthplace by the church, and in the fair, the Eng- lish drama had departed, growing into independent life in the wide world, but leaving in the old home many recollections of its childhood. From Mysteries and Miracle plays the drama, still in its childhood, had grown to Moralities, with personated virtues to teach morals, and a comic Vice to help the devil's work in raising laugliter. The Moralities, as they grew older, learnt to enliven their more abstract dialogues or doctrine with examples illustrative of their theme, and so included monitory scenes from human history, such as the fortunes of Antony and Cleopatra, Damon and Pythias, or the Siege of Troy. The Vice put on the dress of the Eliza- bethan clown. All this was in the childhood of the drama, whereof memories clung to its birth-place long after it had gone out mature into the world, and had begotten sons equal in dignity with the best poets that have ever laid their spell upon mankind. The Fair, like an old Nurse who once carried the infant child of a great house upon her arms, and was not then too ignorant to be its oracle and guide, looks from a lowly hut upon the palace of her nursling, and croons over to herself the old ditties, tells over to herself the old stories that once satisfied the lord of the great house, who is I 2 ri6 Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fair. chap. x. so tall and stately, and so choice in mirth, and so far-reach- ing in knowledge. Once only that bright foster-son crossed the old woman's threshold in the days of his great wealth and honour, and sat chattering and laughing at her feet. She could afford then to be laughed at, for her house after all, though dirty and ruinous, was a good house. She was a most respectable shopkeeper, she had a wholesale trade, and no lack of custom as a retailer of toys and hardware. He was a way- ward wilful lad in his swaddling-clothes, and in his handsome manhood he might laugh at his old nurse, and welcome. In the name, therefore, of Ben Jonson, English drama paid a visit to the Fair in Smithfield. Ben Jonson's comedy of Bartholomew Fair, though by no means his greatest work, has among his writings one particular distinction. It is the most perfect example of his most peculiar character among the poets of his time, and it may even be said of any time. He had a muse that dwelt in London. His tragic muse frequented London libraries ; his comic muse passed from the court to the city, dropping in at London houses by the London streets. In his comedy of Bartholomew Fair, he is in a dense centre of London life. So much about one bit of town litt ^s we find in it, is not contained in any other extant play. The burly, kindly man, with " his mountain belly and his rocky face," a polished scholar and a polished wit; so noble in the outspoken honesty that has outweighed — at last — huge masses of detraction ; the one man who in that day felt to the quick Shakspeare's commanding genius, and in the word of a friend's love expressed a perfect sense of it, was not a London poet in the vulgar sense. He did not, as a thousand men have done, talk of all things out of a mind bound down to the perception of but one ; but, with the full soul of a poet and a wide prerogative, he chose to make a social being of his muse, and live with her as the enlivener of his own dwelling-place. Moreover, he was a bold satirist, whose satire being to the town, was of the town. Satire against the absent or the distant was for feebler men. There are other of Ben Jonson's plays, which in one scene mention a greater variety of London places than are named in the whole comedy of Bartholomew Fair, where the Fair A. D. 1 6 14. In Ben yonson's Time. 117 is all in all, and where we are so hemmed in with town follies and vices, that the "only hint we get of the existence of such a thing as tree in nature, is the mention of an arbour of green boughs, used as a booth for eating pig in. These arbours of green boughs, which disappeared from the Fair, as in course of time London expanded, remind us that in the beginning of the seventeenth century, ihey who crossed Smithfield with their faces to the country very soon were in the open iields. From one side of it country people entered the Fair through lanes but little built upon, from paths by the brookside, and over moor and meadow. Another very noticeable thing in this comedy. is the vivid painting of the characters through whom the satirist amuses himself with the follies of the Fair. They are many and various, yet every one of them is defined sharply, and they all go through a maze of misadventure without causing the least confusion to the witness of their huge bewilderment. In this particular respect Bartholomew Fair is not excelled by any of Ben Jonson's works. Through the centre of the action there moves Adam Overdo, judge of the court of Piepowders. (We observe in passing that the final s had in those days not yet fallen from the court of Wayfaring traders.) That man of power upon whose sole jurisdiction not King James himself may intrude, is possessed with the freak of a Haroun Alraschid. He will walk the Fair in disguise and, habited as a fool, become for himself ear-witness and eye-witness of the enormities that need correction. The watchmen look for him in vain : " How now neighbour Haggise," says one to another who has been on a vain errand, " what says Justice Overdo's worship to the other offenders ? " — " Why," answers Haggise, " he says just nothing ; what should he say, or when should he say ? He is not to be found, man ; he has not been seen in the Fair here all this livelong day, never since seven o'clock in the morning. His clerks know not what to think on't. There is no court of pie-poudres yet." No court yet, on this four and-twentieth of August ; and it is late in the day, for there has been Puppy the wrestler fast asleep before the booth of fat Ursula the pigwoman, — " a strong man, a mighty man, my lord mayor's man and a I r 8 Memoirs of Baj'tJwiomcw Fair. chap. x. wrestler." " He has wrestled so long with the bottle there, that the man with the beard " — that is the bearded face once common on stoneware mugs — " has almost struck up his heels,"' and some time ago " there has been the clerk of the market to cry him all the Fair over for my lord's service." Now the wrestling before the lord mayor is upon Bartholo- mew Day in the afternoon. The north country clothier has finished his day's work, and cried out too late " I'll ne mare, I'll ne mare ; the eale's too meaghty," when he already was "e'en as vuU as a paiper's bag." — " My northern cloth," as Puppy, the west country wrestler said for him before he was floored, " do zhrink i' tlie wetting, ha ! " This sodden north countiyman, denned as one " who do's change cloth for ale at the Fair here,'' is the only ancestor of the merchants of Leeds, Manchester, and Bradford, who in Ben Jonson's play indicates the existence of the still consider- able Cloth Fair in Smithfield. The Pleasure Fair is the scene of the story, and it contains only this one foolish straggler from the body of substantial clothiers who were doing busi- ness among themselves upon Lord Rich's ground. To the Cloth Fair, therefore, some credit is given in the Play, for it yields to the vice and folly of the day only a stray sim- pleton ; but the stagekeeper in the Prologue discussing what might have been written, does not credit the north country- man with want of keenness : " Ho ! an Master Tarleton had lived to have played in Bartholomew Fair, you should have seen him have come in, and have been cozened in the Cloth Quarter so finely ! " The Horse Fair has a representative in Master Daniel Knockem Jordan the horse courser. Ahorse courser was the man who bought and sold horses already in use, a horse dealer was he who traded in horses of his own rearing and training. The horse coursers, with ribbons set about the manes and tails of their beasts, for ornament and sign of their being on sale, had their own ground in Bartholomew Fair, and made its dregs the fouler for their presence. ^ Knockem or Captain Jordan, captain of the roarers, bully in sword, boot and feather, is a man whose breath reeks of the stable. He is a knight of the knife, a child of the horn thumb ; (a horn on the thumb was used to receive the edge A.D. i6i4. In Ben y 0115071 s Time. 119 of the knife with which purses were cut ;) he is a vapourer who can cut halfpenny purses or steal Uttle penny dogs out of the fair ; brutal companion, also, to the weak among his infamous associates of the other sex. To take tolls and manage for its proprietors the general business of the Fair there was the Clerk of the Market. To maintain, on the part of the law, order and justice among the keen traders, cutpurses, and their confederate ballad- singers, pigwomen, costard (apple) mongers, bullies, and whatever worse people the Fair contained, — also among the crowd of precocious, eager boys that duly appear in the play, rioting in the wake of some odd person who is so unhappy as to fix their attention, — there was not only the Piepowder Court, with its justice and clerks, and the marshals its igno- rant and starveling satellites, eyes of the criminal law, but there were the stocks in the Fair, and there also was a whip- ping post. The pond too was large enough for Ursula the pigwoman to be ducked in, whale as she was. " Many," said Adam Overdo, "are the yearly enormities of this Fair, in whose courts of Piepoudres I have had the honour, during the three days, sometimes to sit as judge. Put this is the special day for the detection of those enor- mities. I am resolved to spare spy money hereafter, and make mine own discoveries." Disguised, therefore, as a fool and passing with the Fair goers for " mad Arthur of Bradley, that makes the orations'" — to Arthur of Bradley there were in those days many popular allusions, and he was the subject also of a merry ballad — Adam Overdo mixed with the people of the Fair. But it so happened that the justice's wife, Mistress Overdo, was easily persuaded to taste what innocent pleasure she could as the companion of her simple brother Bartholo- mew Cokes (Cokes was a name once answering to the character of this its bearer), who called the Fair his Fair, because of Bartholomew. Cokes meant to be married to Mistress Grace Wellborn, the justice's ward, and he had sent his man Waspe to Proctor Littlewit's to get the marriage license on his day, Bartholomew Day. He must show his Fair to Mistress Grace, who is a discreet maiden as sober as she is handsome, and casts a restrained scorn upon all his I20 Me7iioirs of Bartholomeu) Fair. chap. x. behaviour and speeches. But she has been sold to Justice Overdo as a king's ward and cannot help herself. Before the abolition of the Court of Wards in the twelfth year of Charles the Second, the heir of the king's tenant, holding lands in capite, was during nonage ward of the king, who might sell or present the right of guardianship and bestowal in marriage. King's favourites had made fortunes by traffic in the marrying of wealthy wards. Justice Overdo has bought the wardship of Grace Wellborn, and she is doomed by what she calls " a common calamity " to marry his wife's brother, or she can escape only by paying forfeit of her land. There was legal remedy in case of disparagement, which was a matching below the bride's rank, or against decency ; and this is referred to by the gamester in the Fair, to whom the poor girl is led to explain her position, when he says, " Is there no device of disparagement, or so? Talk with some crafty fellow, some picklock of the law : would I had studied a year longer in the Inns of Court, an't had been but in your case." Cokes, then, attended by his man Waspe, takes Grace and his sister Overdo into Bartholomew Fair, though Grace truly has " no such fancy to the Fair nor ambition to see it ; there's none," she adds, " goes thither of any quality or fashion." But is not Proctor John Littlewit, of the court of Arches (kept in Bow Church, Cheapside, which as the first church in the city raised upon stone arches, was called St. Mary de Arcubus, or le Bow), is not John Littlewit, one of the Arches, that dwells about the hospital, and one of the pretty wits of Paul's a person of some quality? Now Proctor Littlewit goes to the Fair with all his family, namely. Win — not christened Winifred, but Win-thc-Fight— his newly married wife, and his wife's saintly mother. Dame Purecraft, with the dame's friend, the reverend elder set over against the meat of Littlewit, the Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. They lived just after the days of sword and buckler men, who clashed their bucklers, and affected to seek quarrel in the Fair. Kindheart, the tooth-drawer, was a celebrity of the day just gone by : and Bartholomew Fair had been welcoming the Reformation and defying Spain, with a well- educated ape who would leap over a chain in the name of A.D. i6i4. In Ben yonsoiis Tiiuc. 121 a king of England, and leap back again for an English prince; but who sat on his tail scornfully, and would not budge, for the Pope or the king of Spain. Their visit to the Fair happened in this way. Mr. Little- wit, who has a luck to spin out fine conceits, and, like a silk-worm, out of himself, was pleased by the perception of a pleasant quibble in the drawing out of a license on Bar- tholomew Day, the twenty -fourth of August, for a Bartho- lomew Cokes, of Harrow^ o' the Hill, in the county of Middlesex, esquire ; and being in good humour with him- self and all things, was well pleased to see his wife, Win, come into his room in her velvet cap and her fine high shoes, like the Spanish lady. He could challenge all Cheapside to show such another : Moorfields, Pimlico-path, or the Exchange in a summer evening. He was in love with his' bright wife and his bright wit. He was none of )'our Three Cranes, Mitre, and Mermaid men. Other men have wives as fine as the players, and as well drest. Other men have their works too. Master Littlewit was author of a puppet play — a Motion — which was to be performed on that day for the first time at the Fair. A bachelor friend, Master Winwife, happening to call at this time — for he was a suitor to Mrs. Littlewit's mother, the Dame Purely, — found the happy pair in love with one another, and with all the world, except perhaps Dame Purely and the Rabbi, who kept rule over their household. Master Winwife was' warned by them, that the widow had been to the cunning man in Cow-lane, who had foretold that she should never have a happy hour if she did not within that very week marry a madman ; t'other man of Moorfields, said it must be a gen- tleman madman. Winwife was advised to be a little matldcr than his friend the gamester. Master Quarlous, who had also an affection for the dame's six thousand pounds. The widow herself, he was told, inquired at Bedlam twice a day, and was studying the old Elder, come from Banbury, a suitor that put in at meal-tide, to praise the painful brethren, or pray that the sweet singers might be restored. Presently, Master Quarlous also looked in upon Littlewit, and was reminded by the dangerously briskwitted proctor, of a pro- mise made over their cups last night, to join them in a 122 Memoirs of Barlholomew Fair. chap. x. visit to the Fair. " Before truth, if you have that fearful quahty, John, to remember when you are sober, John, what you promise drunk, John ; I shall take heed of you, John." The next comer was Master Bartholomew Coke's man, wanting the license, a terrible testy old fellow, and his name was Waspe, too. He must not be kept waiting ) he hath both eggs on the spit, and irons in the fire ; more business than the buying of gingerbread there in the Cloister, or a gilt pouch in the Fair. He has charge of his master : " You are an ass. I have a young master, he is now upon his making and marring ; the whole care of his well-doing is now mine. His foolish schoolmasters have done nothing but run up and down the country with him to beg puddings and cake-bread of his tenants, and almost spoiled him ; he has learn'd nothing but to sing catches, and repeat ' Rattle Bladder, rattle !' and ' O, Madge !' I dare not let him walk alone for fear of vile tunes, which he will sing at supper and in the sermon times. If he meet but a carman in the street, and I find him not talk to keep him off on him, he will whistle him and all his tunes over at night in his sleep ! He has a head full of bees ! Gentlemen, you do not know him ; he is another manner of piece than you think for: but nine- teen years old, and yet he is taller than either of you by the head, God bless him ! We have been but a day and a half in town, gentlemen, and yesterday in the morning, we walked London to show the city to the gentlewoman he shall marry, Mistress Grace ; but afore I will endure such another half-day with him, I'll be drawn with a good gib-cat through the great pond at home, as his uncle Hodge was. Why we could not meet that heathen thing all the day but staid him ; he would name you all the signs over, as he went, aloud ; and where he spied a parrot or a monkey, there he was pitched, with all the little longcoats about him, male and female; no getting him away! .1 thought he would have run mad o'the black boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy, rogue's tobacco there." But what insult to the trusty Humphrey Waspe, the faithful Numps, — to seek him ! He must come after him to Proctor Littlewit's ; Cokes himself, with Grace and his sister, Mistress Overdo. What the mischief! Do they think lie changed their four- A.D. i6i4. J^ii BciL JojisoiLS Time. 123 teen shillings worth of small ware — the license — for hobby- horses in the Fair ! But to the Fair, Master Cokes was bound. "The Fair, Numps, the Fair." —" Would the Fair, and all the drums and rattles in it, were in your belly for me ! they are already in your brain. He that had the means to travel your head now, should meet finer sights than any are in the Fair, and make a finer voyage on't \ to see it all hung with cockle-shells, pebbles, fine wheat-straws, and here and there a chicken's feather and a cobweb. Gentlemen, if he go to the Fair, he will buy of everything to a baby there" (the dolls there were called Bartholomew babies) ; " and household stuft" for that too. If a leg or an arm on him did not grow on, he would lose it in the press. And then he is such a ravener after fruit ! you will not believe what a coil I had t'other day to compound a busi- ness between a Cather'ne pearwoman and him, about snatch- ing : 'tis intolerable, gentlemen." — " O, but you must not leave him now to these hazards, Numps." — " Nay, he knows too well I will not leave him, and that makes him presume : ^^'ell, sir, will you go now? If you have such an itch in your feet to foot it to the Fair, why do you stop, am I o' your tarriers ? Go ! Will you go, sir ? Why do you not go ?" Of course he goes. And Proctor Littlewit must needs go ; for, as he tells his wife, " I have an affair in the Fair, Win, a puppet play of mine own making, — say nothing, — that I writ for the Motion man, which you must see. Win." — " I would I might, John, but my mother will never consent to such a profane motion, she will call it." But John is a husband with a wit. He has ideas, " Win, long to eat of a pig, sweet Win, in the Fair, do you see ; in the heart of the Fair, not at Pye corner." Roast pig was from time imme- morial the dainty of the Fair, and to long for Bartholomew Pig was a device common even among married women of a later generation than that to which ]Mrs. Littlewit belonged. Davenant cites this as part of his impression of tlie Fair when he has told how London's Mayor, in saddle new. Rides to the Fair of Barllemew ; He twirls his chain and lookctli big, As if to fright the liead of pig That gaping lies on every stall — T 24 Meuiob's of Bartholomew Fair. chap. x. waiting the call of any one in Mrs. Littlewit's position. Dame Purecraft fought in vain against her child's desire for the unclean beast, pig, and she would do anything to satisfy the longing. But faithful justification of our zealous brother Busy might prevail. Busy was sought and found fast by the teeth in the cold turkeypie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand and a glass of malmsey on his right. Presently, when he had cleaned his beard, he came. This was the Banbury man — Banbury being in those days a stronghold of the Puritans. Here let me say at once, what there are few now who doubt, that throughout the seventeenth century in England the sincere Puritans were the truest gentlemen and best main- tainers of the country's honour. But there is nothing so easy, nothing so profitable for a rascal as the feigning of religious zeal. Let, therefore, nobody now read the cha- racter of Zeal-of the-Land Busy as derision cigainst the whole body of Puritans, who had already declared Avar against the Pla} house and the Fair. It is a fierce satire against Reli- gious Hypocrisy. It is an English Tartuffe, exposed to a more passionate scorn than any Frenchman ever has invoked against fraud in religion. I^Iemoirs of Bartholomew Fair now reach a period in which the Puritans must occupy a chief position in the narrative ; and it is in Ben Jonson's comedy that upon records of the Fair they first make their appearance. The Rabbi Busy is the person in the play who belongs most essentially to this part of our history. " He is more than an elder, he is a prophet. He was a baker, sir, but he does dream now and see visions. He has given over his trade, out of a scruple he took that in spiced conscience, those cakes he made, were served to bridals, maypoles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings. His christian name is Zeal-of the -Land, a notable hypocritical vermin. One that stands upon his face more than his faith at all times : ever in seditious motion, and reproving for vain glory ; of a most lunatic conscience of spleen, and affects the violence of singularity in all he does. A fellow of a most arrogant and invincible dulness, by his profession he will ever be in the state of innocence and childhood, for A.D. i6i4. In Ben Jonson^s Time. 125 he derides all antiquity, defies any other learning than inspiration, and what discretion soever years should afford him, it is all prevented in his original ignorance." That description doubtless was meant for a more general censure on the Puritan ; but when the particular Busy, having purified his beard, enters to give his counsel to the widow and widow's daughter, he snufiles out the language of the Hypocrite alone : " Verily, for the disease of longing it is a disease, a carnal disease or appetite, incident to women ; and as it is carnal and incident, it is natural, very natural : now pig, it is a meat, and a meat that is nourishing and may be longed for, and so consequently eaten ; it may be eaten ; very exceeding well eaten ; but in the Fair, and as a Bar- tholomew Pig, it cannot be eaten ; for the very calling it a Bartholomew Pig, and to eat it so, is a spice of idolatry, and you make the Fair no better than one of the high places. This, I take it, is the state of the question : a high place.'' — " Good Brother Zeal-of-the-Land, think to make it as lawful as you can.'"' — " Yes, sir, and as soon as you can, for it must be, sir." — "Surely, it may be otherwise, but it is subject to construction, subject, and hath a face of offence with the weak, a great face, a foul face ; but that face may have a veil put over it, and be shadowed as it were ; it may be eaten, and in the Fair, I take it, in a booth, the tents of the wicked ; the place is not much, not very much, we may be religious in the midst of the profane, so it be eaten with a reformed mouth, with sobriety and humbleness ; not gorged in with gluttony or greediness, there's the fear : for, should she go there, as taking pride in '"^^'^ place, or delight in the unclean dressing, to feed the vanity of the eye, or lust of the palate, it were not well, it were not fit, it were abominable, and not good." " Nay," says Littlewit, " we'll be humble enough, we'll seek out the homeliest booth in the Fair, that's certain ; rather than fail, we'll eat it on the ground." " Ay," adds Dame Purecraft, " and I'll go with you myself Win-the- fight, and my brother, Zeal-of-the-Land, shall go with us too, for our better consolation." Then says the Rabbi, " In the way of comfort to -the weak, I will go and eat. I will eat exceedingly, and prophesy ; there may be a good use 126 Memoirs of Bartholomciu Fair. chap. x. made of it, too, now I think on't ; by the pubhc eating of swine's flesh, to profess our hate and loathing of Judaism, Avhereof the brethren stand tax'd. I will therefore eat, yea, I will eat exceedingly." So these also set off to the Fair. In the Fair, as I have said, is Justice Overdo, solemnly establishing himself as a fool for the benefit of public morals. There are the booths and stalls. There is pros- perous Lanthorn Leatherhead, the hobby-horse man, who cries "What do you lack? what i.s't you buy? what do you lack? ratdes, drums, halberts, horses, babies o' the best, fiddles of the finest ! " He is a too proud pedler, owner- also of a famous puppet-show, the manager indeed for whom Proctor Littlewit has sacrificed to the Bartholomew Muses. Joan Trash, the gingerbread woman, keeps her stall near him, and the rival traders have their difterences. " Do you hear, sister Trash, lady of the basket ? sit farther with your gingerbread progeny there, and hinder not the prospect of my shop, or I'll have it proclaimed in the Fair, what stuff they are made on." — " Why, what stuft' are they made on, brother Leatherhead? nothing but what's wholesome, I assure you."—" Yes, stale bread, rotten eggs, musty ginger, and dead honey, you know." — " I defy thee, and thy stable of hobby-horses. I pay for my ground as well as thou dost. Buy any gingerbread, gilt gingerbread ! Will your worship buy any gingerbread, very good bread, comfortable bread?" The cries of the Fair multiply, " Buy any ballads ! new ballads ! Hey ? ' ' ' Now the Fair's a filling ! O, for a tune to startle The birds o' the booths here billing-, Yearly with old Saint Bartle ! ' " Buy any pears, pears, fine, very fine pears ! " — " What do you lack, gentlemen ? Maid, see a fine hobby-horse for your young master ; cost you but a token a week his provender." (Tokens were farthings coined by tradesmen for convenience of change, before farthings were published as King's money by Charles the Second, in 1672.; " Have you any corns on your feet and toes ? " A.D. 1614. Ill Ecu Jonsou's Time. 127 " Buy a mousetrap, a mousetrap, or a tormentor for a flea ? " " Buy some gingerbread ? " " What do you lack, gentlemen ? Inie purses, pouches, pin-cases, pipes? what is't you lack? a pair o' smiths to wake you in the morning? or a fine whistling bird ? " " Ballads, ballads ! Fine new ballads : " ' Henr for your love, ami buy for your money. A delicate ballad o' the ferret and the coney. A Dozen of Divine Points, and the Godly Garters : The Fairing of Good Counsel, of an ell and three-quarters.' "What do you lack, what do you buy, mistress? a fine hobby-horse, to make your son a tilter? a drum to make him a soldier? a fiddle to make him a reveller? What is't you lack ? little dogs for your daughters ? or babies, male or female ? " " Gentlewomen, the weather's hot ; whither walk you. Have a care of your fine velvet caps, the Fair is dusty. Take a sweet, delicate booth, with boughs, here in the way, and cool yourselves in the shade ; you and your friends. The best pig and bottle-ale in the Fair, sir. Old Ursula is cook, there you may read : " HERE BE THE BEST PIGS AND SHE DOES ROAST THEM AS WELL AS EVER SHE DID." (There is a picture of a Pig's head over the inscription, and) " the Pig's head speaks it." " A delicate show-pig, little mistress, with shweet sauce, and crackling, like de bay-leaf i' de fire, la ! Tou shalt ha' the clean side o' the table-clot^ and di glass vash'd with phatersh of Dame Annesh Cleare." (A favourite well near Hoxton, that of Agnes le Clare.) With Dame Ursula, the ])igwoman, more gross than her own pigs, even Ben Jonson's rich colouring shall not tempt us to make any intimate acquaintance. Justice Overdo has her misdeeds on record in the Piepoudres. Her booth, gay in front with its sign-board, and arbour, and, on the other side, smoky with the fire at wliich the pigs roast, is a den of infamy, and used as the head quarters of a gang of thieves, 128 Mnuoirs of Bartholoriie'iv Fair. chap. x. headed by Ezechiel Edgworth, the civil cut-purse, a polite young gentleman, in whom the disguised Justice Overdo, believing him to be an honest, simple, and misguided youth, takes a benign interest. Knockem the horse-courser is of the same company, and so is Nightingale the ballad-singer, whose vocation it is to collect crowds, in which Edgworth and his friends can operate, and, as a man not open to sus- picion, to receive, when they can be passed to him, the purses cut. Edgworth and he are great friends, never asunder. He chooses good places near the fullest passages to sing in, and says his friend to him, "in your singing you must use your hawk's eye . nimbly, and fly the purse to a mark still, where 'tis worn, and on which side ; that you may give me the sign with your beak, or hang your head that way in the tune." What countryman can suspect the man who sings him a Fairing of Good Counsel, of an ell and three-quarters ; or his warning him with all his lungs to mind his pockets, in a Caveat against Cut-purses. Cokes cannot doubt his honour. Cokes and his friends have had adventures. Cokes has had his pocket picked by Edgworth of his small change, but he has his purse of gold, and jingles it, and openly defies all rogues in the fair to take it. He goes through the fair with his hand in his pocket, fimily grasped about his gold, a delicate fine trap, he thinks, to catch the cut-purse nibbling. He has been purchasing largely, and has already loaded the back of his man Waspe with toys. " Would I had been set in the ground," says Waspe, "all but the head on me, and had my brains boivled at, or threshed out, when I first underwent this charge." Winwife and Quarlous meet him with his load. " Are you removing the Fair, Numps? " — The voice of Cokes, in barter, here breaks in with, " Those six horses, friend, I'll have, — and the three Jews' trumps ; and half a dozen o' birds, and that drum, (I have one drum already,) and your smiths ; I like that device of your smiths very pretty well ; and four halberts — and, let me see, that fine painted great lady, and her three women for state, I'll have." The frantic Waspe cries, " No, the shop ; buy the whole shop, it will be best, the shop ! the shop ! " and Cokes is considering of that, when the gingerbread woman calls ofl" A.n. i6i4. In Ben yonsoiis Time. 129 his attention. " Is this well, goody Joan," the toyman asks, " to interrupt my market in the midst, and call away my customers? Can you answer this at the Piepoudres?" But Cokes is ready to buy shop and basket. The toyman thus appraises his establishment: "Sir, it stands me in six and twenty shillings and seven-pence halfpenny, besides three shillings for my ground." Gingerbread woman thus ap- praises hers : " Four shillings and eleven-pence, sir, ground and all, an't like your worship." Whereunto Cokes answers, " It does like my worship very well, poor woman; that's live shillings more : what a masque shall I furnish out, for forty shillings, twenty pound Scotch, and a banquet of ginger- bread ! there's a stately thing ! Numps ? sister ? — and my wedding gloves too ! that I never thought on afore ! AH my wedding gloves gingerbread ? O me ! what a device will there be, to make 'em eat their fingers' ends ! and deli- cate brooches for the bridemen and all ! and then I'll have this poesie put to them. For the best grace, meaning Mistress Grace, my wedding poesie." Mistress Grace answers, " I am beholden to you, sir, and to your Bartholomew wit." Then whispers the civil cut- purse to the ballad-singer, " Yonder he is, buying of ginger- bread ; set in quickly, before he part with too much of his money." Nightingale the ballad-singer therefore comes near, and to the tune of Pagginton's Pound, begins : " My masters, and friends, and good people draw near." " Ballads ! hark ! hark ! pray thee, fellow, stay a little ; good Numps, look to the goods. What ballads hast thou? — a Caveat against Cut-purses ! a good jest i' faith, I would fain see that demon, your cut-purse, you talk of, that deli- cate-handed devil ; they say he walks hereabouts, I would see him walk now." Nightingale sings : ' ' My masters and friends and good people draw near, And look to your purses, for that I do say ; And thougli little money in them you do bear, It costs more to get than to lose in a day. You oft have been told. Both the yonng and the old, And bidden beware of the cut-purse so bold ; 130 Memoirs of Dartholomciu Fair. chap. x. Then if you take heed not, free me from the curse. Who both give you warning, for, and the cut-purse. Youth, youth, thou hadst better been starved by thy nurse, Than live to be hanged for cutting a purse !" There are three other verses, and while they are being sung, the civil cut-purse, tickling Cokes in the right ear with a straw, has caused him, when off his guard, to take his right hand from his pocket. While he rubs his ear the purse is gone. Winwife and Quarlous at the edge of the crowd see the theft committed. In Whalley's edition of Ben Jonson's works, that is the scene illustrated by the annexed en- graving. There is one etching on copper before each play, the etchings all uniform and done by the same Louis du Guemier, were first published with the work that contained them in the year 1756. I know not what small printseller afterwards turned the plate to account by re-issuing prints from it inscribed afresh by himself, as a sketch of " Barthe- lemew Fair. 1739.' The woodcut here given is a facsimile of the re-issued picture. Soon afterwards Cokes is a victim to the trick, then com- mon, of pear-throwing. The costermonger oversets his pears, Cokes joins in the cry, " A muss ! a muss ! " and is eased of his hat and cloak during the scramble. So far stripped, he becomes an object for the attention of the small boys of the Fair, who diligently follow in his wake. The stolen goods find their way, for division at night among the confederates, to the booth of Ursula. What entertainment there is for the public in the " pig-box," we may learn from Ursula's directions to her tapster, who must help also to wipe the pigs and mend the fire that they drop not, and baste and roast them until they are passionate, and have wept out their eyes. " How can I hope that e'er he'll discharge his place of trust, tapster, a man of reckoning under me, that remembers nothing I say to him ? but look to 't sirrah, you were best. Threepence a pipe-full, I will have made, of all my whole half-pound of tobacco, and a quarter of pound of coltsfoot mixt with it too, to eke it out. I that have dealt so long in the fire, will not be to seek in smoke, now. Then six an' twenty shillings a barrel I will advance on my beer, and fifty shillings a hundred on A.D. 1C14. /// Bill Jonsoiis Time. 13' K. 2 1 3 2 Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fair. chap. x. my bottle-ale \ I have told you the ways how to raise it. Froth your cans well in the filling, at length, rogue, and jog your bottles, sirrah, then skink out the first glass ever, and drink with all companies, though you be sure to be drunk ; )'ou'll misreckon the better, and be less ashamed on't. But your true trick, rascal, must be, to be ever busy, and mistake away the bottles and cans in haste, before they be half drunk off, and never hear anybody call, (if they should chance to mark you,) till you have brought fresh, and be able to for- swear them. Give me a drink of ale Look who's there, sirrah : five shillings a pig is my price, at least ; if it be a sow pig, sixpence more ; if she be a wife, and long for 't, sixpence more tor that." Here was enormity for Jus- tice Overdo to overhear in his character of mad Arthur of Bradley, to whom — because a fool's handsel is lucky — Ur- sula gave a sixpenny bottle of ale. " Mad Arthur of Bradley that makes the orations. Brave master old Arthur of Bradley, how do you do? welcome to the Fair ! When shall we hear you again to handle your matters with your back against a booth, ha ? I have been one of your little disciples in my day." The Justice presently beholds what tempts him to hold forth upon bottle-ale and tobacco. Tobacco, " it causeth swearing, it causeth swaggering, it causeth snafiling and snarling, and now and then a hurt." In the Streights and the Bermudas, intricate haunts of London pirates, " where the quarrelling lessons is read, how do they enter- tain the time but with bottle-ale and tobacco ? Then for a suit to drink in, so much — and, that being slavered, so much for another suit, and then a third suit, and a fourth suit! and still the bottle-ale slavereth, and the tobacco stinketh." The irritated Waspe falls upon 0\'erdo, who cries to him, " Hold thy hand, child of wrath, and heir of anger, make it not Childermas day in thy fury, or the feast of the French Bartholomew, parent of the massacre !" In the mean time the watchmen of the Fair are fetched from place to place, but so busy about beggars that they have no leisure for gentlemen thieves. Besides there was one of them, Toby Haggise, falling under just reproach of his comrade Davy Bristle, " You said let's go to Ursula's indeed ; but then you met the man with the monsters, and A.D. 1 6 14. In Ben Jojisons Time. nz I could not get you from him. An old fool, not leave seeing yet !" A monster, according to the derivation of the word, means in the first sense a show, a thing to be pointed at, and in that first sense it was then used in Bartholomew Fair with a tie of the word to living wonders, such as the dog Toby, the dogs that dance the morrice, the eagle, the black wolf, the bull with five legs, — he was a calf at Uxbridge fair two years agone, — the Hare of the Tabor,* and the great hog, all of which we find named in the play. The mention of the hog recals to us the Brother Busy who, leading his flock into the Fair, exhorted them to " walk on in the middle way, fore- right, turn neither to the right hand, nor to the left, let not your eyes be drawn aside with vanity, nor your ear with noises." The traders cry, what do you lack ? but the Rabbi exclaims, " Look not toward them, hearken not ; the place is Smithfield, or the field of smiths, the grove of hobby-horses and trinkets, the wares are the wares of devils, and the whole Fair is the shop of Satan : they are hooks and baits, very baits, that are hung out on every side to catch you, and to hold you, as it were, by the gills, and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth ; therefore you must not look nor turn toward them." Was he driving his flock into the pens, that he would let them look on nothing? Littlewit, reproved by Dame Purecraft for reading the board over Ursula's booth, asks how they shall find pig if they do not look about for it. Will it run off the spit into our mouths, think you, as in Lubber! and, and, and cry " Wee, wee !" " No," answers the Rabbi Zcal-of-the-Land. " No, * The Hare tliat played the Tabor was an ancient monster, for this sketch of liini is from an illuminated MS. of Hours of the Virgin, painted three centuries before Ben Jonson's time. Strutt first copied it, and his rough copy has been several times rccopied. I need hardly add, that for the above sketch the draughtsman has gone to the MS. itself. 134 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. x. but your mother, religiously %vise, conceiveth it may offer itself by other means to the sense, as by way of steam, which I think it doth here in this place — huh — huh, yes it doth. \He scetits after it like a hou?id.'\ And it were a sin of obstinacy, great obstinacy, high and horrible obstinacy, to decline or resist the good titillation of the famelic sense, which is the smell. Therefore be bold — huh, huh, huh, follow the scent : enter the tents of the unclean, for once, and satisfy your wife's frailty. Let your frail wife be satisfied ; your zealous mother, and my suffering self, mil also be satisfied." "Mooncalf!" the horse-courser shouts, '' entertain within there ; the best pig in the booth, a pork -like pig. These are Banbury bloods, o' the sincere stud, come a pig-hunting." " Sippers ! " gnmibles Urse, " sippers o' the city ; they look as they would not drink off two pen'orth of bottle-ale amongst 'em." And ]\Iooncalf opines that a body may read that in their small printed ruffs. But Knockem has a wider knowledge of the world than the old hermit of the pig-box, "Away," he says, " thou art a fool, Urse, and thy Mooncalf too : in your ignorant vapours now ! hence ! good guests, I say, right hypocrites, good gluttons. In, and set a couple o' pigs on the board, and half a dozen of the biggest bottles afore 'em. I do not love to hear innocents abused ; fine ambling hypocrites ! and a stone puritan with a sorrel head and beard ! good mouthed gluttons ; two to a pig, away." " Are you sure they are such?" "O' the right breed, thou shalt ivy 'em by the teeth, Urse." The horse-courser, retired within the booth, waits upon Busy for conversion. As they come out together, Knockem is a professed convert, who will take good counsel, cut his hair and leave vapours. He sees that tobacco, and bottle- ale, and pig, and very Ursula herself are all vanities. " Only pig," says tlie Rabbi, "was not comprehended in my admo- nition, the rest were : for long hair, it is an ensign of pride, a banner ; and the world is full of those banners ; very full of banners. And bottle-ale is a drink of Satan's, a diet-drink of Satan's, devised to puflf us up, and make us swell in this A.D. i6i4. Ill Ben yonsoiis Time. 135 latter age of vanity ; as the smoke of tobacco, to keep us in mist and error." "Win,'' says Dame Purecraft, "is again longing." " For more pig," cries the Rabbi hungrily, " There is no more, is there?" Not for more pig, but to see some sights of the Fair. " Sister, let her fly the impurity of the place swiftly, lest she partake of the pitch thereof Thou art the seat of the beast, O Smithfield, and I will leave thee ! Idolatry peepeth out on every side of thee !" — Says the man of the stables, " now his belly is full, he falls a railing and kicking, the jade. I'll in, and joy Ursula, with telling how her pig works ; two and a half he ate to his share ; and he has drunk a pailful. He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth." The toyman cries : " What do you lack, gentlemen ? what is't you buy ? rattles, drums, babies " " Peace," roars Busy, " peace with thy apocryphal wares, thou profane publican ; thy bells, thy dragons, and thy Tobie's dogs. ■ Thy hobby-horse is an idol, a very idol ; a fierce and rank idol ; and thou, the Nebuchadnezzar, the proud Nebuchadnezzar of the Fair, that sett'st it up, for children to fall down to, and worship. "What is a drum? It is the broken belly of the beast, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are of his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth." "And what's my gingerbread, I pray you?" asks Dame Trash. "The provender that pricks him up. Hence with thy basket of popery, thy nest of images, and whole legend of ginger-work. " The sin of the Fair provokes me,'' cries the Rabbi, " I cannot be silent. " Hinder me not, woman. I was moved in spirit, to be here this day, in this Fair, this wicked and foul Fair ; and fitter may it be called a Foul than a Fair ; to protest against the abuses of it, the foul abuses of it, in regard of the afflicted saints, that are troubled, very much troubled, exceedingly troubled, with the opening of the merchandise of Babylon again, and the peeping of popery upon the stalls here, here, in the high places. See you not Goldylocks, the purple 136 Memoirs of BartholomriU Fair. chap. x. woman there, in her yellow gown and green sleeves ? the profane pipes, the tinkling timbrels? a shop of relicks !" • The jest is typical. This Rabbi Busy was, in Ben Jonson's age, the character most dwelt upon and enjoyed by the spectators of the play. The other characters were of all generations ; he was a man of the day itself, and yet more of the day next coming, as the play-writer well knew. More than an idle jest was meant when the Rabbi fell on the toys, overthrew the gingerbread basket in his zeal and glory to be thus exercised, and to those, who sending him to the stocks, cried, "Stop his noise," shouted, "Thou canst not; 'tis a sanctified noise : I will make a loud and most strong noise, till I have daunted the profane enemy." At the stocks, — "the pigeon-holes," — he cried, "No, minister of darkness, no ; thou canst not rule my tongue ; my tongue it is mine own, and with it I will both knock and mock down your Bartholomew abominations, till you be made a hissing to the neighbouring parishes round about." And in the stocks he declares himself, " One that rejoiceth in his affliction, and sitteth here to prophesy the destruction of Fairs and May games. Wakes, and Whitson-ales, and doth sigh and groan for the reformation of these abuses." Set free, and engaged in a new battle against the puppets, the Rabbi speaks indeed prophetic words : " I look for a bickering ere long, and then a battle." He is a hypocrite trailing through mud upon the skirts of a great Truth. The Rabbi's real character, as well as her own. Dame Purecraft reveals to one whom she has found in the Fair, and takes for her appointed madman : " Good sir, hear me. I am worth six thousand pound, my love to you has become my rack ; I'll tell you all and the truth, since you hate the hypocrisy of the party-coloured brotherhood. These seven years I have been a wilful holy widow, only to draw feasts and gifts from my entangled suitors : I am also by office an assisting sister of the deacons, and a devourer, instead of distributor of the alms. I am a special maker of marriages for our decayed brethren with our rich widows, for a third part of their wealth, when they are married, for tlie relief of the poor elect : as also our poor handsome young virgins, with our wealthy bachelors or A. D. 1 6 14- In Ben Jonsoiis Time. 137 widowers ; to make them steal from their husbands, when I have confirmed them in the faith, and got all put into their custodies. And if I have not my bargain, they may sooner turn a scolding drab into a silent minister, than make me leave pronouncing reprobation and damnation unto them. Our elder, Zeal-of-the-Land, would have had me, but I know him to be the capital knave of the land, making himself rich by being made a feoffee in trust to deceased brethren, and cozening their heirs by swearing the absolute gift of their inheritance." The uncared-for madman, then a necessary figure in every true picture of a public festival, is a discharged servant of the piepowder court, " mad child of the Piepoudres," who flits through the Fair with no thought but of Justice Overdo, and the tremendous efiicacy of his warrant. Ingenious use is made of him in the elaboration of the story of the Comedy. Of the story, however, in this place, only that part concerns us, which belongs essentially to the portrayal of the Fair. We need not even look at Justice Overdo comforting himself with philosophy as he sits also in the stocks. The sole business of this chapter is to contain all that the play tells us of the Fair in Smithfield, in Ben Jonson's time ; and we have now only to walk into the puppet show, before we part from our rare guide. Lan thorn Leatherhead has left his hobby-horses, and is dressed as a puppet showman : he is the prosperous mechanic, who makes all the puppets in the Fair. (Inigo Jones, say acute commentators. — Let no one be " so solemnly ridiculous as to search out, who was meant by the gingerbread woman, who by the hobby-horse man, who by the costard-monger, nay who by their wares," says Ben Jonson.) Leatherhead appears before his booth with his two men ; one plants a flag, and rolls out the sign of his invention, while the other beats the drum. " All the dirt in Smithfield will be thrown at our banner to day, if the matter does not please the people. O the motions that I Lanthorn Leatherhead have given light to, in my time, since my master Pod died ! Jerusalem was a stately thing, and so was Nineveh, and the city of Norwich, and Sodom and Gomorrah, with the rising of the prentices upon Shrove-Tuesday ; but the gun-powder plot, 138 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. x. there was a get-penny ! I have presented that to an eighteen or twenty pence audience, nine times in an afternoon. Your liomeborn projects prove ever the best, they are so easy and famihar; they put too much learning in their things now o' days : and that I fear will be the spoil of this. Littlewit ! I say, Micklewit I if not too mickle ! look to your gathering there, goodman Filcher." — " I warrant you, sir." — " An there come any gentlefolks, take two-pence apiece, Sharkwell." — " I warrant you, sir, three-pence an we can." Sharkwell and Filcher then delivered handbills of " The Ancient Modem History" (a jest at the old school of Lamentable Tragedy .... mixt full of pleasant mirth,) The Ancient Modern History of Hero and Lcander, other- luise called the Touchstone of True Love, witJi as true a Trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faith- ful friends d the BanksideP "Please you come near, we'll take your money within." " Two-pence apiece, gentlemen, an excellent motion." — "Shall we have fine fireworks?" asks one as he enters. — "Two-pence apiece, sir, the best motion in the Fair." Cokes hurries in of course, leaving his train of Bartholomew boys at the door. He looks over the basket full of puppets, and then asks, referring to Marlowe's translation of the Hero and Leander from Musseus, " But do you play it according to the printed book ? I have read that." — " By no means, sir." — " No ! how then?" — "A better way, sir; that is too learned and poetical for our audience ; what do they know what Helles- pont is, guilty of true love's blood ? or what Abydos is ? or the other Sestos hight ?" — "Thou art in the right; I do not know myself" — " No, I have entreated master Littlewit, to take a little pains to reduce it to a more familiar strain for our people." — "How I pray thee, good master Littlewit?" The author then explains : " It pleases him to make a matter of it, sir ; but there is no such matter, I assure you : I have only made it a little easy, and modern for the times, sir, that's all. As for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here ; and then Leander I make a dyer's son about Puddle- wharf : and Hero a wench o' the Bankside, who going over one morning to Old Fish-street, Leander spies her land at Trig-stairs, and falls in love with her. Now do I introduce A.D. 1614. i)i Boi yoiisons Time. 139 Cupid, having metamorphosed himself into a drawer, and he strikes Hero in love with a pint of sherry ; and other pretty passages there are of the friendship, that will delight you, sir, and please you of judgment." This burlesque puppet play, which had been written by Ben Jonson some time before, is then pleasantly inter- woven with the general story. Its jests lie in the absurd reduction of the highest old thoughts, to the lowest new ones, in the confusion of plot, the multitude of personal encounters, — even Damon and Pythias must needs belabour one another, — and in the liberal use of language most in accordance with the tastes of the foulest people in the Fair. Upon the puppet play Zeal-of-the-land Busy, escaped from the stocks, suddenly falls in with a shout, " Down ■with Dagon ! down with Dagon ! 'tis I, I will no longer endure your profanations." "What mean you, sir?" asks the showman. — "I will remove Dagon there, I say, that idol, that heathenish idol, that remains, as I may say, a beam, a very beam, ^ not a beam of the sun, nor a beam of the moon, nor a beam of a balance, neither a house-beam, nor a weaver's beam, but a beam in the eye, in the eye of the brethren ; a very great beam, an exceeding great beam ; such as are your stage- players, riiymers, and morrice-dancers, who have walked hand in hand, in contempt of the brethren, and the cause ; and been borne out by instruments of no mean counte- nance." — "Sir, I present nothing but what is licensed by authority." — "Thou art all license, even licentiousness itself, Shimei!" — "I have the Master of the Revels' hand for't, sir." — "The master of the rebels' hand thou hast ! Satan's ! Hold thy peace, thy scurrility, shut up thy mouth, thy ])ro- fession is damnable, and in pleading for it thou dost plead for Baal. I have long opened my mouth wide, and gaped ; I have gaped as the oyster for the tide, after thy destruc- tion : but I cannot compass it by suit or dispute ; so that I look for a bickering ere long, and then a battle.'"' Busy then offers controversy, and Leatherhead under- takes that his puppet Dionysius shall argue for him. The argument consists wholly of recrimination, and at the end of it, to the great delight of the audiences of Ben Jonson's 140 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. x. day, Busy cries out " I am confuted, the cause hath failed me." Then says the puppet, " Be converted, be converted." " Be converted, I pray you/' urges also the showman, " and let the play go on." " Let it go on," says Busy, " for I am changed, and will become a beholder with you." It was well ; but a- time came when Lord Buckhurst had to write a comment upon this : — ■ Many have been the vain attempts of wit, Against tlie still prevailing hypocrite. Once, and but once, a poet got the day, And vanquished Busy in a puppet play. But Busy' rallying, filled with holy rage, Possessed the pulpit, and pulled down the stage. The strength of the Puritans in Banbury dates from a time yet earlier than the induction into the vicarage of Thomas Brasbridge, who, in 1590, for Puritan reasons, ceased to be vicar. In 1602 the Zeal of the town caused the destruction of its public cross, and the defacing of the ornaments of the cathedral. Banbury had sent Anthony Cope, and other Puritan members to Parliament ; its mem- ber for the Parliament of 1623, Sir Erasmus Dryden, Avas the grandfather of John Dryden the poet. The vicar of Banbury when Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair was written, — for the four years before, and six-and-twenty after that date, — was the famous William AA'hately, a Cambridge man, and a scholar, eminent for bounty to the poor from little means, who had a most able body, and such sound lungs, that for his style of preaching he was called '• the Roaring Boy of Banbury." Scudder, his disciple and biographer, tells that " according as his matter in hand and his auditory needed, he was both a terrible Boanerges, a son of thunder, and also a Barnabas, a son of sweet consolation." Fuller probably identified this contemporary vicar of Banbury with Rabbi Busy, when he said, " Indeed he was a good linguist, philosopher, mathematician, divine ; and (though a poetical, satirical pen is pleased to pass a jeer upon him) free from faction." Whately was in the habit of stirring up the faith- ful at Stratford on Avon, by a periodical lecture. In one sense he was Ben Jonson's fellow worker, for his published works include two volumes of sermons against hypocrites. A.I). 1 6 14. In Ben Jonsons Time. 141 A doughty brother labourer with Whately was his sister's husband, Robert Harris of Hanwell. He also gave at one time, fortnightly lectures to the peojjle of Stratford on Avon, and besides preaching in his own church, lectured at Ded- dington and Banbury. We are told that troops of Christians came on Sundays many miles from all quarters to hear Harris at Hanwell, and on the morrow were in like manner " entertained at Banbury, by Mr. Whately. What a Fair of Souls," cries Durham, the biographer of Harris, " was then held at Hanwell and Banbury by these two brothers ! How did religion flourish ! how did professors- thrive ! Against any such Fair of Souls Bartholomew Fair whistled its fifes, rolled its drums, and squeaked its trumpets of defiance. 142 Memoirs of Bartholomezu Fair. chap. xi. CHAPTER XL ® liber's ^ag. On the fourth of August in the first year of the reign of Charles the First, (a.d.) 1625, "the king's most excellent Majesty, out of his princely and christian care of his loving subjects, that no good means of Providence may be ne- glected to stay the farther spreading of the great infection of the Plague, doth find it necessary to prevent all occasions of public concourse of his people for the present, till it shall please Almighty God, of His goodness, to cease the violence of the contagion, which is very far dispersed into many parts of the kingdom already; And therefore, re- membering that there are at hand two Fairs of special note, and unto which" (let this consideration be observed) " there is usually extraordinary resort otit of ail parts of the ki?igdo//i, the one kept in Smithfield, near the City of London, called Bartholomew Fair, and the other near Cambridge, called Stourbridge Fair, the holding whereof at the usual times, would in all likelihood be the occasion of further danger and infec- tion to other parts of the Land, which yet, by God's mercy, stand clear and free, hath, with the advice of his IMajesty's Privy Council, thought good, by this open declaration of his pleasure and necessary commandment, not only to admonish and require all his loving subjects to forbear to resort for this time to either of the said two Fairs, or to any other fairs within fifty miles of the said City of London, but also to enjoin the Lords of the said Fairs, and others interested in them, or any of them, that they all forbear to hold the said Fairs, or anything appertaining to them, at all times accustomed or at any time, till by God's goodness and A.D. 1625. Oliver s Day. 143 mercy the infection of the Plague shall cease, or be so much diminished, that his Majesty shall give orders for holding them; upon pain of such punishment as, for a contempt so much concerning the universal safety of his people, they shall be adjudged to deserve, which they must expect to be inflicted with all severity, his Majesty's desire being so intentive for preventing the general Infection threatened, as he is resolved to spare no man that shall be the cause of dispersing the same. And to that purpose doth hereby further charge and enjoin, under like penalty, all citizens and inhabitants of the said City of London, that none of them shall repair to any fair held within any part of this kingdom, until it shall please God to cease the infection now reigning amongst them : His Majesty's intention being, and so hereby declaring himself, that no Lord of any Fairs, or others interested in the profits thereof, shall by this necessary and temporary restraint, receive any prejudice in the right of his or their fairs, or liberties thereunto belonging, anything before mentioned notwithstanding." This proclamation, given at the court at Woodstock, best tells its own story. Again, on the first of August in the year 1630, the Plague being in Cambridge and then threatening London and Southwark, the King remembered that there were " at hand three great Fairs of Special note, unto which there is extraordinary resort from all parts of the kingdom," and forbade the holding of Bartholomew, Stourbridge, and Our Lady (or Southwark) Fair. A zeal in the land that was not hypocrisy had been busy to some purpose between the year 16 14, in which Ben Jonson's Comedy of Bartholomew Fair was first presented "before James the First, and the year 1641, the date which next concerns us in the present narrative. The king's "princely and Christian care of his loving subjects" was in question. There was a disease in the land, for the abate- ment of which not the king, but the People, had sent forth a proclamation. In the year 1641 Charles the First assented to the bill for the attainder of Strafford, and Stratford died on the scaffold in the presence of a hundred thousand persons. 144 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xi. At Bartholomew Fair time in that year the King was in Scotland, and the Commons were nominating commis- sioners, who, in the name of honourable attendance, were to watch the monarch who had forfeited all trust. The state of Bartholomew Fair is represented by the oldest of the extant tracts professing to describe it, a small quarto of four leaves, containing five pages of print appended to this title-page : BARTHOLOMEW FAIRE OR Variety of fancies, where you may find a fair e of wares., and all to please yo^ir mind With The severall Enormityes and misdemea- nours, which are there scene and acted London Printed for Richard Harper at the Bible and //(t?/;^^ in Smithfield, 1641. A. p. 1 64 1. Oliver's Day. 145 " Bartholomew Fair," we are here told, " begins on the twenty-fourth day of August, and is then of so vast an extent, that it is contained in no less than four several parishes, namely, Christ Church, Great and Little Saint Bartholomews, and Saint Sepulchres. Hither resort people of all sorts, high and low, rich and poor, from cities, towns, and countries ; of all sects. Papists, Atheists, Anabaptists, and Brownists ; and of all conditions. . . . And now that we may the better take an exact survey of the whole fair. First let us enter into Christ Church Cloisters, which are now hung so full of pictures, that you would take that place, or rather mistake it, for Saint Peters in Rome ; only this is the difference, those there are set up for worship, these here for sale.'' (It will be remembered that the disputations of the scholars were held in these cloisters, still therefore within the Fair, when they were held at all after the dissolution of the Priory.) " But by the way," goes on the tract, " Pll tell you a tale of a precise Puritan, who came in all haste from Lincoln to London, purposely to see the fair, where he had never been before, and coming out of Newgate Market, through Christ Church into the Cloisters, and elevating the snowballs of his eyes, he presently espies the picture of Christ and his twelve Apostles, with the Virgin Mary and many other Saints departed ; at which sight the very thought and strong conceit of superstition set such a sharp edge upon the pure metal of his inflamed zeal, that very manfully, like a man of valour and son of Mars, he steps to a stall well stored with twopenny halberds and wooden backswords, where, having armed himself cap-a-pie (as he thought) he begins in a ^dolent passion to exclaim against the Idolatry of the times, that it was grown abominable ; protesting that the woman of Babylon was crept into Christ Church, and that the good motions of the spirit had brought him to town, to make a sacrifice of those idle Idols to his just anger and holy indignation, which begot no small laughter to the mul- titude which thronged about him, that put him into such a chafe, insomuch that at the last, like Rosicleare, the Knight of the Sun, or Don Quixote, most furiously he makes an assault and battery upon the poor innocent pictures, till the shopkeepers apprehending him, had him before a constable, 146 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xt. wlio forthwith committed my Uttle hot fury to the stocks, where we will leave him to cool his heels, whilst we take a further view of the fair. And novr being arrived through the Long ^Valk, to Saint Bartholomew's Hospital ; that place (methinks) appears to me a sucking Exchange." A devil's mart, truly ; exchange of filth for baubles of the fair. " Let us now make a progress into Smithfield, which is the heart of the fair, where in w_y heart, I think there are more motions in a day to be seen, than are in a term in Westminster Hall to be heard. But whilst you take notice of the several motions there, take this caution along with you, let one eye watch narrowly that no one's hand make a motion into your ])ocket, which is the next way to move you to impatience. The fair is full of gold and silver drawers : Just as Lent is to the fishmonger, so is Bartholomew Fair to the pickpocket ; it is his high harvest, which is never bad, but when his cart goes" (Tyburnia way) "up Holborn. The City marshals are as dreadful to these youngsters as the Plague is to the London Actors. That restrains them from playing, and they hinder these from working ; you may quickly know these nimble youths, and likely find them very busybodies in a quarrel which nothing concerns them. . . . Some of your cut purses are in fee with cheating costermongers, who have a trick now and then to throw down a basket of refuse pears, which prove cloake pears to those who shall lose their hats or cloaks " (I cannot say that the misprints are not meant to be funny, therefore reproduce them,) " in striving who shall gather fastest. They have many dainty baits to draw a bit, and (if you be not vigilant) you shall hardly escape their nets ; fine fowlers they are, for every finger of theirs is a lime twig, with which they catch dotterels. They are excellently well read in Physiognomy, for they will know how strong you are in the purse by looking in your face ; and for the more certainty thereof, they will follow you close, and never leave you till you draw your purse, or they for you, whicli they'll be sure to have (if you look not to it) though they kiss Newgate for it. " It is remarkable and worth your observation, to behold and hear the strange sights and confused noises in the fair Here a Knave in a Fool's Coat, with a trumpet sounding, or A.D. 1641. Oliver s Day. 147 on a drum beating, invites you and would fain persuade you to see his pujjpets ; there a Rogue hke a Wild Woodman, or in an antick shape like an Incubus, desires your company to view his motion ; on the other side Hocus Pocus with three yards of tape or ribbon in's hand, showing his art of Legerdemain to the admiration and astonishment of a com- pany of cockoloaches. Amongst these you shall see a gray goose-cap (as wise as the rest,) with a What do ye lack? in his mouth, stand in his booth shaking a rattle, or scraping on a fiddle, with which children are so taken, that they pre- sently cry out for these fopperies ; And all these together make such a distracted noise, that you would think Babel were not comparable to it. Here there are also your gamesters in action ; some turning of a whimsey, others throwing for pewter, who can quickly dissolve a round shilling into a three half penny saucer. " Long Lane at this time looks very fair, and puts out her best clothes with the wrong side outward, so turned for their better turning off; and Cloth Fair is now in great request; well fare the Ale houses therein ; yet better may a man fare (but a;t a dearer rate) in the Pig market, alias Pasty nook or Pie Corner, where pigs are all hours of the day on the stalls piping hot, and would cry (if they could speak) Come eat me ; but they are .... dear, and the reckonings for them are . . . saucy These unconscionable exactions, and excessive inflammations of reckonings made that angle of the fair too hot for my company ; therefore I resolved with myself to steer my course another way, and having once got out, not to come again in haste. ' ' No\v farewell to the Fair ; you who are wise, Preserve your Purses, whilst you please your eyes. FINIS." Of the commercial importance still at this date attached to fairs, I find an indication in the warden's accounts of expenditure preserved among the records of the Skinners' Company.* Li 1606 there is an item, " To the Wardens * Thanks are due to Mr. Kensit, the Clerk of the Skinners' Companv, for his courtesy in giving nie information, and pcrniitiing nie to refer to records tliat might have contained matter essential to this History. L 2 1 48 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xi. for their allowance in riding to Stourbridge Fair, ^3 6j. Zd., and 13^-. 4^. to me the Renter Warden for my pains." But ten years afterwards the beginning of a change may be implied by the fact that the wardens ceased to go in person to the fairs. It is the accountant who receives, "in allow- ance towards his charges in riding to Stourbridge Fair, ;^6," and for the journey to Bristol Fair, ^6 13^-. dd. St. Bartholomew's Cloth Fair, well supphed with ale- houses, was at this date still a place of much resort ; and of the family receiving toll from it we must now trace the line, for in due time we shall reach a Lady of the house, whose name became, for the rest of the Fair's Hfe, knoAvn only too well to the dwellers about Smithfield. Of Richard Rich, the Lord Chancellor, first Lord and founder of the family, by whom the tolls of Bartholomew Fair, formerly due to the Priory, were bought for himself and his heirs, we have already spoken. He died in 1568, leaving behind him ill-fame and a mass of treasure. His son Robert, second Baron Rich, was one of the friends of Essex, who went with him in his expedition to Ireland in 1573, and shared some of his " misery by plague, famine, sickness, continual toil, and continual wants of men, money, carriages, victuals, and all things meet for great attempts." He died in 1581, to be succeeded by his son and heir, another Robert, the third Baron Rich. The third Baron was alive, and was still only Lord Rich on that 31st of October, 1614, when Ben Jonson's Bartho- lomew Fair was first produced at the Hope theatre in Bank- side. He procured the rank of Earl of Wanvick, tv/o or three weeks before the Fair time, four years afterwards. What do you lack ? what do you buy ? v/as the cry of the Stuarts, reckless and bankrupt traders, huckster-kings. James the First invented baronetcies as a way of raising money, charging ;^5ooo for a baronetcy, and ;^2o,ooo for an earldom. This was the Lord Rich who had married the Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of Walter, Earl of Essex, the bright Stella who had Sidney for an Astrophel. The dying hope of Essex was, that if God so moved their hearts, Sidney might be the husband of his eldest daughter, then A.D. 1641. Oliver s Day. 149 about fifteen years old. She grew to be a lady of surpassing beauty, and was by her friends sold into unwelcome marriage with Lord Rich, " a man," says Heylin, " of an independent fortune, and a known estate, but otherwise of an uncourtly disposition, unsociable, austere, and of no very agreeable conversation to her." Astrophel then sang of her : — " Rich in all beauties that man's eye can see, Beauties so far from reach of words that we Abase her praise saying she doth e.xcel : Rich in the treasure of deserved renown, Rich in the riches of a royal heart. Rich in those gifts which give the eternal crown ; Who though most rich in these and every part Which makes the patents of true worldly bliss, H.ith no misfortune but that Rich she is.'' Of her sang also Spencer, when as Colin Clout he praised the beauties of the English Court : " Ne less praiseworthy Stella do I read. Though nought my praises of her needed are. Whom verse of noblest shepherd lately dead. Hath praised and raised above each other star." As Lady Rich, tolls of Bartholomew Fair helped to adorn her person. But this exalted lady was a falling star, who did not ever remain "rich in the riches of deserved renown." Even at the altar she had made protest against her unhappy marriage. Afterwards, loved much abroad and little loved at home, the heart that Lord Rich never asked for, she gave to another. There was an actual before there was a judicial separation from her husband. After three months of second marriage, she was left the widow of Mountjoy, Earl of Devon- shire, whose fair fame perished at the Court, when he resolved to end in sacred honour what he had begun in shame. King James was even slow to forgive Laud for having tied that second knot. Poor lady, " Wit's ornament, earth's love, love's paradise, A saint divine, a beauty fairly wise, "^ she was a woman of bright wit and noble temper, set with a dry crust in the midst of all temptations of the banquet. Robert Lord Rich took in second marriage a full-pursed 150 Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fair. chap. xi. Lancashire widow, — two years after the first acting of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, — and was said, a year after- wards by Chamberlain, "to be in great perplexity, or rather crazed in brain, to see himself over-reached by his wife, who hath so conveyed her estate, that he is little or nothing the better by her, and, if she outlive him, like to carry away a great part of his." There were three sons and three daughters of Lord Rich and his first wife, but no children by the second marriage. It was for the descendants therefore of Stella that he by help of money obtained, in 16 18, his earldom. He had wished to be made Earl of Clare ; but Clare being a like title with Clarence was, says Camden, " a higher honour than could well suit with a family in a manner up- start." The earldom of Warwick, which had become extinct in 1561, upon the death of Ambrose Dudley, was conferred, therefore, on Robert, third Baron Rich, whom as a wealthy miser unhappy in marriage, the world mocked with the name of Cornucopia. From him I need hardly say that the present Earls of Warwick do not trace descent. The earldom, after the extinction of the line of Rich, passed in the year 1759 to the descendants of its first possessors. Robert Rich having obtained this earldom, and given to the mansion in Cloth Fair the name of Warwick House, lived but a few months longer. The eldest son of Cornucopia, again a Robert, held the earldom of Warwick forty years (1618 — 1658). This is the P2arl of Warwick who was Lord High Admiral under the Long Parliament, a man who was liberal-handed, and full of wit and energy and cheerfulness. He was three times married : first to a rich heiress, daughter of Sir William Hatton, and from her alone he received children. It was a grandson of his who married one of the Protector Crom- well's daughters. The second son given to Robert Rich of the money-bags, by Stella, was Henry Rich, who be- came Earl of Holland. Henry Rich was a handsome man, of winning presence, and a gentle conversation. There- fore, after two or three campaigns in Holland, he attached himself to the Court, and sought, says Clarendon, to be esteemed the creature of the Duke of Buckingham, and the friend of the Earl of Carlisle. He courted those who A a... 1 649- Olivers Day. 151 ruled the King. He was made Knight of the Bath in 161 1, and in 1618 Captain of the King's Guard. He mar- ried tlie daughter and heiress of Sir Walter Cope, who brought with her a good fortune, and the manor and seat of Kensington, of which he was shortly afterwards, in 1623, made Baron. The Duke of Buckingham then prevailed with his sovereign to place the Baron Kensington about the person of the Prince of Wales, as Gentleman of the bed- chamber to his Royal Highness. He was employed also at the Spanish court, upon diplomacy relating to Prince Charles's wedding with a daughter of the King of Spain. In 1625 he was made Earl of Holland, in Lincolnshire, and soon after- wards installed as Knight of the Garter. He was the first ambassador sent into France to treat of the marriage between Charles and his Queen, and being left, after the Duke o'i Buckingham's assassination, high in favour, he took pains to ingratiate himself with the Queen, as well as with the King, and sought against the Duke of Portland, and all who were opposed thereto, the increase of her authority. Thus, knowing her to be the King's master, he earned her particular trust, and contrived to become one of the most prosperous men at the court of Charles the First. He was made General of the Horse in the army raised against the Scotch Covenanters, in 1639 ; but he retreated when he came to face the Scotch at Dunse, and afterwards received Avith evident good will their overtures for the suppression of a civil strife. Returned to court, he put aside a challenge from the Earl of New- castle, and he was not employed in the next Scotch expe- dition, because there were engaged in it the counsels of Strafford, who had once angrily suggested that the King would do well to take the Earl of Holland's head, and who was met by the Earl thereafter with open hatred. He was presently appointed one of the King's Commissioners to treat with the Scots at Ripon, and was among those who were induced to regard their desires with favour. He served the office of chief justice in Eyre, and was accused of oppression and exaction : but taking offence at the King's refusal to create at his request a baron, when he could have made ten thousand pounds by the transaction, he altered his course ; and when, as general for the disbanding of the 152 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. cuAr.xi. armies after the second Scotch expedition, he returned to his house at Kensington, the Earl of Holland belonged to the popular party. It was he who read to the King in 1642 the desire of both houses that his Majesty would reside near Parliament. He was therefore removed from his office of First Gentleman of the bed-chamber. In January, 1643, ^^ ^^^'^ one of the Commissioners sent by Parliament to the King with propositions of peace, he him- self being at all times disposed to establish peace on easy terms, for he had much property imperilled by a doubtful strife. Soon afterwards he was, with the Earl of Bedford, a deserter from the Parliament, received into the King's gar- rison at Wallingford with a cold welcome. But he had already established, from the time of her landing, a private understanding with the Queen, and being restored to her favour, fancied that he saw his way before him. He joined the King's army at Gloucester, fought well at the battle of Newbury, and returned to Oxford with King Charles who, still distrusting him, saw through the arts of a courtier in which he was proficient. He was unwise enough to speak highly at court of the power of Parliament ; " which," said the King, " was a strange discourse for a man to make, who had so lately left them because he thought the King's con- dition to be the better of the two." When, disappointed in every way by King Charles, he returned to the feet of the Parliament, his declaration was, that he had sought the King as a peace-maker, and quitted him again because he was averse to peace, and in the power of the papists. The Earl's estate had been sequestered Avhen he went into the royal camp, and the sequestration was continued after his return from it, in the same year 1643, ^^^''d "was not removed till some time afterwards. The Earl also was committed to prison, and excluded from the council of the popular leaders. In 1648 he had again changed sides, and planned a rising on behalf of the King. Proposing the relief of Col- chester, he held a public rendezvous at Kingston on Thames; but some troops of horse under Colonel Rich, put him and his levies suddenly to rout. The Earl, fugitive for a day or two, was taken at St. Neot's by the few horsemen who pur- sued him. finally tried, condemned, and executed on a scaffold A.n. 1649. Olwc7^'s Day. 153 before Westminster Hall, a month after the execution of the King, in March of the year 1649. In that same year, the civil strife was represented in Bar- tholomew Fair, by a pamphlet in the form of a booth-play, entitled ''A BARTHOLOMEW FAHIING, New, New, New : Sent from the raised siege before Dublin, as a Pre- paratory Present to the Great Thanksgiving Day. To be communicated onely to Independents." It was issued without any printer's name, being signed only " London : Printed in the year 1649." Charles the First had in that year suffered for high treason against the liberties of England. Ormond had proclaimed Charles the Second, and the Prince was to make his stand at Dublin. Cromwell then, after some delay, accepted from the council of state the title of Lord Lieutenant-General and General Governor of Ireland, and undertook to quell Irish rebellion with certain means that he demanded, and with the help of Ireton, husband of his eldest daughter Bridget, as his second in command. Before Cromwell's arrival, the Duke of Ormond (who, after a march from Carlow, during which he had taken castles and garrisons, was besieging Dublin with nineteen thousand men or thereabouts, and awaiting the arrival of ten thousand more) had been attacked by Lieutenant-General Jones issuing out of Dublin with four thousand foot and twelve hundred horse. Jones had received, two days before, Cromweirs advanced guard from F.ngland, with the news that Cromwell himself was at hand ; and upon this encouragement, at once put to the rout the besieging army of the Duke of Ormond, and forced his retirement to Kilkenny. This event happened on the second of August, and the tidings of it that reached Eng- land were, on the twenty-fourth of August, the chief talk of the citizens at Bartholomew Fair. August the twenty-ninth had been appointed as a great Thanksgiving Day. It was on the fifteenth of August that Cromwell and Ireton landed at Dublin, and prepared to subdue an island of which the inhabitants — as a mass unbroken and savage — had, for the past eight years, been independent of the English, " and," says Godwin, " as one man, looked towards the assertion of English ascendancy in the functionaries of the present Eng 154 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xi. lish Parliament, with an unmingled and indescribable horror," With this brief reminder of its date we may sum up the contents of the Royalist pamphlet dispersed as a Bartho- lomew Fairing, among the people assembled in Smithfield from all parts of the country on the 24th of August, 1649. Thus it opens with a Prologue. A Pcdier in haste with an Horn. " Stand off, make room, give way, for I come Post, My Fairings do run wild from the /r/s/i Coast ; Poor Cram a Cree untrouz'd, O hone ! O hone! Hath lost his cows, his sheep, his Bagh, all 's gone: All is transported hither, view it, view, Patrick is to be sold at Bartholomew. All saints must bow in the old Calender Unto Saint Ireton, and Saint Oliver : Pompey and Ccesar's Wars are now begun. Thus for a Ceremony, and poor jars. The Saints do keep us still in civil wars. This Bartholomew will be the last, I fear, Fair we shall see : the next is Py-powder. Take every one, a Fairing now, be sped. You Presbyter, a Bishop in Ginger-bread : You Cavaliers, what will you buy? or how? How go by Goldsmiths' HaU, the State's milcht cow? You Independents buy no trifling matters, Hobby-horses, babies, dislies, or platters : You are for King's revenues, Crowns and Jewels, And Hangings too, or you'll ne'er have your due cise. Come buy these curious Pendents, and these knots. They are Scotizing Saints, Saintizing Scots. You Papists, which have juggled with the King, Buy you these Crosses, now the Saint's-bells ring. You honest Citizens who yet stand true. Gainst Pres, and Dep, and Pap, and Div : and Jew : Take ye this Book, and on the day of joy. Laugh at old Nol, and drink to the blach Boy. The pam])hlet belongs to the days when ridicule was held to be a good and sufficient weapon against men who were engaged in solemn and strong battle, not only against the last lines of defence left to popery in England, but also against the civil yoke which principles of Roman doctrine helped to bind on the necks of the people. Passive obedi- ence, a blind faith in certain men and certain ceremonies, A. D. 1 649. Oliver's Day. 155 were not more the essence of Romanism than of the Church wliich Charles the First had sought, in the guise of a Reformed Church, to impose upon his subjects. The Scotch people rejected it, and swore to their covenant of resistance. The English people, wherever the re-action was a true one against the'old forms of imposture, asserted their own independence; and some were firm, while some were violent, against dead forms of civil and religious despotism. These Memoirs began by showing us in Bartholomew Fair a credulous rnul- titude, easily practised upon by the grossest frauds. Against this we now set that which time has brought about, a day of violent re-action. The chaff of popery is being swept by a rude storm, out of the people's threshing-floor. The strong resolve to base their religion on the Bible only, drove men to a passionate study and exaltation of the Holy Scripture, to an unsetded Bible worship, to a fervent, half devout and half defiant use of Scripture language in the daily inter- course of Ufe, glorious to contemplate in men of taste and education, but at first glance ludicrous among the men of feeble intellect, whose zeal, moreover, was perhaps only the hotter for their lack of judgment. Behind the triumphant army flocked a subtler host of hypocrites and thieves, men vapouring religion as the jackal of a camp may vapour courage. Religion is the cloak none like to pluck at rudely, therefore the best cloak for the meanest vices ; and when- ever zeal is active, there are the thieves making their den in the temple. Hypocrisy is loud in prayer, and a too open utterance of deep religious emotion must in our own days always beget distrust. But in the days of the great struggle discussed by the crowd at Bartholomew Fair in the year 1649, depths of men's hearts were stirred, and they were bound to active utterance of their most sacred feelings. They were in battle for the very title to possess their souls in peace. An obtrusive fervour, which to-day would be a sure sign of dishonesty or weakness, then was a strong man's weapon in defence of liberty. We do not now walk in Cheapside or Piccadilly, sword in hand; but the steel flashed in the hands of our forefathers that we might be able to walk weaponless. Zeal-in-the-Land Busy has no more place in a modern market-place, than an old man-at-arms with morion 156 Memoirs of BartJiolomciu Fair. chap. xi. and broadsword. But we speak now of days when a man might be as bhndly violent as that Elder from Banbury, and yet be an honest man, and yet be an efificient helper of a nation's holy cause. The charge of hypocrisy is always the most obvious weapon of attack against religious zeal, and I have no doubt that the main body of Cavaliers, until they had been instructed by some rough experience, honestly took their opponents to be hypocrites. They were open also to a charge of gluttony. Zeal-in-the-Land Busy ate his two pigs and a half to a dinner ; and in the tract to which we are now coming, the best part of the jest against the saints consists in showing how they feed. God gave us bodily senses and their innocent delights, as well as a soul and its pure aspirations. Re-action against a form of worship that put the delight of the senses where the spiritual aspiration should have been, led to a vain attempt at the complete reversal of the error. Men who denied themselves too many of the finer pleasures of the ear and eye, were easy prey to the temptations of the table. The reference to " Goldsmiths' Hall, the State's milcht cow," in the Prologue to the Bartholomew Fairing, is an allusion to the use then made of that building. It was, from the year 1640 till the Restoration, the Exchequer of the Parliamentarians, in which was stored up all the money accumulated by sequestrations of the royalists' estates. There are three other small points to be remembered in connection with this Bartholomew Fairing. Committee-men's wives figure in it, because Englishwomen were in those days spe- cially active on behalf of the popular cause, and had even carried to Goldsmiths' Hall, jewels and trinkets to assist in raising funds for support of the army of the Parliament ; a Thimble and Bodkin Army it was sometimes called on that account. Apprentices of London are caricatured in it, be- cause they also sided generally with the Parliament ; and the whole caricature is expressed in the form, odious to In- dependents, of a play, theatres having at that time been closed for seven years. There are five acts. The chief topic of the play is the restoration to the people of the New Park at Richmond, A. a 1649. Olivers Day 157 which King Charles had formed by unwarranted enclosure of the public land. Act the First. Enter three Independent Committee- men's wives, Mrs. Avery, Mrs. Tryall, and Mrs. Woolastone. Mrs. Avery says : " Good day to you, sisters ; I may give you the good speed, for I know you to be of the Household, for unless it be to such (it was Mr. Fenne of Coventry's opinion, and a good one) we might not give it truly." Mrs. Tryall says that her teacher, Mr. Whateley, of Banbury, was of the same mind ; but thinks that they three may kiss. They do so. Mrs. Woolastone observing, "Verily yes, sister, it is now holy, Avhen holy persons use it ; we make everything holy we use ; for the creature was made for us, and creature-comforts too, be they higher or be they lower." Mrs. Avery, delighted with the pretty word, creature-com- forts, steps aside and writes it down. Mrs. Tryall says, "It was very long ere the Parliament thought upon us, in that point ; but I knew they would put home at last. Mr. Marten promised upon his Honesty (an Oath truly that I have kept with me), that we should in time be remembered for our Bodkins, Silver spoons, and Caudle cups, and now they have done it to the purpose ; this gift of the New Park, insooth, sister, was it not a pat, a very pat and apposite, a very pertinent, and, as Mr. Good^vine said, a very suitable and agreeing present for us ? We had no place of air before, but common with infidels, the cabs and cabbages, the Gray's Inn Rufiflers and Hyde Park Jezebels, who did profane and unhallow those good places and other- wise wholesome recreations. Mrs. Avery declares that their husbands must buy them a coach, the place being too far for a sedan. Against sedans also, then somewhat newly introduced, the lady must cry, Fy. One lady having pro- posed that the husbands buy a coach, another is for horses, and in the New park they will have old doings. Says Mrs. Tryall, " I have acquainted Mr. Marten with our intentions, and he saith he will move the House and wilj not be denied now Cromwell's gone ; and we shall have an ordinance for a cheesecake house, and there shall be a summer-house too, and meet withdrawing-places."' The lady ends with a com- pliment to Mr. Marten's gallantry, and Mrs. Woolastone 158 Memoirs of Bartholamew Fair. chap. xi. replies that "the noble Lieutenant-General is as under- standing ever^r'whit himself. They call him Ironsides ; alas ! he is flesh and blood as other men are, and after the con- quest of Ireland and those wild savages, he wall return and do "wonderfully." The talk of the saints becomes indelicate, and the ladies presently long for the day of Jubilee, when Cromwell shall have come back again : " it shaU be St. Oliver's Day, the Aldermen shall be in their scarlets, and the Livery in velvet, all our husbands shall be in velvet from head to foot." "O dear," cries Mrs. Aver\', " in good sooth, sister, it will be very pomponatious. But are you resolved upon the meeting there ? I will send my three dishes, be- sides wine and sweetmeats, and a rosebag, and other knacks. But my husband cannot possibly go, he is so given to the world, he is a ver}- Martha." Of coiu^e, none of the husbands can go, they must in\-ite to their feast in the park some of the young divines. Then there are two clever apprentices. Mrs. Woolastone's man Ralph has made the prettiest things upon the present, and so mag- nified the Parhament as passes all imderstanding. Mrs. Tryall's man is a poet too, honest Roger, a knight's son : — London apprentices in those days really might be knights' sons, now and then ; — his father is a Cavalier who, with the residue of his estate after his composition, bound him to her husband. So they will feast, remembering to bring the codhng tart, and to put good store of ambergris in the warden and quince pies, and meaning so to feast the ap- prentices and the Levites, with marrow pies, that they shall take New park for Marrow bone. Act the Second. Enter three Independent ministers, Mr. Lemed, Mr. Olduns, Mr. Bew, as in a chamber, talking a most atrocious imitation of blank verse, in which they con- gratulate each other that, ' ' our Harvest Is not as the lean country-pulpit-thrashers. Who work for the tenth cock and Easter book." They have fifty-two days in the year of sweat, not rest, and thereto almost three hundred holidays. Mr. Olduns explains Monday 's our prime festival. Luna Begins our merriment, and Venus ends ; A. D. 1649- Olivers Day. 159 For Saturn makes us melancholy ; then We are for text and exposition, that is But half holiday, some sack, some notes ; The mom at Sion College, the afternoon At in Coleman Street : where we agree What part o' th' news to preach ; what pray'r, what use (Such as the State prescribes), and the work's done, This work of double honour. Presently Mr. Leraed draws a bottle from beneath the table, saving, ■ ' Come sit, mv friends. Come forth (my Posteller) this is Tonseca The learned Spaniard, this, this is the book WTiich gives us-leaming and a politic look : Bv \-irtue of this author, Don-Canar}-, We speak what truth we please, or else it vary. {Fills into the Glass.) Look how the spirits dance, see how they skirr it ? We that drink this, must needs hold forth the SpiiiL Olduns, this lusty glass to all those eyes WTiose whites we lift, as I do this, to th' skies." [DHnks. ) And Mr. Olduns drinks responsively, To those that sigh at every Lard and ah. And hum, we make upon the sabbath day. Presently there is a knock at the door, a swift hiding of the bottle and glass, and a fetching out of ^ Re\Tiolds' Sermons, whose most learned books Are the gulled people's baits, and we the hooks. " The knock is only that of Mr. Woolastone's apprentice, Ralph — " Ralph Shorthand \ what my stenographical sermon- catcher, my mass of repetition, and conserver of my small wares of Divinit}-, little pedler ofm)- dominical labours, how dost thou, sweet j-outh ? What is thy business?" He brings a letter from his mistress, and brings money also with it, " the argcntum vivum of the last edition : no Carolus upon their white boys, nor Dei gratia neither, but Anno Libertatis, and what is it? Crucis noviZ 1 '' The letter is of invitation to the feast, and is received with welcome 3 so are the pieces of new coinage. 1 60 Memoirs of Bartholomeiv Fair. chai'. xi. This shows the State is fixt, And Iparned too : O let me kiss this cross The sign of vanquished superstition, The sign of Reformation in the State As well as Church ; for this we bless and curse ; Thus we will carry crosses ; in our purse. Mr. Bevv. With what regard of words ! and godly tokens Are we invited to this feast ! This whistle, This silver whistle of the Saints is shrill, These charmers iray e'en chann me where tlie>- will. Mr. Olij. Next Sunday we will hold forth of thankfulness. And praise the open handedness o' th' Saints ; Our thanks to those who ministered to our wants. Ralph then prefers to Mr. Lerned humble suit. It would for ever make huii with his mistress, to have an handsome smart copy of verses on the Park and present Thanksgiving. " Pray, sir, think : you have it, if you but scratch i' the fantastical side. Sir, I have a piece of singular tobacco for your Muse. The very prime of the leaf. Ochechampano Poca-Hunto's father, great custos of the Indies, drinks not so good. Against night, I pray thee, let them be composed, fair wrote, and scratched under where the emphasis must lie." Mr. Lerned undertakes to do this, and breaks up the .sitting, because he needs time ; he is a hind at prose, but a dull ox at verse. The ground is then clear for the entrance of the other apprentice, Roger Trusty, the Cavalier's son, bound, after his exclusion from the university, to a mercer and committeeman. He works alone upon the subject of the Park, and says things more familiar than civil of his mistress. Act the Third. Enter three committeemen, Mr. "W'oolastone, Mr. Avery, Mr. Tryall. They have given their wives a holiday in the Park, but intend to steal upon them. Meanwhile, as men of the day, they talk a little politics. One did not think the gain of godliness had been so quick. No mystery, no traffic half so sure. No hazards run. For first, we know we are saints ; and that granted, the world's our OAvn, and we may safely take all tliat we see or covet. All the rest are aliens, only we are heirs of the house. — This, says Tryall, is our sweet title. The Scriptures are a mine of endless treasure if applied aright. — Upon that principle Woolastone tells how he made all the fortune lie possesses *.D. 1649. Oliver s Day. 161 by betrayal of a trust. It was the estate of an orphan whose father had died in arms against this blessed Pariiament. I first Discovered my engagement ; tlien disclosed The foul delinciuency, and for a slight Reward unto the chairman (some two or Three thousand crowns, a very toy, a toy) For services (I never yet knew done), And for my losses (truly I was lost But for this happy windfall), and because I was affected to the state (as no man more), And for I was a man of known integrity (None serve the state but such), I was voted Lord of the whole estate, and the Orphan Proscribed and disinherison'd. He'? sent Into Barbadoes with instructions Unto a master, to unlearn his birth, Which, if he can forget, he may do well, Tlien he may live, and prove in time a planter. Mr. Avery thinks that his friend has proved his trust abundantly into the state, the end of Feoffe-ships. The youth, with a little help of aqua viice, stockings and hats, old ling and martlemas, may rise to a fortune great as Craven's was. — Mr. Woolastone replies that he cares only for the act of good, and has precedent in Sir John Danvers, that honoured knight, and now great statesman, who proved the earl, his brother, a delinquent for some pounds lent to the King, and overthrew the will, cozening his own sister and all the legatees. The friends then fall upon talk about the accusation against them of sacrilege in buying Bishops' lands. As if their land were Heaven. If it were, they wouldn't purchase it. The House is far enough from such an act ; that were sacrilege i' the highest, and not on any terms to be committed. " No, heaven at no rate ! Little England for my money ! " "A little Ireland too will now do well," hints Tryall, and the talk turns upon That renegade lord Apostate Inchiquin, who hath committed The high offence, revolting to the King. 'Tis he that plagues us, he hath dismunster'd He hath dismunstered me (Deil Inch him for't) Of full three thousand acres (his very name Makes every Inch I have about me quake). Which if I could have quietly enjoyed, I would not have engaged in Bishops' lands. JVl 1 62 Memoirs of BartholoDiew Fair. cHAr. xi. Mr. Avery. Ormond and he shall ne'er be pardoned, nor Montrose, Hopton nor Langdale, no nor Dives— Mk. Tkyall. I was afraid of Ireland once, I gave it For an unwholesome air, bogs and quagmires ; But Colonel Jones hath cleared it all again. With the State's Thunder, Powder and Money. Me. WooLASiONE. It was a plot of Cromwell's all this while (And Monk will justify it) to lose so much : To make the business seeming desperate, To his eternal honour to restore it. This was the plot, if Ormond had ta'en Dublin ; He should have put in governors, then Inarched And joined with Johnny Presbyter in Scotland, Then should those governors have sold it back (For what's the City money for, but that?) Unto the high Lieutenant, that once ours, Cromwell had powdered after Ormond, whiles Good Sir Arthur Haselrigg and Lambert Rebuilt the wall betwixt the Picts and us. And kept them out of England, pent in Scotland. This was the plot, which none but sure ones knew : This is the day to raise more money for't. Mr. Tryall. It shall be levied, what we say 's a law. This is the word, Do it, or Cromwell comes ; We'el fetch him with a whistle, if they boggle. He lies in Wales on purpose at a lurch ; (Upon pretence of waiting on the winds) But the truth is, it is to awe those here The Leveller and discontented party. He'll squirt you regiments into Dublin, And fright off Ormond with a whiff of 's tail. Mk. Avery. The Welch do love him mainly. Mr. Woolastone. They have reason. He is their cousin very near aUied, Once Ap-Lord Lieutenant General, — ^Ap-AU ; Ap-Tudor, Ap-Queen Elizabeth, Ap-Bess, Ap great Protector presently ; the States Must have a grave, and who is fitter for 't. They talk then of the change of lords, delightful as variety of meats. Kings were too stately, thought it much to feast a subject \ but the State condescends to take a lodging, and tell secrets of the House to citizens' wives, who tell their husbands what they learn, and pump the junto for intelli- gence. "And on that confidence we buy king's lands, bishops or anything. They work it all." Therefore the wives are entitled to their holiday feast in the park. But they shall not miss the plea.sure of their husband's company. l.etters from Cromwell, announcing that he had sailed A.D. 1649. Oliver s Day. 163 from Ireland, reached London on the twenty-first of August ; but the fact that he had sailed was evidently not known to tlie writer of this pamphlet, when, immediately after the arrival of the news of the Raised Siege before Dublin, he began and hurriedly completed his appeal to the passions of the crowd that was a few days afterwards to be assembled at the Fair. Of the point of the other political allusions very brief reminder is sufficient. The Earl of Inchiquin, Lord President of Munster, had "dismunstered" the com- monwealth, first by manoeuvres against Lord Lisle, to whom, when he arrived from England he played the part of an adversary in the form of an ally, in the voice of a friend crying check to him at every move he made. Lichiquin was a royalist who, having been offended by his own party, had joined the Parliament, but at the end of two years returned to his old mind, and profited as long as he could by the opportunit}' of acting as a traitor in the camp to which he had deserted, before he returned to his right position as an open foe. He had helped Ormond greatly, and before Ormond's defeat at Dublin and the change of fortune following on that, Monk had been driven out of Ireland ; Dublin and Derry only still held out against the forces of the Stuart. That the tone of the preachers ridiculed in this pamphlet was open to the interpretation set upon it by the Cavaliers, there can be no doubt. The sermon preached by its " daily Orator before the Throne of Grace " to the House of Commons on that twenty-ninth of August, the Thanksgiving Day, for which the Bartholomew Fairing was a preparation, shows us how the learned preached ; and if their preaching put a flaming sword into the hand of him who listened, what must have been the manner of men whose zeal was untempered by knowledge and discretion. William Cooper, M.A., Minister of the Gospel of St. Olave's, Southwark, preaching from a text relative to the siege of Jerusalem in the 12th chapter of Zachariah, said, "Observe then the parts and parallel together : you have here, first, a very formal and formidable laying a siege ; secondly, we have a signal raising of that siege : thirdly, we have the causes and consequents of botli : In the first, two things are considerable, first the besieged, secondly, the besiegers. Tne M 2 164 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xi. besieged is no mean city, but a Mother in Israel, Jerusalem, the metropolis of Judea, the glory of the Earth, the city of God is invested and beleagured ; the beloved city is sur- rounded and straitened by her adversaries. 2. The besiegers ; a numerous Host, all the people round about ; sundry nations, bad neighbours, such as bear evil will to Sion." What would be the comment of a Cavalier upon a passage like the following? "Such a contrariety is there between Jerusalem and her enemies, that as the two scales of a balance, put weight in one, presseth do\\ai and lifts the other up : the rise of Sion is the fall of Babylon ; the death of the witnesses makes the inhabitants of earth merry, Revela- tions, II, 10. When Jeremy and his people lamented in tears, their enemies laughed, mocking at their Sabbaths. Again the Saints have their turn at last, they shall laugh last, Isaiah, 65, 13, 14. Behold, my servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be ashamed ; my servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye shall cry for sorrow of heart, and howl for vexation of spirit. Revelations. Now this is a special act of divine justice, to give every one his turn : and not only so, but by the Law of Retaliation to make his people shift their burdens upon their oppressors' shoulders : The burdens that oppressors lay on the back of the righteous, shall fall heavy upon themselves, breaking their bones, and pressing them down into the pit. This they get by laying loads on the Saints of God." This direct preaching of the Law of Retal- iation received the thanks of the House of Commons, and was printed by its desire. " What a distinguishing love is here in gracious God," says Mr. Cooper, " that puts so vast a difference between men and men, between party and party ; accounting his own honourable, his enemies base ; his own precious, his enemies vile : the Lord like a lion goes forth, and tears whatever he meets with, to feed his young, be it men or beasts." Again he says, " It is ever fatal to assault the Jerusalem of God. In their engaging against Jerusalem, they do but march the nearest cut to their own graves. It's an evident token the Lord intends to blast a Person, Family, or Nation, if he permits them to advance and act hostilely against his people." Such preaching inevitably tended to beget among the A.D. 1649. Oliver s Day. 165 ignorant, opinions, which in the talk of the men introduced into that third act of his tract, all Bartholomew Fair knew to be hardly an exaggeration of the Cavaliers. There were oppressions also, and there were infamous betrayals of trust by private men, who hypocritically sought only their own advancement, in the concourse of the saints : and it would be unfair to Mr. Cooper not to shew how he speaks like a Christian upon this topic. He speaks of petitions left unopened by the Parliament, during a press of public busi- ness. " I beseech you,'' he says, " let your ears be open to those cries which reach up into Heaven, and beat loud alarms in the ears of divine justice. Oh, take care and heed, that the oppressions in the land may not be such as may cause the tears of the oppressed to speak. They have no comforter, while on the oppressor's side there is power; some cry for bread to feed their bodies, others cry for bread to feed their souls : some cry for justice, others for mercy ; some sink under their burdens, others play the task-masters upon their brethren, laying on them more load ; some grow rich upon others' poverty, and some proud by others' riches."' He tells the members of the House that they must unload heavy burdens, heal the breaches between brethren, and let the oppressed go free, and that then " the Lord will be tender of you and yours, and will build you a sure foundation." The Minister was labouring over his state sermon, (which is full of erudition) while the Cavalier was peppering his gibe, and we may understand either of them the better for a glance over the other. After this talk between the acts we take our seats for the remainder of the play. Act the Fourth. Enter Ralph and Roger as at New Park Gate. Ralph pays the carochman who has brought the ladies, drink-money above his hire. The two appren- tices, about to order the feast, exchange a word or two aboiU their approaching wit-combat. The three ministers, leading the three Committee luenV wives, enter the Park. Mr. I^f,if Henrietta Maria may first have brought it to England ; and when the Puritans abandoned drinking of healths, it would appear by the passage above cited, that they fell back on the cry of Tope, and gave it currency enough to establish firmly the word toper among the English people. Then, when it had been used by Dryden and by other authors who lived after the time of the com- monwealth, it became classical English. To the topers of Bartholomew Fair in the year 1649, the Cavalier who offered them his Fairing on occasion of the raising of the Siege of Dublin had but little more to say. He brought the husbands in to join the feast of saints, and they were welcomed by their wives and by the ministers, who bade them sit down, for the meats were blest and thoroughly sanctified. There needs no repetition \ the creature cannot fall from grace. The two apprentices are then called to their wit-combat, which ends the play. It ought to contain the sting of the whole satire ; we have been prepared for it from the first, and when we come to it, — Ralph witlessly Sings changes upon the witless notion of Not such a present since good Noah's Ark As this of the new State, their Fine New Park, and bewilders us with arks and parks, much to the delight of his hearers in the play, who seem to understand him. At last says Mr. ],erned, " Now, conclude, Ralph, smartly. I 70 Memoirs of Bartholoiueiv Fair. chap. xi. with the sting in the tail, as all epigrammatical poems should. Ralph. Tis all our own, — it comes ; Be wondrous merry, The next good news ; All Irelajid's London Dcrry." It was thirty-seven years since the large grants of land in Deny, then made to the corporation of London, had re- ceived the name of Londonderry. London now might ask all Ireland for its Derry. There was no wit here, indeed, but there was a strong expression of the eager expectation with which men then watched the issue of Cromwell's expe- dition to a land in which there had been left to the Parlia- ment only two places to call its own. The other apprentice sings as a Cavalier of gold and goblets changed to parks. Each bodkin in this new alembic proves A Tree ; ear-rings and thimbles start up groves. Gilt spoons are saplings and the orphans' food, Pap with a Hatchet, it is nursed with wood. The widow's jointure here most stately shews, She calls for 't in, the Feoffees say It grows. Engage, engage apace, while the State lives. She is a liberal governess, she gives. This is a taste to the city of their loves, Lend all you have ; and you shall all have groves. Then though the King return with Foreign Force, And take your Forest, what are you the worse. When these are gone, the State more favour yields, They give Parks now, and then Elysian Fields. "You are a little too bitter, sirrah," Mr. Lerned cries, and the painfully witty Roger answers, " Satyrs in woods, sir, are most proper." The ladies falling out over the merits of the two apprentices, throw pie, mustard, and sugar at each other. Mr. Olduns rises, with hat off, to exorcise the spirit of trouble and feast-interruption ; and the husbands entering with music that plays " several smart tunes," the ladies tope both dry and wet, in sign of reconciliation, and are led off by the ministers in a pretty dance, while the husbands, ever intent on the state of the nation, run over the diurnals. " The Moderate Intelligencer," was one of the many little quarto journals crowded with print, that A. D. 1649- Olivers Day. 171 expressed the stir among the people in those days ; — " the Moderate Intelligencer," says INIr. Woolastone, " is very full this week ; what a comfortable letter is here from Colonel Jones ? What ! was it Ormond's Fair, that there were such rich prizes taken ? Who would have taken it for a siege ? And you will — we will — send and buy it all. 'I'will be good chaffer." The end is that 1 1 is Lordship's shipped : we are Princes ail. Mr. Avery. I must unto my court at Squeezing Hall, There wait those Oranges, those humbled things : While we sit uncontrolled like petty kings. Mr. Woolastone. We will have the song, and so conclude : Our wives to their caroches, we to our horses. Levites to their Books. Boys to their shops, and Music to the scraps. THE SONG. To the Tune of In the Merry Month of May. I. In the merry, merrv month of June When the rose fades ; but venison Ranges stately by the woodside. With head branched in her pride. Then the State looked down upon Citizana and Citizen. II. The States that styled are the free More than those of Germany : Free of flesh, as any State, Gave us Venison for our Plate. They will give us anything, A New Park for an old King. III. What Returns arc these for our loans ! No man gnidgeth, no maid groans. She that laid lier bodkin down. In New Park has a green gown. And if that be not enough What is far more pleasing stuff? There are two verses more before the {Close.) Thus Enge-land for a Crown of Gold Is with a silly Willow Garland fooled : I 72 Memoirs of Barl/ioioview Fair. chap. xi. Thus Enge-Iand by successfull knaves, Is become a State of Fools and Slaves. Thus for a Park, like a fort of owls, The Charter's lost of the Forest of Fools. In an epilogue of indignation Roger seems to compare the traffic and turmoil going on throughout the country to a Fair, and ends as usual with a blunt point thrust very fiercely. The Fair is hell. Difference there is t\\ ixt that and Bartholomew, That brings Brimstone and Fire, this the Cold Dew. The simple histor}'- of the Park which is the foundation of the Cavalier's attack upon the Puritans, is that King Charles the First, by enclosure of common lands belonging to the people, added to the Old Park at Richmond the two thousand two hundred and, fifty-three acres still known as the New or Great Park. In the formal list of his en- croachments upon public liberty drawn up before his trial, this seizure of public land had been included ; and soon after the King's death, two months before this Bartholomew Fair, that is to say in June 1649, the New Park, as their own land, had been given back to the use of the people. In plain words, restoration was made of the stolen property. The Puritans did not suppress Bartholomew Fair. There were, indeed, no dramas performed in it by living actors, but the State did not condescend, like Rabbi Busy, to engage in controversy with the puppets. It was for the Corporation of London, if it pleased, to exercise control, and there was a Lord Mayor who, as we shall see, did make himself eminent for an attack upon the wooden Dagons of the show. Against the fool in his motley none made war ; Cromwell himself had in his private service foui buffoons, and had he visited the Fair, true hero as he was, might have been well disposed to mount a hobby-horse. Tlierefore the clown still jested, and the toyman thrust his baubles in the face of the Roundhead, while the Cavalier's lady with a constellation of black stars about her nose, a A. D. 1649- Olivers Day. 173 moon of ink on her chin, and a coach and horses, a very fashionable patch, on her forehead, laughed at the short hair under the broad-brimmed hat of the offended gentle- man. Well might she laugh at the miserable scarecrow in plain coat and jerkin, and in boots that fitted him, for he had no love locks and no peaked beard like the gallant at her side ; he wore only a little pecked band instead of a laced, collar, and as for his breeches, — not only did they want ornament and width, but they even showed no elegant bit of shirt protruding over them ! Across the Smithfield pavement, Cavaliers in boots two inches too long, and with laced tops wide enough to contain each of them a goose, straddled about ; compelled to straddle, in order that the long and jingling spur of one boot, hooked into the ruffle of the other, might not bring down the Avhole man into the gutter. Women, I say, might note such things, but the men were in earnest. The dainty Cavalier in the historical shirt, embroidered with the deeds of profane heroes, might glance from the speckled face of his companion towards the clean cheeks of the Puritan maid in the religious petticoat, worked over with texts and scripture scenes j all had their vanities, their froth of weakness floating loose above the storm ; all had an eye for the jest of the Fair, but under it lay in a heaving mass the solemn earnest of the time. The Fair brought together from almost all parts of England, men who had urgent thoughts to exchange, harmonies and conflicts now of principle, and now of passion to express. The destiny of fatherland was hidden for all in a future black with doubt. Men brave and honest had their souls pledged in allegiance to an earthly king, over whom and against whom others, as brave and as honest, set up the rights given to them by the King of kings. A true Bartholomew Fairing, then, for the year 1649, ^vas this of which we have discussed the purport. The talk of the Fair was in it. Zeal might be there crying out against the puppets. License might be there preaching the cause of the monarchy to Ursula the pig-woman ; type of all that is gross and sensual in the Smithfield festival, and winning from her and hers a ready outcry against interference of the Puritans with honest pleasure. But it was not only to the I 74 Memoirs of Bai'tholomew Fair. chap. xt. tribe of Ursula that Cavaliers, then abroad in the Fair, looked for applause and countenance. There were sup- porters of the commonwealth battling with all their hearts for civil liberty, who did not seek religious liberty by sharing in the protests of the Puritans ; and there were Puritans — nay, there were the very saints of Banbury — who felt themselves bound in conscience to pay tribute unto Csesar, and who had on tiiat ground protested formally against the execution of King Charles the First. All were eager, there were few who were not earnest, and there were none to whom the news from Dublin was not, even in the midst of the Fair, a matter of more pressing interest than all the Monsters of the booths. The Fair was become an assembly of the people, for whose suftrages contending parties strove. The very Lords of the Fair had in that year borne witness to the heat and urgency of the great struggle through which the land was passing. From the corporation of London, holder of the Fair in Smithfield, there had been a Mayor dismissed as disaffected to the Commonwealth, and a successor forced upon the citizens. Of the family of Rich, holding the Fair in Bartholomew Close, the two chiefs, brothers, attached to one another in ihe household, were divided in the state. The head of one of them had been struck off at the gate of Westminster Hall ; the other was a main prop of the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's friend. The Rich family has to be kept in sight during this portion of our story. In a few paragraphs, therefore, let its history be summed up for the next half century. The Earl of W^arwick, a stout but temperate supporter of the Puritans, had, in the King's time, been much honoured and trusted in the House of Lords. It was he who had been appointed by the Lords and Commons, on behalf of England and against the King's wish, Vice-Admiral under the Earl of Northumberland ; who had, in obedience to the orders of the Parliament, removed from Hull to London the King's magazine of arms, cannon, and ammunition ; and who, when the King discharged . the Earl of Northumberland of his commission, which he would not consent to resume on the authority of Parliament, took by that authority his place A. D. 1649. Olivers Day. 175 of Lord High Admiral. The first use made of the new broadseal of tlie ParHamcnt was to confirm his patent. He was a hearty, honest, charitable man, whose influence was great, not only among leaders of the popular cause in London, but also among his friends and tenantry in Essex. Clarendon terms the Earls of Manchester and Warwick the two pillars of the Presbyterian party ; and tells us that the Earl of Warwick piqued by some slight put upon him as Lord High Admiral, was privy and consenting to his brother's design ibr the royalist rising which was discomfited so easil_\- at Kingston, and which brought the schemer of it to the block. Yet the Earl of Warwick at that very time was, by appointment of the Parliament, threatening the fleet of the Prince of Wales at sea, and when, "because it was well known that the Earl was privy to the engagement of his brother, and had promised to join him," the prince tempted him by letters and friendly messages, the messenger " quickly' returned with an answer from the Earl which (in terms of duty enough) humbly besought his highness to put himself into the hands of the Parliament ; and that the fleet with him might submit to their obedience ; upon which they should be pardoned for their revolt." This was not the behaviour of a traitor to his cause. Probably he had heard of the Earl of Holland's wild design, and was by family affection re- strained from betraying plots that must inevitably fail. When they had failed, he strained every nerve to save his brother's life, pleaded his past services, his age and infirmity, engaged all the Presbyterians on his behalf, and after long and w^arm debate failed only by three or four votes to rescue him from death. He still remained true to the Commonwealth, was Cromwell's fast friend, was the nobleman who in AV'est- minster Hall helped in the robing of him as Protector, and to whose grandson— another Robert, and a short-lived hus- band — Cromwell gave his youngest daughter Frances for a wife. He gave her, it is said, so joyously that, at the wedding-feast, he threw sack-posset over ladies' clothes, daubed stools with sweetmeats, and pulled off and sat upon his old friend's wig. A formal courtier, dancing at this feast, had his lip made black like a beard by one of the Protectors' four buffoons, and, being offended thereat, nearly T 76 Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fair. chap. xr. slaughtered him for his impertinence. There was hope for Bartholomew Fair revels when such sport was relished in the Household of the Lord Protector. The Earl and his newly married grandson both died a few months after this wedding, in the year 1658. But the grandson so married to Frances Cromwell was the only male child of an intervening Robert, the Lord Admiral's eldest son. This yoimg man's premature death having deprived his fether of a direct heir, the tide passed to his uncle Charles, his father's brother, and the second son of Earl Warwick the Admiral But when this Charles died also without issue (in the year 1673), the earldom of Warwick came with its estates, including the lordship of Cloth Fair, to the son (again a Robert Rich) of the Lord Admiral's brother, the beheaded Earl of Holland, and of the Elizabeth who had been heir to Sir Walter Cope of Kensington. Sir Walter was the brother of a Sir Anthony Cope, already mentioned in these pages, who had served in the Puritan interests for the borough of Banbur)% diuing five Parliaments of Ehzabeth, and who was King James's first High Sheriff of Oxfordshire. Marriage into this family had influenced the mind of Henr}-, Earl of Holland ; and, doubtless, had caused some of his vacillation between the contending parties of the State. But Elizabeth, his wife. Sir Walter's heiress, appears to have been a lady of high spirit, and, after her husband's execution, bore no good-will to the part)- by which he had been condemned. She continued as a widow to occupy Holland House, her own inheritance.' It had been built by John Thorpe for her father, afterwards improved by her husband, and it was again enlarged by herself, when she was sole mistress of it, in the year 1654, a widow, and a mother of nine children. In her eldest son Robert, who was three times married, and who was not master of Holland House until after his mother's death, the two earldoms were first united ; and after the year 1673, joint Lord of Bartholomew Fair with the corporation of London was Rich, Earl of Warwick and Holland. The first lord who held the titles jointly died after holding them two years, and was succeeded then by a son Edward, married to Charlotte Middleton, daughter of a Welsh baronet, the lady who, after her first A. D. 1649-1673- Olivers Day. 177 lord's decease in lyor, was re-married to Mr. Addison, The first husband had left her with a son named Edward Henry, three years old, upon whose small head the two Earls' coronets descended, and who became the little Lord also of the Fair within the bounds of St. Bartholomew the Great. 1/8 Me))iuirs of BartJwloniew Fair chap. xn. CHAPTER XII. fagon. Bartholomew Fairings, in the form of political pamph- lets, had been in use before the year of the King's execution. One such work, entitled " General Massey's Bartholomew Fayrings to Colonel Poyntz," was ascribed to John Lilburne, in 8vo pages of answer to it printed in i647,under the name of "Reformados Righted, being an Answer to a paltry piece of Poetry, entitled" as above. Some passages from this answer are in the Guildhall book of MS. collections ; but they are mere abuse, and can illustrate nothing. The only point in it is, that the respondent, as Lilburne had expressed abhorrence of smokers, talks of making pipe-lights of his verses : If Derrick don't prevent our taper And burn it in Smithfield for a libellous paper. Oh, how 'twould vex our idle pamphleteer To see his Fairing executed there : Yet such a punishment too noble is For senseless rhymers. Let thy doom be this, May never reader henceforth look for thee But in a whipping post or pillory. That Bartholomew Fair held its own while the play-houses were silenced, tliere is abundant evidence to prove. Evelyn, in his diary, under date August 28, 1648, notices his coming to London from Says' Court, and seeing " the celebrated follies of Bartholomew Fair." hi the same year, a quarto pamphlet, called "An Agitator Anatomised,' notices the puppet-playing. Nearly as old as this, and, although undated, probably to be taken as the first advertisement of a wild-beast show in the Fair of which there is extant record, is the following : A.D. 164S-1655. Dagon, 179 "JUST ARRIVED FROM ABROAD, " And are now to be seen or sold, at the first House on the Pavement from the end of Hosier Lane, during Bartholo- mew Fair, " A large and beautiful young Camel, from Grand Cairo, in Egypt. This Creature is twenty-three years old; his head and neck are like those of a deer.' In the year 1651 the Household Book of Sir Edward Bering, Bart, of Surrenden Bering, in Kent, records as expenditure on the 3rd of September : " Item, Baubles at Bartholomew Fair, 4^-." That entry might have been impor- tant to our history, as the first intimation we have of the Buration of Bartholomew Fair for a longer time than the three days in August first appointed for it. But it happens, unfortunately, that, about the year 1650, the practice of adopting from abroad the computation of new style, although not yet established by the law in England, had been recog- nised by the Commonwealth in public documents, which employed such dates as the \\ June. Therefore, Sir Edward Bering's 3rd of September may really have been, and pro- bably was, English Bartholomew's Bay, the 24th of August. Some old verses about the Fair, written in the time of the Commonwealth, and in the year 1655, show that it then still throve, that the cut-purses were not suppressed, and that Fat Ursula was still measuring her ale at the rate of six cans to a quart. The rope-dancer performed within four walls to penny audiences, and the memory of the old Miracle Plays and Moralities was being cherished among the puppets. Bows and arrows were sold among the pigs at Pye Corner, and the leather market had begotten, near Smithfield Bars, an offspring of its own in Shoemakers' Row. Thus runs the " Ancient Song of Bartholomew Fair," quoted in the fourth Volume (p. 169) of B'Urfey's " Pills to Purge Melancholy" : In fifty-five may I never tlirive, If I tell you any more than is true, To Loudon che came, hearing of the fame Of a Fair they call Bartholomew. In houses of boards, men walk upon cords, As easy as squirrels crack filberds ; But the cut-purses they do bite, and rob away ; But those we suiipose to be ill-birds. N 2 i8o Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair.cw^?.\.u. For a penny you may zee a fine puppet play, And for twopence a rare piece of art ; And a penny a can, I dare swear a man May put zix of 'em into a quart. Their zights are so rich, is able to bewitch The heart of a very fine man-a ; Here's patient Grisel here, and fair Rosamond there. And the History of Susanna. At Pye Corner end, mark well, my good friend, Tis a very fine dirty place ; Where there's more arrows and bows, the Lord above knows. Than was handl'd at Chiv\-Chase. Then at Smithfield Bars, betwixt the ground and the stars, There's a place they call Shoemaker Ro^v', Where that you may buy shoes every day Or go barefoot all the year, I tro ! But the position occupied by Bartholomew Fair during tlie Commonwealth will be best understood if connected with a recollection of the struggles of the stage during that period. Whatever Prynne may have suffered for his Histrio-mastix, or Stagers' Scourge, published in 1633, the interest excited by the book was mainly due to the fact that it expressed an actual passion felt by a large body of the people. Only nine years later is the date of an ordinance of the Lords and Commons concerning stage plays, commanding them to be forborne as out of joint with days when England was " threatened with a cloud of blood bv a civil war." Again, in the year 1647, there had been an Act passed to the effect that all stage galleries, seats, and boxes should be pulled down by warrant of two justices of peace ; that all actors of plays for the time to come, being convicted, should be publicly whipped ; and that all spectators of plays for every offence should pay five shillings. Prynne could have asked no more than that. Many players out of occupation fought in the ranks of the Royalists. Some waifs collected in one spot during a lull in the great storm, were to be seen together on three or four successive nights in the year 1648, perfonn- ing at the Cock-pit. They were broken in upon and dispersed by soldiers. In Oliver's day, however, there was much secret connivance at dramatic entertainment. Private per- A.D. 1660. Dao-on. 1 8 1 ' made by the collector, of a broadside printed at about this time, "by and for A.M., and sold by J. Walter, at the Hand and Pen in Holborn," which will add some colouring to our picture of the Fair in the time of Charles the Second. In quoting this or any other memorial, let it be understood that I alter nothing, but, in the name of cleanliness, omit whatever is mere Ursula talk. ■ ' ROGER IN AMAZE ; OR, THE COUNTRYMAN'S RAMBLE THROUGH BARTHOLOMEW FAIR. ( To the Tune af the Dutchman s yig. ) Adzooks ches went the other day to London Town In Smithfield such gazing Zuch thrusting and squeezing Was never known. A Zity of wood, some volk do call Bartholomew Fair, But ches zure not but king and queens live there. In gold and zilver, zilk and velvet each was drest, A Lord in his zattin Was bus'ly prating Among the rest. But one in blew jacket came in, which some do Andrew call, Ad'sheart talked woundy wittily to them all. At last adzooks, he made such sport I laugh'd aloud ; The rogue being flustered He flimg me a custard Amid the crowd. The Volk fell a laughing at me, then the vi.xen said, ' Be sure Ralph, gi\ e it to Dolly, the dairymaid. I zwallowed tlie affront, but staid no longer there : I thrust, I scrambled Till further I rambled Into the Fair. When Trumpets and Bagpipes, Kettledrums and Fidlers all were at worlc And the Cooks zung, ' Here's your delicate Pig and and Pork. I thrust and shoved along, as well as ere I could : At last I chanced grovel Into a dark hovel Where Drink w as sold. They brought me cans, which cost a penny a piece, ad'<;heart, I'm sure twelve ne'er could till our country quart. o 194 Memoirs oj Bartholomew Fair. chav. xn. C;he wint to draw her parse, to pay them for their beer, The devil a penny Of money che'd any Che'il vow and swear. They doft my hat for a groat, then tm-ned me out of doors. From the countryman we turn back to the expert towns- man at the Fair. On the ist of September 1668, Mr. Pepys to the Fair, and there saw several sights ; among others, the Mare that tells money and many things to admiration. Three days afterwards the same gentleman went " to the Fair to see the play of Bartholomew Fair with puppets," meaning not acted by puppets, but with the puppet show included in it. Ben Jonson's play received the doubtful honour of King Charles the Second's special approbation. First restored to the stage, after forty years suppression, on the 7th of September, 166 1, it was performed several times before the King, and the Fair itself rioted in the discom- fiture of Rabbi Busy; but, blind to the equally hateful picture drawn of itself by the great dramatic satirist, made its booths merry with the Elder and the Pigwoman. It is well to remember that while Charles the Second, scoffing at religion, where the satirist had scoff'ed at the vain show of it, patronised Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, there is said to have been an interdict put in his reign on the Maid's Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, which closes with the moral, that : On lustful kings Unlocked for sudden deaths from heaven are sent. And, whether that be true or not, Mr. Waller felt it to be only loyal that a new fifth act should be written, expunging tlie judgment on the Shameless villain ! A thing out of the overcharge of nature ; Sent, like a thick cloud, to dispense a plague Upon weak catching women ! such a tyrant, That for his lust would sell away his subjects ; Ay, all his heaven hereafter ! And putting in place of it a happy end, with the prayer that fixed the personal interpretation then in every man's mind : Long may he reign that is so far above .AH vice, all passion hut exxess in love. A. p.. .1671-78. Dagon. 195 Creditable to Mr. Samuel Pepys is his cogitation on the Fair within the l^'air : '/ And is an excellent play ; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it ; only the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest." On the seventh of September, in the same year of the Fair, Mr. Pepys was *' with Lord Brouncker (who was this day in an unusual manner merry, I believe with drink), J. Minnes and W. Pen to Bartholomew Fair; and there saw the Dancing Mare again (which to day I find to act much worse than the other day, she forgetting many things, which her master beat her for, and was mightily vexed), and then the dancing of the ropeSj and also the little stage-play, which is very ridiculous." On the day following Mr. Pepys received so earnest an invitation to Stourbridge Fair from Roger Pepys that he resolved to let his wife go, which she was to do next week. Bartholomew Fair, Southwark Fair, and Stourbridge Fair, — since the extension of Bartholomew Fair, — were all kept in September. In the year 167 1, the corporation of London was dis- satisfied with the profits of the Fair accruing from the ar- rangement then subsisting, and referred it to the Comptroller to let the ground for the City, and report the profits, tv:c., to the first court after the Fair. This was done, and the tolls of the Fair were not farmed but received directly by the City until July 30 in the year 1685, when they were leased to the sword-bearer for three years at a clear rent of a hun- dred pounds a year. At the expiration of two years a com- mittee having reported that the net annual profit for those years had amounted to not more than sixty-eight pounds, the City Fair, then lasting fourteen days, was, on his appli- cation, leased to the sword-bearer, for one-and-twenty years, at the same rent. In the meantime the civic authorities had already taken formal notice of the " Irregularities and Disorders " of Bar- tholomew and Lady Fairs, and had in 1678 referred it to a committee " to consider how the same might be prevented, and what damages would occur to the City by laying down the same." o 2 196 Memoirs of BartJiolo,nezu Fair. chap. xh. This is the first hint of suppression that arises in the story of the Fair, and its arising is a]most_ simultaneous with the decay of the great annual gathering as a necessary seat of trade. There is no year in which it can be distinctly said that then the Cloth Fair died. Even at this hour, when the Fair itself is extinct, there are in the street called Cloth Fair, on the site of the old mart, one or two considerable shops of cloth-merchants, who seem there to have buried them- selves out of sight, and to be feeding on traditions of the place. In Charles the Second's time Leeds had asserted its importance, and the cloth trade in the North of England was already outgrowing the old ways of commerce ; Hercules was beginning to neglect his go-cart. The cattle fair was still considerable, but London needed and had weekly cattle-markets, and one of those might be a show-market, if a great annual cattle-show were needed. At a much later date than that at which we have now arrived (in 17 15), >ve read in Dawk's New's Letter that " on Wednesday Earth o- . lomew Fair began, to which we hear, the greatest number of black cattle was brought that was ever known." The trade of the fair, therefore, was not extinct when the first question of its suppression arose in the City of London. There was also a grave question whether the City had legally a right or power to suppress it. Poor Robin's opinion of the commerce of Bartholomew Fair at this date we find in a catalogue of Jests upon Fairs in his almanac for 1674. Among such quips as, " January i at Cogshall in Essex for |ccvs, January 25 at St. Martin's for Bboch-,§logs, January 28 at Dunstable for Rabies (C^ap- hins," ^t^ ^t' — he describes Bartholomew Fair, thus: "August 24 at ^nutbficlb for i'ack-puiiijings, ytgs ^cabs aitb Savtbolonuhj babits." A.D. iC8o. The Hustling of the Pope. 197 CHAPTER XIII. %\lt iustUng of i\t |3ope. Enough has been read of the story of the Fair to show that it was as truly as the House of Commons, part of the Representation of the EngHsh People ; not, indeed, its Lower, but its Lowest House. When Spain threatened us with an Armada, the monkey of the Fair was taught to show defiance of the King of Spain. When Gunpowder Plot was the topic of the day, it was the -great show of the Fair, played to eighteen or twenty penny audiences, nine times in an afternoon. When England broke loose from civil and religious despotism, the Puritan was in the Fair preaching down vanity; and the Cavalier was in the Fair with all the puppets on his side, crying down excesses of religious zeal. From among the excesses there came out at last a quiet mean. We arrive now at another period of antipapal ferment. Our story does not ask who stood behind Titus Gates, or what was the first purpose of those who designed the fable of the Popish Plot to kill the king. In October, 1678, the upheaval of thought among the people, caused by it, began. On the first of November, the House of Commons resolved, " That, upon the evidence that has already appeared to the House, this House is of opinion, that there hath been and still is, a damnable and hellish plot, combined and carried on by Popish recusants, for the assassinating and murdering the king, and for subverting the Government, and rooting out and destroying the Protestant Religion.'" Bartholomew Fair was of the same opinion, and acted on it in its booths. The Fair acted on it in the year 1680, a play, called " the Coronation of QUEEN ELIZABETH, with the Re- iqS Memoirs of Bartholonieiu Fair, ciiap.xih. STAURATiON of the PROTESTANT RELIGION ; or, the Downfall of the POPE. Being a most excellent Play, As it was Acted, Both At Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs, This present year 1680. With great Applause, and Approved of, and highly commended by all, the Protestant Nobility, Gentry, and Conunotialty of England, who came to be Spectators of the same. London, Printed for Ben Harris, at the Stationers Arms, under the Piazza, in Corn- hill, 1680." The copy of this play (24 pages, Quarto) in the Library of the City of London, here used, is supposed to be the only perfect copy extant. In 1680, when it was acted, the ferment raised among all ranks or degrees, which nobody could conceive who was not a witness thereof, was at its height. On the 26th of June, the Duke of York, heir to the crown, had been by persons of rank and influence, presented before the Grand Jury at Westminster, as a Popish recusant. The question of his exclusion from the throne was being discussed throughout the country at Bartholomew Fair time, and his rival in the minds of the people, Monmouth, " the Protestant Duke," was at that time in the West of England, " with chariots, horsemen, and a numerous train," receiving evidence, as calm as it was overwlielming, of the Protestant determina- tion of the people. Then it was that the great play of Bartholomew Fair was the play of which I have just cited the title. This is the address, " To the Protestant Reader. Kind Reader. After the great applause this Play has gained upon the stage, I have thought fit, for the better satisfaction of the Curious, to publish it to the World, that all may plainly behold my sincere Intentions herein, which was only to lay open the Cruelties and Villanies of Rome, more to the Life, than they have been exposed since the beginning of this late horrid and most barbarous Plot ; for, upon second thoughts, I considered, that many who only saw this Play, were not of such profound Capacities, as to let it take a firm Impression upon their Memories ;" — we shall know presently, whether it is a thing to be remembered only by men of profound capacity ;— " therefore, that all might the better weigh each particular circumstance, as their leisure A.D. i68o. The Hustling of the Pope. 199 served them, I have presumed to send it abroad into the World, though, no doubt, amongst a thousand Foes, whose Mahce unquestionably will endeavour to asperse and sully the candid Reputation it has already gained amongst several Noble Personages of this Nation, whose sound Judgments are undeniable : the reason of it, is, perhaps, because it plainly shows them as in a Mirror, the purity of our Religion, and the gross Absurdities and Cruelties of the Pope and Church of Rovte in their proper Colours, not gilded over with borrowed Ornaments or Fictions, which never were ; but howsoever, under the friendly patronage of all truly Loyal Protestants, I have sent it abroad to tell the World the Noble Exploits, Heroic Resolutions and Victories, of that blest Queen who managed all the Plots and dire Conspiracies of Rome, to the last moment of her long and prosperous reign. So I remain a I^over of all that own the Name of Protestants, and live up to the Dictates of the Sacred Profession, to serve them in all sincerity. J-D. The People then, under a king who made England inglo- rious abroad, were reverting strongly to the days of Queen Elizabeth, and dwelling on them in a tone that boded ill to any but a Protestant successor of the reigning Stuart. The Play of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth was in three Acts, short enough to secure an end to the whole perform- ance every half hour. Its theme was, of course, a Popish Plot against the Sovereign : and these were THE ACTORS. Queen Elizabeth. ^ !^'1^°P \ Protestants. 2 Bishop ) A Lord, General to the Queen. Another Lord. 1 Popish Cardinal. 2 Popish Cardinal Tim, a Tinker. Brush, a Cooper. Honeysuckle, a Cook. The Pope. Devil. 2 Jesuits designed to kill the Queen. Dulcemente, a Nun, ravished by the Pope. 200 Memoirs of Bartlwloineiv Fair, chap.xih Cardinal Moricena, her Father. 2 Ghosts. 2 Devils more. Singers and Mutes; &c. Act I. " Scene I. — The noise of Kettle-Drums and Trumpets are heard, at -which- the Curtaiti rising, discovers the Queen sitting under a Cloth of State, in her Royal Robes, attended by her Lords and Ladies of Honoitr ; two Bishops mpporting her Crown, and two Popish Ca7-dinals sta?tding at a distance ': the Scene imagined to be Whitehall. " I Bish. Long live Elizabeth, of England, France, and Ireland, Queen ; sole Protector of our Lives, Fortunes, and Religion, under whose sacred Rule may it shine brighter than unclouded Stars. "A Lord. May Foreign Nations fly to do you Homage, and kings find Succour under the Shelter of your Wings ; Princes and Potentates bow down before you, as the Universal Goodness of the World : Ne'r was England so happy in a Monarch, nor we in such a Royal Mistress, "i BisJiop. May the Aethiopians forget the Sun, and fall down and worship you, whose Sacred Influence governs thus Mankind. " Qiteen. My thanks to all, but I must refuse that worship which the Immortal Powers have only bidden to themselves, yet must own you, next to the Powers above, who have given me Essence, and preserved my Life from Dangers great ; placing me upon this Throne to Rule a Tottering State, driven by fierce Storms of Malice, o'r the deep Bil- lows of devouring Envy ; encompassed on every side with Foes, yet fearless will I act. First then, to settle Religion, the dearest part of Government, and surest Rock for Princes to build upon, shall be my speedy care to begin : I'll reform my own House, and after that the Nation" (this, probably, was, like the next sentence, a popular reference to the suc- succession question, hailed with some particular applause). " Therefore all you who pay Obedience to the See of Rome, or think supremacy due to the Pope, we here discharge you and banish you our Court. You my Lord Cardinals, as chief, must show the way, and in your room such faithful Ministers I'll place, as shall be worthy of so great a charge rt.D. 1680. The Must lino- of the Pope. 201 Bloodshed and Rapine shall to Rome retire, \ Murther and Luxury which feed the fire, \lixeunt allbut the Shall to the Scarlet Beast for Succour fly, | 2 Cardhtals. And unimploy'd within his bosom die. ) " I Cani'uiaL Is it come to this ? "2 Card. Now Heresie begins to pee]j abroad, that in Maryes days was laid as low as Earth. "i Card. Oh I could curse her Heart out, nay, my own, for not preventing it before it had took root. "2 Card. Horrors and Death, why were our hands so tame, when one brave stroak had done it at the Altar. "i Card. Where was this Devil, Koine's great counsellor; where was he, I say, that he foresaw not this Monster, to have pushed it in the Mould of Nature, or have strangled it in its Infancy, e'r it grew to such a gigantick stature, now enough to shake the very Throne of Rome. "2 Card. It is not yet too late, the Seeds are newly sown, and e'r they root too deep, we may pluck them up ; or by lopping off the Cedar, make the Shrubs bend pliant as we please. " I Card. Let us about it then, and lose no time ; me- thinks I could as freely strike the Heretick, as one assured Salvation. "2 Card. Tis that must crown our Wishes; the Queen once Murthered, the rest are easily reduced unto the See of Rome; let's on then, no opportunity must be omitted to get her speedily dispatched. "Tis meritorious no doubt : Blood and Murthers are Rome's chiefest Glories." Great applause in the booth, surely, at this natural remark of the Cardinal's, which the other Cardinal tops with a likel\- prayer. " I Card. O Pius Quartus assist us with thy Prayers, and Hell, if thou hop'st a glutting Harvest, protect the best Religion." \ExCU7lt. To a Bartholomew Play comic scenes were essential, and the comedy consists very much in Ursula-talk which is not worth repeating. It is the Pope who is befouled with it, as the polite reader will be pleased to take for granted. 202 Memoirs of Bart/ioloineiu Fair. cHAr.xm. "Scene II. — Enter Tim the Tinker, Brush the Cooper, a9id Honeysuckle the Cook, 7vith several other Rabble. ^'■Tim enter.'] Come, Neighbours, come, — This day is as we may say, a Holy Day, for this day Queen EHzabeth is crowned King of England, and therefore we ought to keep it Holy. '■'■All. We ought, we ought. " Brush. How Neighbour, Holy ! Pray Neighbour, have a care what you say, for methinks talking of keeping a day Holy, sounds as if we intended to keep a day for his Holiness. ^' Honey. Who's that talks of his Holiness? His Holi- ness is . .1 say no more, I say no more. " Tint. Indeed, Neighbour Brush, my neighbour Honey- suckle is in the right on't ; for since King Elizabeth has banished Popery out of England, I say . . ^^ Brits/i. Ay, but Neighbour, this had been Treason a year ago, " Tim. But now we have got a King Elizabeth, 'tis no Treason, Neighbours; Agad I think myself as good a Chris- tian now, as any man of no religion whatsoever. ^^ Brush. A year ago, I had like to have been burnt for a Heretick, because the watch took me with a Bible in my pocket, which I had had there at least a quarter of a year, and never thought on't. " Tim. Nay, I had like to have gone to pot too, for saying . . : but those times are gone, they are I thank my Stars, or else we should all have smoak'd for speaking against the Pope. Well, I am but a Tinker, but if I could have turned Papist, I never needed to have mended Kettle more. ^^ Honey. How's that, never mended Kettle more, that had been brave. " Tim. No, for you must know I am a great Politician, and a great Statesman; that is, a man of the State: and a man of the State is a Statesman, mark ye me neighbours. " Honey. Why, then we are all Statesmen. ''AH. All, all Statesmen. "Zm. Yes, every Man and Mother's Child that don't go to Church too often; for if ye go to Church too often, People takes ye to be Religious, and then ye are looked A.D. 1 680. The HiLstling of the Pope. 203 upon as all Plotters, Traitors, Conspirators, and the like; for under Religion the Pope acts all his Villanies: and everyone knows that he is the greatest Churchman in the World. ^^ All. He is, he is, he is — ^^ Brush. But come Neighbours, to make right use of this Holyday, let us go to the Alehouse, and there drink till we are drunk, come home and beat our wives, and so to sleep: come, come, come Neighbours, come. [As they art going out, enter two Cardinals. ^^ Ho7iey. Ha, what ha' we got here, two young Popes? " Brush. No, no, they are Cardinals. " Tim. How, Canibals! Neighbours, ud's lud, they look as if they were a hungry, I had best have a care they don't eat me. But now I think on't, Gentlemen, Pray how dare you stay in London, since King Elizabeth has Banished Popery out of England ? "i Card. Why, you know we ought to have preach'd to you but — [Here they run upon 'um n^dely. " All. But what, but what ? "2 Card. Why, ye are a company of Incorrigible, Imper- tinent, and Exorbitant Wretches — '■'•Brush. How's that. Neighbours, Exorbitant! " Tim. Ay, that's a hard word Neighbours. ... . . . Therefore I think. Neighbours, these He Popes ought to be chastised. " All. They ought, they ought — [Here they fall upon 'um with Broom-staves. " Card. Pray Gentlemen, pray Gentlemen be civil. " Tim. Down on your Knees then, down on your Knees, wc say, and beg our Pardons, and that quickly. "■Card. O cursed Fate! But better this than worse [Asidc?j, We do, we do, Gentlemen, and are sorry for what we have said. " Tim. Well, now 1 know 'um, that's he that burnt my Neighbour Mole the Sexton for a Heretick, who was of no Religion. 204 Memoirs of Bartholomeiu Fah\ chap.xhi. ^'■JBrush. And that sly scarlet Rogue. . . Honey. And that's the fellow . . ; but 'tis no matter, we'll Plague 'um for it now we have got 'um in our clutches; they had better have been at Rome i' faith. \Taking off their Hats and Mantles, they rudely force them out. "■All. Come, come. Away with 'um, away with 'um. \Force them ottt. '■'J'ijil. Thus like two Roman Hero's handy-dandy, We'll go to the Alehouse to be Drunk with Brandy. \_Exeunt in the Cardinals Hats, and other ornaments. " Scene III. — The Scene draws off, and discovers the Romish Conclave, the Pope, Cardi?ials and Bishops, as in clusc consult. '■'•Pope. Now let the joy of Rome be great, and let every individual Father cry, Long live Religious Soul and Scourge of Heresie, Mary of England, Eldest Daughter to this Holy See, read here. [Delivers a Paper to a Cardinal. "i Card. How's this, 300 burnt alive in a Church as they were Preaching Heresie and close Rebellion against this Holy Catholick and Apostolick See : Ten more such Sacred Murthers would have made the haughty Turk and stubborn Flemming to have owned you the Supreme Head of the Universal Church. " 2 Card. 'Tis great and Meritorious, let him be Canoniz'd for a Saint, that first invented this Religious way of sending Troops of Hereticks to Hell together. '■'Pope. Let it be done, 'tis my Command it be so; for the Propagators of Religion ought to be cherished though in Blood; and let our speedy thanks be sent to our best Daughter, for taking such effectual care to blast the growing Heresie, and keep it underfoot. "i Card. She ought to be Sainted whilst on Earth, and when wrapped up into the brighter Mansions, far above this lower world, be Enthroned a Goddess, and adored, who found herself uneasie in her thoughts and restless, till oppor- A.D. i68o. The Hustlins; of the Pope. 205 tunity gave leave to throw her Self and Crown at your Sacred feet, desiring to be received into your bosom. " Pope. And by so doing has fenced herself within a Wall of Addamant, too secure for Envy, or the prying Fates to reach; and her Ambassadors shall still have the prehemi- nency in all our Courts. "2 Card. Who dares dispute it, if it pleases you, when all the glories of the Earth depend upon your Will ? Monarch's but a Name you lend to pleasure haughty Man withal, and when you please to call it back, Kings are as soon devested of their Honours, as are your meanest Slaves. \_Enter the Devil in the Shape of a Jesuit, as in great Consternation. " Pope. Ha ! Your Eyes speak wonders, and forebode some dismal Message to the See of Rome. " Devil. Dismal indeed, the Flower of Rome is gone, the Star that lately shone so bright in your great Firmament, is set; the Sacred Empress of the Northern Isles, the angry Power have snatched away, Mary of England's dead. [All rising come forward. ''All. How! " Devil. Cold as the face of Ice, and in her stead the haughty Magnanimous Sister's Crown'd — But Crown'd to make Religion and her Ancient Seat stagger and fall before her. ''Pope. Curs'd disaster. " Devil. All of the Church of Rome she has disgraced, and the greatest Places of Trust about her Person, are given to Hereticks ; no Roman is to be seen in London now, but such as sculk in corners, or those of such puny Souls that swallow all the Execrable Oaths they impose." We should remember here that the Test Act was recent when this play was acted. In 1673 the force of law had been given to the resolution of the House of Commons " That all persons who shall refuse to take the Oaths of Al- legiance and Supremacy, and receive the Sacrament ac- cording to the rite of the Church of England, shall be incapable of all public employment, military and civil." " Pope. Let them swallow all they can Impose, we make 2o6 Memoh's of BartJwlomeiv Fair. cH^p.xirr. it Lawful, we'll grant the Dispensations for so doing ; no matter if the whole outside taste of Heretick, so within they remain firm to us — " Devil. Something must be done to change the Scene, least other Nations taking Example from her, should fall from their Obedience, and throw off your yoak. " Pope. There shall \ Nor must we linger in a Cause of such a vast Importance ; for Heresie, like Weeds, grows fast, and if timely care be not taken to prevent it, the World, e'r we can' root them out, will be Infected. \Speaks to the Cardinal. Father, your advice in this great Affair. " I Card. She must be Murthered, and that without delay. '■'■Devil. Spoke like a Saint that would fain be in Hell before his time. {^Aside. " Pope. Murther's too gross a name, or sounds too harsh in People's ears ; let her be made away secretly : Sign a speedy Warrant for her Death. \The OaxdMvA takes the Warrant, and having Si gnedit, delivers it to the Pope, 'cvho gives it to tlic Devil. *' Pope. Here take this, and with our ample Pardon, though it be for the blackest Murther's Hell e'r knew, . . . For to promote Religion naught 's withstood, Empires must fall, and Kingdoms set in Blood. Blood must cement the tottering State of Rome, And Heaven shall warrant all the Ills we doom. To fix Religion in its blessed abode, Should be the mighty Business of a God : Murther's the end, the Trat'ress shall not live, Who kills for Rome, Rome's Vicar will forgive. [Exeunt Pope, Cardinal, Bishops, &c. " Devil. I can but laugh now, to think how these old Fools are cheated : This is the Warrant that Signs the Pope's destruction. That must needs be a hopeful Religion that has the Devil to it for a Tutor. 'Tis Murther and Poison tliat brings them to the Popedom, where for a while, they A.i>. 1680. The Hustliui^ of the Pope. 207 enjoy all earthly Pleasures ; but then, by dire Mischance, or their own Luxury, Death snatches them from hence, and then they are hurried Headlong down to my great Master. For he which in Pleasure gives liis Soul to dwell A Pope on Earth, must be a Devil in Hell. [Exit." So ends the first Act of this Bartholomew Fair Drama. The Fair that dated its fame from a pilgrimage to Rome, to which in its young days the juggling of monks caused thou- sands to travel through the marshes and the forest tracts of England, where men had rejoiced and traded at the gates of the Priory, and in which the monk's cowl had been a com- moner fight than the fool's cap, was a Roman festival no more. Nothing delighted its frequenters better, than that the Pope should be well hustled in it. There is weak literature in this play of Queen Elizabeth ; but there is strong life. Think of it on its platform in the booth, recall the eager faces and the animated shouts of a crowd, in which English nobles took part with the rabble of the Fair, " Therefore, all you who pay obedience to the See of Rome, or think supremacy due to the Pope, we here discharge you, and banish you our Court." The determined power of the people, lay beneath the shouts that answered to appeals like these. At that hour they were kindled with the purpose of assuring to themselves their liberties, and Avhen, ere long, the time was ripe for their just effort, it was not made in vain. Very rude and, in one sense, very ignorant was the delight of the multitude in the visible rough handling of a pair of Cardinals, the beating them with broomsticks, the stripping off of their frippery, and carrying it about the stage in ignominy, on the persons of a pair of sots. It was uncivil and unjust, no doubt, to call the Pope every bad name, to represent him as a breaker of all Ten Commandments, and to provide him with the Devil as his right-hand man. But there were three centuries of a nation's healthy growth im- plied in this. The grotesque figiu-e, with the horns and tail, invented by themselves, which holy friars in the old miracle plays had presented to the crowd of the Fair as the Prince of Darkness whom they were continually vanquishing, at last stood for themselves upon the scene of their old 2o8 Mejtioirs of Barikolo?nezu Fair, chap.xih. triumphs over heresy; and upon the ground once made fruitful by the ashes of the martrys, entered " the Devil in the shape of a Jesuit, as in great Consternation."' Now let the curtain rise again, upon Act II. "Scene I. — Enter tiuo Cardinals. '• I Card. This is the time the friendly Fates to Rome have set to cut the root of Heresie, and Crown Religion Monarch in the Throne ; E'r to Morrow's dawai the haughty Usurpress shall be no more." The second cardinal asks who are the Murderers, and the first cardinals informs him that thev are two fellows bred up in villany, whom he has agreed with " for so many masses to kill the Queen, and " he adds, " if they bring them off short of Heaven, there is no Tmth in our Reli- gion." " 2 Card. You may as well misdoubt Eternity, as Holy Unction, Mass, and Prayer. " I Card. Should they fail, I would strike the bloAv my- self; me thinks I could as easily do it as I can merit my Salvation. \Enter the Devil /// the shape of a Jesuit. " Devil. Lost, lost and undone for ever. Fly — fly — the Treacherous Secretaries of the Ambassador, just as the blow was going to be given, have unravelled all the Secrets of the Plot, and laid them open for each vulgar eye to pry into." However, the assassins have only a glimmering of what has passed, and still " lurk about the Court, resolving this night to kill the Queen." The Devil is sent off to give them all encouragement, and goes saying, " I go Imperious Cardi- nals, but 'tis my Master's Interest I consult, not yours ; though you are they that reap our Harvest of dire Sin, 'tis we that have the Profit of the Scarlet grain to fill our Stores, ril leave ye to your Fates, it will not be long e'r {Aside. A.D. 1680. The Hustli)ig oj t/ie Pope. 209 the law shall strangle you ; when all your quibblings will not save you." Exit Devil and the Cardinals, after finding some more villany to say, go off with this couplet — ' ' What's done for Rome must needs, if gi'eat, be good. He merits Heav'n whose Soul is bath'd in Blood." "Scene II. — Queen's Garden. Enter two Assassins in the Habits of Jesuits," (alas, poor Jesuits !) "-with Daggers in their hands. " I Assassin. This is the Night designed to wash our hands in Blood of Hereticks, to cut down that high Cedar that has made herself Rome's Envy ; nor shall we want Gold for perfecting so brave a work ; the enterprize must be with Resolution undertook, and as fearless we must on, as did that brave Burgundian, who killed the Prince of Orange. " 2 Assass. Remember Raviliac, and let us boldly under- take an act so meritorious ; nor let our hands be slack to strike our fatal Daggers home into her breast ; plunge them to the hilt, and when we've drawn 'um out, laugh loud, as being pleased to see the streaming gore be-crimson the pale surface of the Earth. " I Assass. See where the Queen comes, attended only by one Gentleman. Now's the time to cut the Root of Here- sie, and if she 'scape us may we be accursed for ever. Me- thinks the blow's already struck, and Death has hushed her silent in his frozen Arms. " 2 Assciss. Let us abscond awhile, the better to surprize her. \_Thcy retire and stand unseen. [The Queen enters with one Gentleman. " Queen. Are all things done according to my order. " Gent. They are. In all things I have been obedient to fulfil your Royal Pleasure. " Queen. A\hat said the French Ambassador to his Accu- sation ? " Gent. Haughty and bold, like any guiltless man he did behave himself before the Council, denying that he knew ought against our Sacred Life, or was not obliged to tell it 2IO Memoirs uf Bartholomew Fair, chap.xhi. if he did ; he only alledg'd, That it was not in the Power of any Council to tax the King's Representative, much more to demand such Questions of him as none but his Master ought to know. " Qiicccn. 'Tis close and dark as all their other Actions are, but v,-e'll not meddle with Lemaspin more ; only tell him our just resentments, that we banish him our Court, and speedy care shall be taken to send him quickly to his own land. What powers Divine Protect, Rome cannot harm, Nor can the Scarlet Beast our Senses charm ; Pistol nor Poison ne'r can make her start. Who has Heav'ns Sacred Armour for her Heart. \Exemit Queen and Gentleman. T/ie Assassi?ts come out from their A?nbnscade andfollmu the7n. " I Assass. Now, now's the time, strike home. Now for cutting the very root of Heresie, that it shall never sprout in England more ; let's on, let's on, I say. " 2 Assass. My heart fails me, I cannot touch her. " I Assass. Cowardly slave, art thou not paid for Mur- ther? " 2 Assass. Not as you are assured Salvation ; therefore strike you, and that quickly, or I'll kill you, and so end the dispute. *' I Assass. Villain, thou darest not. " 2 Assass. You shall see I dare. [ Hire they fight with their Daggers, during which, Tim, Brush, a}id Honeysuclvie, 7i'ith several others, enter. " Tim. Why how now, what's to do here ? What ! two Fellows a-Fighting in the Queen's Garden. " Honey. I'll be hang'd if these Fellows have not a hand in the Plot, and come hither to kill the Queen. " Tim. It may be, it may be so, therefore, I think it fit that we seize 'um, and carry 'um before a Justice of Peace to have 'um examin'd. [Here they seize tliem, upo?( ivhich they tremble, and endeavour to hide their Daggers, &'c. " Tim. Pray, Gentlemen, of what Prade or what Calling A.D. 1680. The Hitstliiig of the Pope. 211 are ye ; for know, Gentlemen, I have Power to apprehend ye, and make ye give a better account of yourselves, and what business you had here. Ha, what are these ! Truly, Gentlemen, these are suspicious weapons. {^Finding the Daggers. " Honey. Ud's lud, see ye here, as I take it Neighbours, if I am not mistaken, they should be Butchers by their Knives. " Tim. Well, come Gentlemen, I must carry you and these before a Magistrate, and have you both examined ; and Til promise you, Gentlemen, I'll be so kind to you, that I won't leave you till I see you both fairly hang'd ; Come away with 'um, away with 'um ; bring 'um along, bring 'um along. '' All. Along with 'mn, along with 'um. [ They force them out. " SciiNE III. — The scene draws off, and discovers the Pope sitting by a Nun. The Pope is indelicate. The Nun reminds him of her vows. The Pope gives her free dispensation, tells her, however, that Religion is a trade, and that "none but Women and Fools do believe that we can Save or Damn for Moneys whom we please ; or that Salvation can be bought and sold." The Nun obtains further information of this sort from the Holy Father, who asks her how she can imagine " that the Clergy could consist or live without such soft, dear things as are your sex in general." While he embraces her, [Enter the Devil in the Habit of a ycsiiit. and says, "Why this is as it shou'd be," and offers further counsel for which, the Pope, embracing him, says, "Thanks my dearest, best of friends (thou hast been always kind to me) I'll take thy counsel, and expect thee when to-morrow dawns." [Exeunt Pope, leading the Nun, and as they are going out the De\ il with a Dagger offers to strike him. But he thinks better of it : He has made a promise, and the Pope, safe game, will die by the snare in proper time. This r ■-' 2 1 2 jMe?noirs of Bartkoloview Fair. cHAr. xm. devil's great master sits as partner in the popedom, "but," says to the British Pubhc the rebelhous imp, "it shall be my future business to supplant them both, and so at once to rid the Chair of a Lustful Pope and an Imperious Devil." Pope thou art ready, and we all agi'ee When thou com'st to Hell to keep a Jubilee. Tim, Brush, Honeysuckle, and others enter next, upon their way to see the Hanging of the two Assassins. Brush goes out and returns with news that they are hung already. The talk begets a challenge to a fight between Tim and Honeysuckle, and, of course after due vilification of the Pope, the act ends with Tim's monition, " Come, come. Neighbour, for one cherriping Cup, and then to the Fight." \_Exeunt omnes. Act hi. Scene I. — The Seen,- opens and discovers the Pope (?«(/ Nun sitting upon a Co7ich. In the midst of their amorous talk the Nun remembers vvitli dread her Father Cardinal Moricena, but the Pope threatens him with a Sleeping Pill if he prove troublesome. [Enter the Devil in the shape of a Jesuit. " Devil. Fly, fly, or all will be discovered. Cardinal Moricena's at the gate." The angry Cardinal in fact enters, and stabs the irreligious Nun his daughter, who dies in his arms, laying the blame of all her guilt upon the Pope. The Pope and Cardinal come to high words. The devil whispers to the Pope, " Kill the old Coxcomb, Sir, he will be babbling else. Kill him, I say, or else you cannot be safe." " Pope. Moricena, let me embrace thee thus. \Stabs hi VI. '■'' Morice. Ah, I'm slain. {Dies. "Pope. Take that for railing at the Pope, and that for prying into his secret love. A.D. 1680. The HiLstling of the Pope. 213 ^^ Aside Dmil. Evil counsel is a sure way to push a man upon damnation, and I am sure he wants not much of that. " Pope. Well, what's next to be done? ^'- De%!iL Fly Rome, Sir, without loss of life or honour; this Cardinal reviled much the people's hearts, and when the murther's known, they'll seek revenge. Take all your jewels, and things of greatest value, easiest portable; and in some far country spend the residue of your days in pleasure. " Pope. It will grieve me much to be deposed, but more to suffer a shameful and ignominious death ; by the hands of those that were my slaves : — I was a fool to kill him— For men though great, yet are not always good, Who, Hke to Rome, delight to deal in Biood. \_Exit Pope. " Devil. Well, like his shadow I must follow him where- soever he goes, his thread of life is almost spun, and then he falls to my great Master's share — I'll haste, and in destruction push him on, And then I'll leave him in confusion. [Exit Devil." Scene II. — Enter T'vm, Honeysuckle, and others. Tim crying Victoria, Victoria, Victoria. He has beaten Honeysuckle in the fight, upon which Honeysuckle declares, as he was bound to do, for the Protestants, reviles the Pope, and in token of reconciliation " He Dances an An tick yigg- " Tim. So, well done, Cook, now I like thee, i' faith. \Enters Brush to them. " Brush. Arm, arm, Neighbours. Arm, or we shall be all burnt, burnt for Hereticks. " Tim. How's that. Neighbour, all burnt for Hereticks ? " Brush. Ay, all for Hereticks ; for the Pope with the whole Spanish Armada, is come into the Hope, laden with Faggots, Irons, Whips, Racks, and Cibbets, to torture, hang, and burn us all for being Protestants. " Tim. How, the Pope come into the Hope ! Uds-lud, 2 14 Monoirs of Bartholomeiu Fair, chap.xih. then let us go hope to catch the Pope ; and if we do catch the Old Gentleman, we'll so singe his Tail, that he shall never forsake the countrey. Now will I go muster up all my Kent Street Regiment " (that was an allusion meant for popularity in Southwark Fair), " and if I pull him not by the Beard, say Tim's a Coward. Come along, come along, along, along. [Exeunt. [Enter the Pope, led by the Devil in his own Shape. " Pope. "WTiere hast thou brought me, through these gloomy shades of Night ? " Devil. Ask tliyself — know'st thou this Figure, once thy servant, and now thy Master. I counselled thee in all, raised thee at first, and gave thee Popedom \ bore thy Messages o'er Sea, and laid and managed all thy Plots against the Hereticks ; but thou has bought my Service ilear, at the price of thy poor soul. I had thee too in Bonds, and all to make thee one to Lucifer my Master : The time's expired, thy Glass is nm, and long thou can'st not stay ; therefore, Til leave thee to that fate thou meritest, and the Hereticks shall give thee. \TIie Scene suddenly draws off, and discovers Hell full of Devils, Popes and Cardinals, with the Ghosts of Moricena and Dulce- menta wounded : To thetn the Devil etiters. " Pope. What ghastly visions ? this my eyeballs start, my i;lood runs backward, and chill Horror freezes up the Spring uf Life. [Enter one who sings, in answer to a Noise behi7idtlie Scenes, (re. SONG. Voice. ■ Where, where's the Pope ? Answer. Come to die in a Rope : Or his breath expire by the flames of hot fire, To meet the just Plagues that his sins do require. Voice. Pray what is his crime? [Answer.]FoT coming to Popedom before 'twas his time ; For Murther and Whoredom, for Poison and Rape, For killing the Father and making escape. From the Chair of St. Peter to rt Heretick City ; Mid'st the Rabble, to suffer without any pity. A round, a round, a round, inclose the Pope round ; Push him and toss him on Prongs ; all yet quicker, Till he cryes there's no hope, for bloody, bloody Pope, And a cheating old fool of a \'icar. [E.vit Singer. ' A.D. i68o. The Hustlin^^ of the Pope. 215 The Pope cries, " Cursed dismal fate, must all my Glories and incumbent Honours sink into the dust ! O Popedom, thou gilded Pill, whose outside seems enticing fair, but being took, thou hurriest Mankind upon his sure destruction, Oh, I could curse tliee, but 'tis now too late. And I with patience must endure my fate. \_As he is going out, Tim, Brush, Honeysuckle, and others of the Rabble come running in, and almost beat him down." The reader, who has borne with a good deal, here, per- haps, marvels how Tim and the Rabble found their way so easily to the Infernal Regions. Let him remember, that at this time Davenant was laying the foundation of the ar.|; of scene-painting upon a better stage, and that in a booth at the Fair, during the reign of Charles the First, the reader was to imagine all the places that he saw — as indeed in this drama, the very first direction says, " the Scene imagined to be Whitehall." There was a great convenience attending this old plan, of which Bartholomew Fair dramatists could take advantage as they pleased. The locality not being obtrusively suggested to the eye, a speaker was or was not in a given place, or he was now here and now there, accord- ing to convenience. Fancy was free, and there was no painter's work calling it to order when it chose to riot in a few vagaries. " Thn, Ha, what have we got here, a Alamamouche ? " Honey. Til be hang'd if this fellow han't run away from his Colours : Uds-foot look here, he has brought the key of the Cupboard away with him for haste. [Laying hold on the Key that han^s by his side. " Tim. Pray, Sir, if a man may be so bold to ask, what are you. Sir ? \_A dismal Voice from abave. " Voice. He's a Pope." The Pope denies : the Voice says, " He lies." Tim argues that the Voice must be believed, " for it can't lie so long as it speaks against the Pope." There are to be bon- fires that night for the Victory over the Spanish Armada, " and this Pope having been the cause of the burning of 2i6 Memoirs of Bartholoniciv Fair, chap.xhi. many a Heretick ; what say ye, if we should return him Hke for hke, and burn him ? — Hold, stop the Pope there ! \^He offers to go out, they ptill him in. " All. Ay, ay, that wou'd be brave, that wou'd be brave. " Tim. Then take him up, and let's march along with him from hence. To Temple Bar, where being come, We'll sacrifice this mighty Pope of Rome. ''Pope. O Gentlemen, Gentlemen, for Heaven's sake, Gentlemen, Oh ! " All. Ay, ay, up with him, up with him. \Thev get him astride upon a Coalstaff, and lift him upon their 'Shoulders, snatching off his Triple Mitre, Mantle, and other Oriiaments, they put them upon themselves; then hollow and dance round him. " Tim. For know, if you yourself to us do commit, You soon shall find, we love neither Pope, Priest, nor Jesuit. ''Pope. Gentlemen, Gentlemen, nay Gentlemen, \They go out with him, hollowing and throioing up their hats." Queen Elizabeth then enters with her General, Lords, and Attendants, has with them a few words of big talk, and is presently surrounded by Tim and the rabble, who "have been a-fighting, an't please your Majesty, and have beaten the Pope, and taken the Pope ; and now we are come to get your Majestie's leave to let us burn the Pope."' " General. And where will you get one. "Tim. O, we have a Pope, a lusty Pope, a strapping Pope, a rumping, thumping Pope, a Pope that will fry hke Bacon, an't please you. " Queen. Use your freedom, you have our leave ; but do it with discretion, without Riot or Tumult ; lest Grace once given and then abused, should turn the Sword of Justice against my Friends. " 2un. Hark you there, she calls us all Friends. " All. O law— " Tim. O 'tis brave King Elizabeth ; Pll warrant your A.TJ. i68o. TJic Hustling of the Pope. 2 r 7 Worship we'll use him as we ought. Come, come, to burn the Pope, to burn the Pope ; Away, away. [ They go out leaping and shouting. " Quoeii. Thus Heaven showers Blessings on the head of Kings, And does Protect them with Immortal Wings. Rome may Conspire, and Hell with her Combine ; Yet cannot harm, though Pope and Devil join. [ They go ovt. {Enter six Dancers, zvho Dance a Set Dance, which ended, they go out ; then a Wofnan Enters and Dances a yigg." That is the end of the Play. Burning the Pope, it should be said, was in those days a favourite pastime of the Lon- doners. When, a few years afterwards, the Stuarts were being finally driven from the three kingdoms, a false rumour of King William's death in Ireland came to France, there was great rejoicing in Paris, and says Voltaire, osier images of William were burnt by the people, " as they are used to burn the Pope in London." On the seventeenth of November following the Bartholomew Fair in which this Play of Queen Elizabeth was acted, a very pompous pageant in nine parts set out from Whitechapel Bars and marched to an effigy of Queen Elizabeth at Temple Bar, where the Pope received sentence and was burnt " before Queen Besses' throne." In the prelude to this pageant, says an account written for the occasion, — doubtless by Elkanah Settle, who, for the time, was manager — after the Captain of the Pope's Guards on horseback and ten pioneers, " Next walks a Bellman singing, and saying in a loud doleful voice, Remember J^i/stice God- frey. A dead bloody corpse representing Sir Edm.. Ber. Godf. is carried on horseback, supported by a Jesuit behind, who hath a bloody dagger in his hand." After this sad prelude, a very large Banner is carried betwixt two, repre- senting on the one side, the " Cabal of the Jesuits at Wild House, all hanging on one Gibbit ; and among 'em another Twelve, that would betray their Trust or Conscience. On the other side is represented Gammer Celliers with a Bloody Bladder, and all her other Presbyterian Plot Forgers ; and Protestants in Masquerade ; and all this in colours on a 2i8 Memoirs of Bartholomezu Fair. chap. xm. Cloth." Hereupon followed the Anti-Papal Pageants planned in the same temper. The last displayed a Martyr before a Bishop and a conclave of Monks, " and all the theatre round about strew'd and hemmed with racks and instruments of cruelty." The details of the costly spectacle were engraved on copper-plates, and possibly it was this special ceremony of the burning of the Pope, performed in November, to which at the end of August the Bartholomew Play pointed in its last allusions. In the same year, in one of a series of anti-papal tracts, %\}t. |.1ope's Darbingcr, by way of Diversion, (printed by A GodbidioxL. C, 1680), the following comparison is made between the Church of Rome and Bartholomew Fair. " This as well as that consists wholly of noise, and nonsense, and viiscJiief, a Company of Knaves, set up to babble a Rabble of Fools, The Wares of both are much alike, Toys and Baubles, gaudy shews and Tricks of Legerdemain. At Smithfield you have Babies and Hobby Horses, at Rome, consecrated Roses, and holy rotten Bones, and pretty little Pocket-gods, onely you must pay a devilish deal dearer for these than for the other. Here you have Monsters and Wonders, there you have prodigious Saints and whisking Aliracles, whilst the Priest as fack-piidden makes the Parade to the Show — Here, here, /lere's the onely true Infallible Church, Sirs ! Heris Antiquity and Visibility, and Unity, and Universality ; step in then, and take your places. Gentle- men, whilst they 7nay be had ; for, trtist me, ere long you will scarce get in for the crowd. Here too you have the several Orders of Rascals, Alcndicant Ragamuffins without Shirts ; subtil Jesuits, that smile in your Face and pick your Pocket ; grave Capuchins .... whole droves of wandering Nuns .... And to complete the parallel, here you have the Devil and Pope, as plenty as Pig and Pork ; and what would you have more if you were at Rome, though even in a Year oi Jubilee V Thus we find that not in one booth of the Fair only was the hustling of the Pope in that day the pleasure of the people. His was a figure common in the Fair, and he there rivalled the Merry Andrew in his efforts to secure derision. A.D. 1680-82. Revellers. 219 CHAPTER XIV. Iicbcllcrs. Rachel, Lady Russell, might have shared, in these days, with Lady Castleniaine. the pleasures of the Fair. As she is finishing a letter to her husband, on the 24th of August, 16S0, she is interrupted, and before closing it, writes : " My Sister and Lady Inchiquin are just come from Bartholomew Fair, and stored us all with Fairings."' The Master of the Revels was an officer who had always enjoyed, under the Stuarts, valuable consideration for his patent. Li the time of James the First, we have heard Lanthorn Leatherhead, justifying his Motion by asserting that he had " the Master of the Revel's hand for 't." Charles the Second, though he and all the Stuarts traded in the sale of patent offices, liberally gave away this place to Thomas Killegrew, whose jests diverted him. Killegrew and Sir William Davenant, both received at the Restoration patents to build New Theatres. Killegrew's was opened as the Theatre Royal, on the site of Drury Lane ; Davenant's was in Lincoln's-Inn- Fields, his company being sworn by the Lord Chamberlain as servants of the Duke of York. They both began by breaking down the old practice of causing women's parts to be performed by men. The pains taken by Sir William Davenant to secure suitable and rich decoration for his stage, entitled him to rank as the founder of the modern practice of scene-painting. Thomas Killegrew died at the age of seventy-three, in the year 1684. At least seven or eight years before his death his office as Master of the Revels had been transmitted to his son. For he was still living when there appeared in the London Gazette of April 13-17, 1682, this advertisement: "Whereas, Mr. lohn 2 20 Memoirs of Bartholomew Pair. chap. xiv. Clarke, of London, bookseller, did rent of Charles Kille- grew, Esq., the Licensing of all Ballad Singers for five years ; which time is expired at Lady-day last : these are. therefore, to give notice to all Ballad Singers that they take out Licences at the Office of the Revels at Whitehall, for Singing and Selling of Ballads, and small Books, according to an ancient Custom. And all persons concerned, are hereby desired to take notice of, and to suppress all Mounte- banks, Rope-Dancers, Prize-Players, Ballad-Singers, and such as make shew of Motions and strange Sights, that have not a Licence in Red and Black Letters, under the Hand A.l). 1682. Revellers. 22 r and Seal of the said Charles Killegrew, Esq., Master of the Revels to His Majesty; and, in particular, to suppress one Mr. Irish, Mr. Thomas Varley, and Mr. Thomas Yates, Mountebank, who have no Licence, that they may be pro- ceeded against, according to Law." With the office of Master of Revels was allied that of Serjeant Trumpeter of England, which entitled its possessor to a certain fee from every one who blew a wind instrument publicly (except at the Theatres Royal), and, therefore, gave jurisdiction over the Merry-andrews and Jack-puddings in every Fair throughout England. In the Loyal Protestant iox Thursday, September 7, 1682, is this advertisement, fully detailing all the privileges of the office. " ^W ^Vhereas several Persons do presume to Stroll about ') O 9 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xiv. the Countries, to make show of Lotteries, Pla)'s, Rope- Dances, Dumb-Shows, Models, Mountebanks, Ballad Singers, Newshawkers, Scotch Pedlers, and other Unlicensed People ; and also those that make use of Drums, Trumpets, Fifes, and other Wind Musick, without Licence from Gervase Price, Esq., Serjeant and Comptroller of all His Majesty's Trumpets, who is Intitled thereto by His Majesty's Patent, under the Great Seal of England. These are therefore to desire all Mayors, Bayliffs, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and Constables, to apprehend and Imprison all such Per- sons that shall presume to act herein, without License in print, under the Hand and Seal of the said Gervase Price, Esq., and to give Notice thereof to the said Serjeant Trumpeter at his Lodgings in Whitehall, so that they may be sent for, to answer the Contempt before the Right Honour- able the Lord Chamberlain.' Afterwards this demand of the Serjeant Trumpeter was shown to be illegal. In the same Number of the Loyal ProtestaJii, and in the preceding Number for the 26th of August, is an announce- ment of " the Famous Indian Water IVorks, adorned with several new Additions, which have been continuing since this time Twelvemonths, together with Masquerades, Songs, and Danees, to be seen in the Old ElepJianfs Ground, over against Osier Lane, in Smithfield, during the time of the Fair ; which will not be publicly exposed any more till the next Ba7'-tholo7new Fair.'" Also, we learn from the same ^' Loyal Protestant" that at Mr. Saffry's, a Dutch-woman's Booth, over against the Greyhound Inn, in West Smithfield, during the time of the Fair, will be Acted an Incomparable Entertainment, call'd the Irish Evidence; the Humours OFTiEGE;or, ; with variety of Dances. By the first New-market Company." The title of this play suggests a very different treatment of the Irish Teague to that which expressed the temper of the nation seven years later. Some- body also announced that he had lost " in a Hackney Coach, or otherwise coming from Bartholomew Fair, a Silver and Gold Fringe, Waist-Beit, and a Sword Inlaid with Gold," such announcement being a corroboration of the obvious fact, that people of all conditions frequented Bartholomew Fair after the Restoration. There is an advertisement also, A.D. 1682. Revellers. 223 showing the rougli side of the scene. It is "for three horses stolen by James Rucldcrford, a Mountebank, and Jeremiah March, his Clown." It was by no means all pleasure behind the boards and canvas of the booths. There were fees enough to pay, and griefs enough to suffer. One of the sights shown alive, was of a child, said to have been born back to back with a live bear. Let any one who loves children, feel the abomination of the fraud that bound a child and a bear back to back for the amusement of the public. In the Domestic Intelligence for September 4-7, 1682, published during the time of Bartholomew Fair, we read, how, " The German Woinian that danc'd where the Italian Tumbler kept his Booth, being over against the Swan Tavern, by Hosier Lane end in Bartholomew Fair, is run away from her Mistress, the Fifth of this instant ; She is of a Brownish Complexion, with Brown Hair, and between 17 and 18 years of Age; if any person whatsoever can bring Tidings to one Mr. Hone's, at the Duke of Albemarle's Head, at the end of Duck Lane, so that her Mistress may have her again, they shall be rewarded to their own Content." The Lord Mayor, in saddle new, the Sheriffs, and the Aldermen, were, at this date, still riding, in person, to pro claim the Fair on the eve of St. Bartholomew — at about five o'clock in the afternoon— from the gate entering into the Cloth Fair ; Lady Holland's Mob having proclaimed it at twelve o'clock the night before. The Civic Court at- tended also at the wrestling upon St. Bartholomew's Day, and at the Shooting on the 26th of August, From a contemporary book of "Wit and Drollery," I have already quoted the allusion to this march of the Lord Mayor. " The Order of my Lord Mayor, the Aldermen, and the Sheriffs, for their Meetings, and wearing of their Apparel throughout the whole year," printed in 1682, con- firms the record of the poet. Of Bartholomew Fair itself we quote from the same volume, ("Wit and Drollery; Jovial Poems," 1682 ; it is not contained in the first edition of that book, published in 1656) this little epitome: " Here's that will challenge all the Fair Come buy my nuts and damsons and Burgamy pears ! 2 24 Mevioirs of BarllioloviciK' Fair, chakxiv. Here's the woman of Babylon, the Devil and the Pope, And here's the little girl just going on the Rope ; Here's Dives a?id Lazarus and the World's Creation, Here's the Tall Dutch Woman, the like's not in the Nation. Here is the Booths where the High Dutch Maid is, Here are the Bears that dance like any Ladies ; Tat, tat, tat, tat, says little penny Trumpet ; Here's Jacob Hall, that does so jump it, jump it ; Sound Trumpet, sound, for silver Spoon and Fork, Come, here's your dainty Pig and Pork." Sir Robert SouthwelFs son, the Hon. Edward Southwell, being in London with his tutor, Mr. Webster, at Bartholo- mew Fair time in the year 1685, received this letter from his father written on the 26th of August, from Kingsweston. " Dear Neddy, " I think it not now so proper to quote you verses out of Persius, or to talk of Caesar and Euclide, as to consider the great theatre of Bartholomew Fair, where, I doubt not, but you often resort, and 'twere not amiss if you cou'd con- vert that tumult into a profitable book. You wou'd cer- tainly see the garboil there to more advantage if Mr. Webster and you wou'd read, or cou'd see acted, the play of Ben Jonson, call'd Bartholomew Fair: for then afterwards going to the spot you wou'd note, if things and humours were tne same to-day, as they were fifty years ago, and take pattern wf the observations which a man of sence may raise out of liiatters that seem even ridiculous. Take then with you the impressions of that play, and in addition thereunto, I should think it not amiss if you then got up into some high window, in order to survey the whole pit at once. I fancy then you will say — Totus nmJidus agit histrionem, and you wou'd note into how many various shapes humane nature throws itself, in order to buy cheap, and sell dear, for all is but traffick and commerce, some to give, some to take, and all is by exchange, to make the entertainment compleat. " The main importance of this fair is not so much for merchandize, and the supplying what people really want ; but as a sort of Bacchanalia, to gratify the multitude in their wandring and irregular thoughts." (Note this.) " Here you see the rope-dancers gett their living meerly by hazarding of their lives, and why men will pay money A.D. 1685. Revellers. 225 and take pleasure to see such dangers, is of separate and philosophical consideration. "You have others who are acting fools, drunkards, and madmen, but for the same wages which they might get by honest labour, and live with credit besides. " Others, if born in any monstrous shape, or have children that are such, here they celebrate their misery, and by get- ting of money forget how odious they are made. When you see the toy-shops, and the strange variety of things, much more impertinent than hobby-horses or gloves of ginger- bread, you must know there are customers for all these matters, and it would be a pleasing sight cou'd you see painted a true figure of all these impertinent minds and their fantastick passions, who come trudging hither, only for such things. 'Tis out of this credulous croud that the ballad o ... singers attrackt an assembly, who listen and admu'e, while their confederate pickpockets are diving and fishing for their prey. " 'Tis from those of this number who are more refin'd, that the mountebank obtains audience and credit, and it were a good bargain if such customers had nothing for their money but words, but they are best content to pay for druggs, and medecines, which commonly doe them hurt. " There is one corner of this Elizium field devoted to the eating of pig, and the surfeits that attend it. The fruits of the season are everywhere scatter'd about, and those who eat imprudently do but hasten to the physitian or the churchyard. " There are various corners of lewdness and impurity. . . . And how many robberies are beforehand committed on houses and high-ways to raise a stock against this licentious occasion ! Here it commonly ends in quarrels and bloodshed, so that either the chirurgeon is sent for to plaister up the wounds, or the constable to heal the peace, and truth breaking out among malefactors, I\Ir. Justice has sufficient grounds for his mittimus, and Captain Richardson favours them with house-room, and Mr. John Ketch conveys them at length to their long and deserved home. " So here, by the by, you may also observe, that some grave men who think they have nothing to doe with the fiiir, do yet find imployment by it. There is the judge, the 2 26 Memoirs of Barikoioniew Fair, chap.xiv. divine, the physitian, who all have work by the consequences of this unruly assembly. " I have formerly told you that I look'd upon human nature as a great volume, wherein every man, woman, and child, seem'd to be a distinct leaf, or page, or paragraph, that had something in it of diversity from all the rest, not but that many humours, natures, and inclinations, might fall under the sar.e chapter, or be rang'd under the same common head. Yet still there is such distinction of one from the other, as a discerning miind will find out. And, indeed, it never was otherwise, even in the whole mass of things, since the creation ; for two things, if they did not differ, would not be two, but the same. " I have told you also, how that in some leaves, and in- deed whole chapters of this volume, there is many times so little sense or matter for imitation, that those leaves are to be turned over very fast, and yet the variety and very deformity of shapes they contain, do all help to illustrate nature, and put you into admiration to see other leaves and chapters how they are replenished, and seem to be the epitome of all that was good and valuable in the rest." The careful man then adds much prudent counsel before he subscribes himself to his dear Neddy as " ever " Your most affectionate father, "Robert Southwell." The Captain Richardson mentioned towards the close of this extract was Keeper of the Old Bailey. A few days before Bartholomew Fair time, in the year 1687, " His Majesty being informed that divers persons continue to exercise Lotteries, and new invented Games resembling Lotteries within the Cities of London and West- minster, and other parts of this Kingdom, contrary to the express prohibition of His Majesties Letters Patents, Granted to the Indigent Officers, has been pleased to com- mand, that all Magistrates and others whom it does concern, do take effectual care to suppress all such Lotteries as are not duly Licensed by the Commissioners and Patentees for the said Indigent Officers, and particularly at Bartholomew Fair, and Publick Meetings." A.n. 1687-8S. Revellers. 227 That appeared in the London Gazette for the 15th of August, 1687. In the Gazette for August 23rd, 1688. " His Majesty having granted to Randolph Ashenhurst, Esq., Stephen Hales, Michael Cope, and Tho. Ashenhurst, Gentle- men, the sole Exercise of the Royal Oak," — a gambling game dedicated to the honour of King Charles the Second, — " Raffling and all other Lotteries, and games resembling Lotteries," prohibited the use of these games by any one who had not obtained a Licence from the Patentees. In the Theatre of Compliment (i688), are some verses on the Fair which end with a line illustrative of the check thus put upon Lotteries. Here is the Rarity of the whole Fair, Pimper-la-Pimp, and the Wife Dancing Mare ; Here's valiant St. George and the Dragon, a farce ; Here's Vienna Besieged, a most delicate thing ; And here's Punchinello, shown thrice to the King. Then see the masks to the Cloisters repair, — But there will be no raffling all this Fair. At the same time a squabble between Charles Killigrew, Esq., Master of the Revels, and Mr. Symms, Comptroller of the same, as to the right of giving licences, was oppor- tunely settled, when the Fair was just at hand, in favour of Mr. Killigrew. So there was to be no more mistake as to the person from whom showmen were to buy their title to exhibit. The most famous of the Merry Andrews of that day was William Phillips, of whom there are several engravings. It would be pleasant if we could identify this jester with the unknown William Phillips, by whom a tragedy was written. It was published in 1698, as "the Revengeful Queen." There is another Tragedy ascribed to him, called "Alca- menes and Menelippa." Even in his day, had this man been really the tragedian, he would not have been die first to live a clown's life with a tragic sense of life under his gaiety. The annexed picture (p. 228) represents him not as a Tragedian, but as a Merry Andrew. The illustration on p. 239 represents the same man as a "Bartholomew Fair Musician." Among the Harleian MSS. (5961), is the tide page only of " A new Fairing for the Merrilv Disposed : or the Comical Q 2 2 28 Mevwii's of Bartholoiueiu Fair, ch AP. XIV. History of the Famous Merry Andrew W. Phill. Giving an Account of his Pleasant Humours, Various Adven- tures, Clieats, FroHcks, and Cunning Designs, both in City and Country. London : Printed by J. WiUis, and sold by most Booksellers, 1688." i2mo. Among the Advertisements in the Gazette, for April i, 1689, we find a formal announcement bearing witness that Charles Killigrew, f.sq., remained Master of the Revels when the Stuarts had ceased to be Kings of England. " These are to give Notice, That all Stageplayers, Mounte- banks, Rope-Dancers, and others who show Motions and Strange Sights, do repair to Charles Killegrew, Esq., Master of the Revels, at his Office at Somerset House, to renew their Lycenses, their former being void. And that none do presume to make any public shews in Town or Country, without a new Licence from the said Master of the Revels." It may here also be added that among the advertisements Ad. 1688-90. Revellers. 22g which appeared during Fair time in the year 1690, is one of a pamphlet, now not to be found, entitled, " The City Revels, or, the Humours of Bartholomew Fair. By J. G. Gent. Sold by Randal Taylor near Stationers-Hall, and by most Booksellers. Price, Stitcht. 6//." In justice to the Mountebank this volume should contain a specimen of his art as an orator. There is a little undated book, published about the year 1690, entided, "The Harangues or Speeches of several Famous Mountebanks in Town and Country." The least extravagant and most 230 Memoirs of Bai^tholomew Fair. chap. xiv. affectedly candid of the speakers is Tom Jones, a part of whose address I quote : " Gentlemen and Ladies, "You that have a mind to preserve your own and your FaniiUes' Health, may here, at the expense of a Two- penny Piece, furnish yourselves with a Packet, which con- tains several things of great use, and wonderful operation in human bodies, against all Distempers whatsoever. " Gentlemen, Because I present myself among you, I would not have you to think I am an upstart, glisterpipe .... Apothecary. No, Gentlemen, I am no such person. I am a regular Physician ; and have travelled most king- doms in the world, purely to do my Country good. I am not a Person that takes delight, as a great many do, to fill your ears with hard words, in telling you the nature of Turpet Mineral, Mercuri Dulcis, Balsamum Capiviet, As- tringents, Laxations, Hardboundations, Circulations, Vibra- tions, Salivations, Excoriations, Scaldations. These Quacks may fitly be called Solimites, because they prescribe only one sort of physick for all Distempers, that is, a Vomit. "If a Man has bruised his Elbow; Take a Vomit, says the Doctor. If you have any Corns, Take a Vomit. If he has torn his Coat, Take a Vomit. For the Jaundice, Fevers, Flux, Gripes, Gout, nay even the distempers that only my Friend, the famous Doctor Tuff, whom you all know, knows as the Hocognicles, Marthambles, the Moon- Paul, and the Strong-Fives, A Vomit ; Tantum. Gentlemen, these Impostors value killing of a Man, no more, than I value drawing an old stump of a tooth, which has long troubled any of you ; so that I say, they are a pack of Tag- Rag, Assifoetida, Glister-pipe Doctors. " Now, Gentlemen, having given you a short account of this spurious race ; I shall present you with my Cordial Pills, iDeing the Tincture of the Sun, having Dominion from the same Light, giving Relief and Comfort to all Mankind. They cause all Complexions to Laugh or Smile, in the very taking them, they presently cure all Dizziness, Swimmings, Dulness in the Head, and Scurvy. "In the next place I recommend to }0u my incom- A. 11. l6;0. Revellers. o 1 t parable Balsam/' and so forth. Prefixed to the volume here citetl, is a picture of the Mountebank and his Znny on their Platform. When they have ended their appeal, the Jack-pudding will dance upon the tight-rope. ^;,i^ l£ t^/-C 2 2,2 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, chap.xv. CHAPTER XV. A NEW view of " the Humours of Teague/' which had amused a good-natured pubhc in the Fair not many years before, possessed the Enghsh People when the last of our Stuart kings, driven from England, was battling his cause on Irish ground, with foreign arms and a wild Irish help. A Bookseller who had issued Popish Plot Cards to amuse the public, now produced " Orange Cards, representing the late King's Reign, and Expedition of the Prince of Orange," some of which were to represent, "The Prince of Orange Landing, the Jesuits Scampering," &c., " curiously illus- trated and engraved in lively figures, done by the Per- formers of the first Popish Plot-Cards, and is the only true sort; if there be any others they are counterfeit." Such helps to the diversion of the patriot, advertised in Mercuriiis Rcfonuatiis, or the New Observator, at Bartholomew Fair time, in the year 1689, were enlarged by the appearance of a play published in the year following, to which reference is made by Lord Macaulay in his History. " This drama," he says in a note, " which, I believe was performed at Bartho- lomew Fair, is one of the most curious of a curious class of compositions, utterly destitute of literary merit, but valuable as showing what were then the most successful claptraps for an audience composed of the common people." It is from its character evidently a booth play, not professing to have been performed at either of the licensed playhouses, and was acted, probably, both at Bartholomew and South- wark Fairs. We have been dwelling at sonie length on another play of the same class which is more distinctly illustrative of the A.i). 1689-yo. After the Revolution. 233 story of the Fair, for the Wild Irishman never took a defined place, as the Pope did, among f>"'r Mountebanks aixi Zanies. It will suffice, therefore, .ow to describe shortly, the Tragi-comedy that tells how King William sailed for Ireland, and was further to tell in a Second Part, what he did after his arrival. Most probably it did, in some for- gotten continuation, really make doggerel of the Battle of the Boyne. The extant First Part is entitled, " the Jloijal llonaqc, or the Irish Expedition : a Tragicomedy, acted in the years 1689 and 90. Regis ad Exemplum. Claud. London ; Printed for Richard Baldwin^ in the Old Bailey^ A.D. 1690." The essential passages in the address " To the Reader," are these : " Know ye, first and foremost, that the Name of this following Play relates to another part yet to come, which will more signally fill the Title ; thougla this has enough of the Royal Voyage in it to moke that good and proper in this, as well as the other. The Conquest of Granada is only begun in the first part, nay, no more than the Siege on't, yet the propriety of the Title none ever ciuestioned to that part as well as the other. I'he next thing I'm to do you, to wit, is, that the end of this Play is chiefly to expose the Perfidious, Base, Cowardly, Bloody Nature of the Irish, both in this and all past ages, especially to give as lively a scheme as will consist with what's past, so far of the worse than Heathenish Barbarities committed by them on their Peaceable Neighbours, in that Bloody and Detestable Massacre and Rebellion of Forty-one, which will make the Nation stink as long as there's one Bog or Bog- trotter left in it." Though his way of writing allows great Liberty, the author says he has confined himself even to the " Chastness of an Historian, examining as the reader will find, all the material Objections those wicked people can make to our accusations." He apologises for having intro- duced into his play one Irishman " brave and honest (as far as his cause would let him be) to ibil the rest;" and adds, " if I have gone a little beyond the pale and left truth behind me, it is a pardonable fault, and the more easily, because perhaps it mayn't be so common to err on the side of good nature." The good-natured poet adds, that he cannot misrepresent the Irish when he speaks anything ill of them. 2 34 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xv. This is like the opinion of the rabble in " the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth," that the voice must be trustworthy which abused the Pope. The Dramatis Personse of the Royal Voyage are, " Tyr- connel, Primate, Archbishop of Cashel, Nugent, Neagle, Irish Lords, Hamilton, Macarty, Talbot, Butler, Clancarty, Macdonald, Irish Soldiers, Messengers, Officers, &c. " Governor of Inniskilling, Collonels, Souldiers, &c.. Governor of Derry, Collonels, Souldiers, &c., English Captains, with Relief to Derry, English General, Souldiers, Officers, &c." This peculiar list illustrates the author's professed Design to be particular in his enmity, but name no names upon the English side, lest he should be found too partial in his praise. The play deals with high matter ; the issue of the hap- piest of Revolutions, and the most determined struggle made by Ireland to throw oft" the yoke that bound it beside ■England. The greatest siege in British Civil history, the Siege of Londonderry, is meant to be told in one of its Acts. Its purpose was to present the news, together with the English feeling of the day, in flesh and blood. In the first Act it presents, at Dublin Castle, James's Lord Deputy, Tyrconnel, who by his oppression of the Protestants in Ireland, had, during the past three years, been embittering the feud between the Sister Islands. He is surrounded by the Irish chiefs, and glorying in his success. He has made Ireland a Refuge for the Church — But never shall we her fair spring restore, As pure and limped as it was before, Unless we hollow the polluted Flood, And purge out Heretick-Stains with Heretick's Blood. This thought warms the old veins of the Roman Arch- bishop of Cashel, who begins to gloat over memories of the massacre in 1641, when Sir Phelim O'Neil, producing a commission from King Charles the First, headed an out- break full of horrible acts of massacre and cruelty against the Protestant English settlers. Macarthy (Commander in Munster), who is the one good Irishman apologised for by the author in his preface, rebukes the Archbishop, and is A.D. 1689-90. After the Rcvoliitioi. 235 argued with by his Grace in Roman fashion — that to " keep no Faith with those that have none," is a proper doctrine, and one upon which King Louis, eldest son of the Church, has thriven famously. Macarthy's sense of mercy is ahiaost apostacy, and he is " ipso facto excommunicate " in the Archbishop's eye ; but in lyrconnel's mind he is too loyal and brave a subject of King James to be quarrelled with by those who wish success to James's cause. Wiih a hundred thousand men in arms, and only a handful of men in Ireland to withstand them, " Let's o'er to England " advises Nugent, " I'hat golden Land, where Palms and Laurels wait us, Delicious Murthers, and sweet Massacres : Hang, Drown, Stab, Burn, Broil, Eat, Damn our proud Conquerors." But an approving fellow-counsellor dilates upon the beauty of " fair words, good terms, sweet-honied proffers " to delude the English " kind-believing Fools," till Uerry and Inniskillen have been wrested from them. And a second Irish Lord enlarges upon the desire of a first Lord to stay in Ireland and beguile the English, for. The English sooner Cheated are, than Beaten ; We must expect a formidable Army Shortly in our Bowels ; though their Hands Are raising long, thoy generally foil heavy. At any rate they must get DeiTy and Inniskillen, and, if possible, avoid a famine in the land by keeping the Cattle from the Rapparees. The hot Primate curses this luke- warmness. Were not the gentlemen, now so moderate, tho.se who in council pressed to have the Prince proclaimed? Yes, it is answered, but the King had not then quitted England, and given up all that was there to Orange. Tyrconnel interrupts the discussion with intelligence of the reception given to King James in France, and of the strong succours thence expected. But first the Nortliern Rebels let's subdue, At Derry and at Inniskilling too ; The First your lot {to Hamilton), the Second falls to you [to Macarthy). Hamilton, who had been trusted on a mission by King William, and on reaching Ireland had revolted from his 236 .^femoirs of Bai^i/iolojnezu Fair. chap. xv. trust, receives this charge with boasts, aUuding lightly to his word, his " few loose vows, perhaps an oath or two, and airy honour pawned." Later in the play there is an allu- sion to the suicide of John Temple, who had commended Hamilton to confidence, and afterwards took fatally to heart the issue of his counsel. Macarthy, who is sent to Innis- killen, says that he cannot promise much, for he leads raw and wild troops against an enemy both desperate and firm, but he will do his best. Tyrconnel knows he will, and bids him take the best troops while he writes fair offers to the rebels. After this discussion, examf omnes, and " Enter an Irish Rabble, i\Ien, \\'omen, and Children ; the Men with Swords and Clubs, the Women with Skenes, the Children with wooden Swords and. Knives." Very expressive, truly, of a rising of the entire population. " A Piper before 'em (as was their usual Custom) with a Prey of Black and Small Cattle, which they had robbed the English of" The Speakers are Nos. i, 2, 3, 4, 5, of the Rabble. " ist o' th' Rabble. Rare times, by Saint Patrick; the best that Ireland ever saw, by my Soul joy ; why, who would be at the Trouble to raise and breed Cattle of their own, when the Heretick dogs can do 't to our hands without any pain. " 2. — Right, Neighbour Teague ; and, besides, they are all our Tenants, not we theirs; for I heard Father Domi- nick, our Priest, make a Swear, that this was all our country, Five Thousand Years before the New Moon was made, and the Engli.sh Thieves never came hither to rob us of our own till the next year after the Flood was over." With much more talk of the same texture ; displaying the thievishness of Irish Priests, and incidents of cruelty in the present rising that promptly suggest an exchange of frightful recol- lections from the (3'Neil Massacre of 1641. Then, ''that k.bberly breed of Black Cattle here," being English pro- perty, " we'll find some way or other to torment, as well as get rid of 'em, and they'll have little cause to complain, that are used as well as their Masters." " Let's serve 'em as we did the Fellow I told you of Tie 'em to a stake, and cut off pieces of their flesh alive." So A.ij. i68y-9o. After the Revolittion. 237 it is done. The play was really acted, and one wonders greatly whether the savage spirit of the rabble of the Fair was satisfied with a literal massacre of an ox at each repre- sentation of the " Tragicomedy," according to the stage direction. " They sing an Irish Song, Dancing round a fat English Ox, tied to a Stake ;. and as soon as that was over, fall altogether upon it, cutdng out pieces of it alive, and broiling them upon the coals. In the meanwhile, a small party of English surprise and fall upon 'em \ on which, all the Rabble set up the Irish yell, and run away without striking a stroke." The Englishmen having in bad verse exchanged reflec- tions upon Irish courage, depart to -cut their way to the relief of the garrison at Derry. From this diversion, we are taken back to Tyrconnel and his friends in Dublin Castle, and hear from them how they have by Neagle's advice, got rid of their Protestant ally Mountjoy, by sending him with Chief Baron Rice, on a mission to King James, in Paris, where he is safely lodged in the Bastille. But at this time, James is expected from Brest daily, and on his arrival, in the Archbishop's opinion — " his single Xame wou'd do, Without an army, and inspire new courage If any wanted it — 'twas he alone. Who through the last false, dangerous Trimming Reign, Screen'd off the fury of the Rebels from us ; Got that proud Heretick, imperious Ormond, Oftener than once removed. 'Twas he who found The Treacherous Esse.x, who buoy'd up the English And their decaying Interests against us — He found him out at last, spite of his Policy, And did reward him in due time and place. But when kind Fate, — or of her own accord. Or jogged by some Officious Catholick Hand — Broke Charles his Linsy-Woolsey Line of Life, When our bright Star ascended his Meridian And shot his Beams from London to our Isle, What Loyal Face was seen without a smile? Scarce will our joy or juster be or more. When with his Royal Feet he treads our shore." A Courier arrives, who has seen the pompous entertain- ment of the Royal Exile, by Great Lewis and his Court, and who left a squadron at Brest full of money and men, ready for sailing. The Roman Primate takes this occasion to 238 Memoirs of BartJiolomeiu Fair. chap, xv, suggest that tlie approaching opportunity of following the good counsel ivJIl xlll — must not be lost. Another Courier brings word that the King has landed at Kinsale. Tyrconnel gives orders for rejoicings, but the people have already made their bonfires of the houses of the English. This gratifies the Primate. The Courier delivers a copy of a speech made to King James by the Recorder of Kilkenny — a burlesque flourish of course — and the Act ends with present expectation of the King in Dublin, and the equally strong and immediate expectation of a post from the North, telling the fate of those two stubborn towns, Derry and Inniskillen. The first Act, then, tells clumsily, but with evident regard to the sequence of events, what happened in Ireland to the time of the landing of James at Kinsale. The second Act tells in the same temper the story of the defence of Innis- killen, and the third Act is designed to be a summary pre- sentment of the siege of Londonderry. The fourth Act tells of Schomberg's landing in Bangor Bay, of his march through the pass of Newry, of his encampment in Dundalk, facing a powerful enemy at Drogheda ; of the treason in his camp ; the pestilence ; the retirement to Newry. The fifth Act, which is very short indeed, displays the desperate state of Schomberg's troops by reason of the sickness ; the courage of the starving English ; the cowardice (of course) of the Irish; and the arrival of King William at Carrickfergus, just when he was most wanted. In the last scene is dis- played " the Royal Fleet at the Bay of Bangor. The Mary Yacht with the Standard. All the shore enlightened with Bonfires." A booth continually acting plays of this descrip- tion, would, in fact, be a dramatic news-room, giving the news always in combination with a starved and angry sort of leading article fuddled with verse. The literary rank of the Royal Voyage is no higher than that of other booth plays, and it is duller than most others of its class, because it amuses us by fewer flights into the sublime of absurdity. But it is creditably distinguished by the fact that it is from beginning to end decent. The comic scenes, essential to a booth play, usually depended for their fun upon the gratification of a love of dirt ingrained A.D. 1689 -yo. After the RevohitioJi. 239 in the mind of the rabble ; upon Ursula- talk for the pig- woman and her large army of adherents. Now the author of the Royal Voyage was a man who could not descend into this fouler region of claptrap, and who, although he was an author Littlewit, was at the same time an English gentleman. In the midst of the strong current of bitter feeling upon which he was borne, together with his countrymen, he not only foils the bad Irish with an Irishman who is the noblest person in his play, but he also, in the midst of wrath, remembers to make one of his captains warn the English soldiers, who are rudely triumphing over a successful shot: — " Never insult over an enemy Conquer'd or slain, — if either, that's enough, The rest is base. 'Tis true o're you they wou'd, But even there o'recome 'em as in battle." It is good to feel that this was a safe claptrap, a sentiment sure in any age to win applause even from the fiercest mob in England. For his fun the author of this Tragi-Comedy mainly depends on a display of the bad soldiering and cowardice of the Irish. He begins his Second — or Inniskillen — Act, by showing Macarthy in despair about his men, putting them through their exercises. When he cries, " Face to the Kight ! " they "all fall into confusion, some facing oneway, some t'other." They are re-arranged by an officer, and blunder on till at the words, "To the left about!" they throw down arms and run away. Macarthy orders a fresh party in ; " The officer draws out others. Gives the words. They do all well enough 'till he bids 'em Fire — one half never does it at all, the other, one after another, and most of them wink, and shoot just in one another's faces, — at which, concluding themselves killed, one part drops down and t'other runs away." Macarthy and the officers abuse their men, and can hope nothing for their expedition. Macshane, O'Donnel, Teague, and other soldiers re-appear, discussing their performances at drill. " By my shoul now,'" says one, " if poor Teague saw the like in my life. Why my gossip tied a red ribbon about my left hand that I might be sure to know it from my right — and the ugly dog-rogue of an English Serjeant bid me turn to the right, and put me 240 Memoirs of Bar tholo7new Fair. chap. xv. quite out." Presently they brag, fence in the air, club muskets to show how they would brain the English ; when the sally of a few English from their fort suddenly puts not only these men, but all Macarthy's troops to rout and con- sternation. INIacarthy reviles his paste-board army ; worse than an army wove in musty arras, for that will at least stand to be cut in pieces. He resolves at once to prove his fate b}' an attack on Enniskillen, but the garrison comes out : when there is a grand battle fought upon the stage, of which the end is that of the Irish " some throv/ themselves into the bog, and are knockt on the head there ; others ask Quarter, and throw down their arms," &c. Macarthy dashes in gallant despair among the enemy, discharges his pistol at a party of Enniskillen men, who fire at him. He falls ; • a soldier clubs his musket to knock out his brains. Irish officers exclaim, " Macarthy ! " and with words of respect he is taken prisoner while swooning with his wounds. The sally, the rout, and the capture of Macarthy are historical events. In the I'hird — or Londonderry — Act, there is but one scene meant to be comic, and that surely a grim one. The Governor first appears with his colonels and captains, to unfold in talk the boldness that closed Derry against the troops of James, the sending for help to England, the strength of the army under Hamilton, the peril of the crisis for the town. If we succeed, History will record Our actions louder than Ostend or Troy. In Hamilton's camp, Maumont (called Mamow), and Pusignan are introduced, impatient of resistance. Mamow. Ecgar me vili batter 'em down with i, 2, 3, Potgun. Vat de Diable do they mean ? Do they not know My great Maistre send his Lieutenant-General Mamow To puU down all de Walls, and burn, kill, kill, De Man, Woman and shucking Shild dat fight vid his Brother of England ? The cruelty of the French troops is historical, so is the battering of the town next related, the sally partly shown upon the stage, then changed to a " fight behind the scenes" A.D. 1689-90. HA'-'' ^fi^ Revolution. 241 to be described fully, together with the incident of Mau- mont's death by a Captain who brings tidings to the Governor in Derry. The victorious troops enter and receive praise, after which we immediately return to the Irish camp, losing sight of all days between the first and second great encounter incidental to the siege, one happening in April, and the other happening in June. The new attack is planned, which, with the incident of the fall of Mountgarrat, is presently described by the Governor, who is supposed to be witnessing it from the town walls. Troops enter with important prisoners, who are received courteously. It is designed that they shall enter into a discussion of political affairs with their captors and represent weakly their side of the moral to the argument that battle is determining. The didactic scene might not be borne at once by a booth audi- ence ; the spectators, therefore, are prepared for it, by the relief of this interpolation : — Scene VI. %\t %m\ Camp. Enter an Irish Funeral, of one of their Commanders kill'd in the last Action. Tapers, Crones, Dirges, Two fat Friars singitig—and praying for his Soul. SONG BY THE PRIESTS. Rest thy Soul in Bliss, dear Friend ! Now beginning, n'ere to end : At Purgatory be not scar'd. Its Flame shall never singe thy Beard. Mount torights to Heav'n, nor stay To call at the Half-way-house by th' way. On thy Soul, while here below, If some little spots did grow : Murder, Perjury, or Rape, Or some such other small Escajie : By thy meritorious Fall Thou hast o're atton'd 'em all. 3- Innocent as Child unborn On the golden wings of morn Mount to bliss, and pray for those Struggling with their faithless Foes : Aid thy Friends who thee adoru As thou other Saints before. 242 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xv. {They put him into the Grave, and the Irish kneel down by him. tear their Hair, throw up tlie Dirt, and lament his Death with insufferable Howlitigs, as their manner is, singing this song over his grave.] IRISH SONG. Ah Brother Teagiie ! Why didst thou go ? Whillilla I ilia I ilia lilla lilla lilla loo I And leave thy Friends in grief and wo, Aboo aboo aboo aboo aboo aboo a boo / Hadst thou not store of Household-stuft", Whillilla, 6^6-. Potatas and Usquebagh enough ? Aboo, crv. Three Sheep, one Gassoon, and a Cow, Whillilla, &fc. A Garden, Cabin, and a Plough ? Aboo, S^c. Hadst thou not Bonny-ctabbar store? Whillilla, &=•€. If not enough, weed giv'n thee more. Aboo, 6-v. Why wouldst thou, 'league ! Ah tell ine why, ' Whillilla, &=€. Thus play the Fool and maake a dy ? Aboo, Sr'e. Why cHdst thou toucli the fatal Shore, Whillilla. S^e. Where we shall never see thee more ? Aboo aboo aboo aboo aboo aboo aboo .^ [ While they are in the midst of their Harmony comes a Shot from the Town, and kills the ttoo Fryars and several others, — all the rest start up and ruii azuay. Immediately we are upon Derry walls, hearing the soldier jejoice that he has spoiled their howling, which was more insufferable than their cannon ; but when another soldier laughs at the slaying of the priests, he is admonished by his Captain, in the manner before said, not to insult over a fallen enemy. The prisoners and captors then come out and hold their argument, in which the noticeable fact is, that the best view of the case treats Ireland only as a con- quered dependent of the English crown. The prisoners tell of the boom across the Lough, and in the next scene the A.D. 16S9-90. After the Rcvohction. 243 Governor and his Colonels, from Derry walls, see and describe to the audience the forcinGr of the boom. The Act ends with the entry of the relieving Captains, and the news that — Schombergh speedily is liere designed With twenty thousand men to march for Dublin And end the war. This prepares the Spectator for the Fourth Act, which describes the sufferings of Schomberg's army, and contains no comic scene. Its last scene is, " Dundalk as before. Mosi of the Soldiers sick, many dead, the rest pining." It ends with the order to march back to Newry — there to quarter till Recruits and better Seasons call for Action. The last Act is of four short scenes, and but three pages. The first scene is with the Irish at Dundalk, simply to ex- plain that they mean to force the Newry Pass. The second scene is this. Scene II. — The Nczory. A Party of Irish -Officers, Soldiers, dfc. Offic. March quick and close — They take not yet th' Alarm. The Town 's already ours^The Prisoner whom We lately took, informs there 's scarce a hundred Yet left alive, and those half sick and languishing ; The rest or careless are or desperate, Nor dream of that warm visit we shall make 'em. [T/ie Gentry discovers 'cm, and fires three times, retiring. Officer. Discovered . . But too late for their prevention ; In — and we're Conquerors — [ Tliey enter tfic Toivn — Several Officers co?ne out in their shirts, and arc knockt o'tli head. A Drummer beats an .■Harm, and a few of tlic English gather in the Streets. Eng. Ofiic. Ha — are you come so far to hinder us From dying now in quiet — Fellow Souldiers, You see 'em --Rally here behind this Cart, And give one Charge — if they march not back At their accustomed pace — I'll c'ne nm for 'em. \^The English charge — The Irish run. \Enter several English Soldiers crawling upon their Hands and Feet with their Musqucts in their Hands. OFFtci.K. Poor Wretches— What d'ye mean — You'r fitter for Your Beds or th' Hospital, than War and Action. K 2 244 Menwirs of Bartholonieiv Fai7\ chap. xv. 1 SouLD. Noble Captain — Let me have but shot at 'em And then I'll dy contented. 2 SoULD. Now we're their Matches, 'twere not fair to fight 'em, If strong and well as they. {They both get up to a Bank, fire their Pieces at the Irish and fall dead themselves. After their officer ha.s praised them, exeunt omnes, and we are at Belfast : " Heaven smiles again," and English supplies come daily — as a General relates in a speech of ten lines, forming the -whole scene. Then appears the Royal Fleet, and the Mary yacht with the Standard, the Bonfires enlighten all the shore. A messenger brings to the General, good tidir.gs from Carrickfergus, at which cries the General — ' ' Let all the Bogs in Ireland quake for fear. Their Fate is come — The Pageant King must run ; And once agen fly from the conscious Sun. And in some Monastery hide his Head Midst lonely Tombs, and the polluted Dead. While that bright Hero who supplies his place, Sways his strong Scepter with so great a Grace : In trembling France shall give new wonders Birth, And rend the withered Lilies from the Earth." The Curtain falls ; not upon this play only, but upon all free dramatic politics in Smithfield. After the Revolution, there came Governments that would not tolerate the criti- cism of the showman. That public entertainer fell back, therefore, upon Susanna and the Elders, or the Siege of Troy ; or he advanced to a new form of Miracle-play, in which Magicians took the place of .'^aints, and the Devil held his ground in company with Punchinellos, comic Serving-men, and country Shallows. A.I). .. I TOO.. Monsters. 245 CHAPTER XVI. Blonstcrs. os* We must never lose sight of the fact, that Bartholomew Fair throve while it was a true element in London life ; and although, even at the time of which we are now speaking, the Corporation of London had already raised the question ot its suppression, it stood firm yet for another century, because it was a true thing still. In this chapter I speak only of its Monsters : with a book before me, once owned by Sir Hans Sloane, into which, I think, it was Sir Hans himself who pasted Handbills about some of the natural Prodigies which interested London from the days of Charles the Second to those of Queen Anne. The greater number of them belong to the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne ; the latest is one issued directly after the death of '' his late Majesty," King George the First. They commonly profess to describe things exhibited by his or her " Majesties' Authority" — like the quack medi- cines of our own day — because a fee had been paid to Government by every showman for his licence. But they had other " Majesties' Authority." The Kings and Queens of Europe in the years before and after 1700, shared in the taste of all classes, for men who could dance without legs, dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, or scaly boys. The taste still lingers among uncultivated people in the highest and the lowest ranks of life, but in the reigns of Wil- liam and Mary, or Queen Anne, it was almost universal. Bartholomew Fair, with all the prodigies exhibited therein, was not as it now would be, an annual display of things hardly to be seen out of a fair, but was, as far as Monsters went, only a yearly concentration into one spot of enter- 246 JMcnioirs of Bai'tholomew Fair, chap.xvi. tainments that at other times were scattered over town and country. The very mountebanks took lodgings in the streets, and issued their addresses upon paper. Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the wonders of the outlying world began to pour in rapidly upon the Eng- lish people, a thirst for marvels, and a credulity, in the be- ginning very natural, had tempted the exhibitor to seek for Monsters from abroad. This Shakespeare even goes out of his Avay to satirise, when he makes Trinculo say, while first pondering over Caliban, " Were I in England now (as once I was), and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a ])iece of silver: there would this monster make a man ; any strange beast there makes a man ; when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." To the nation destined for a world-wide rule, the mysteries of distant regions of the world were then first opening. An eager, all- embracing curiosity, however absurd in many of its forms, was then as suitable as all the wonder through which a child comes to its first acquaintance with the life outside the nursery. What was begun in reason was continued in frivolity. For the tone of society in England was degraded by the Court of Charles the Second ; soon afterwards there came a strange stagnation over nearly the whole mind of Europe, and for reasons into which we must not here in- quire, the disposition of the rich in England continued to be throughout nearly the whole eighteenth century indolent and trifling. The taste for Monsters became a disease ; of which the nation has in our own day recovered with a wonderful rapidity in presence of events that force on the development of all its powers. Bartholomew Fair is gone, and there are few English boys who now would care to see the giant, under whose arm it pleased Charles the Second to walk. Handbills are not usually dated, but there is one issued in Southwark Fair, containing the year 1684, when this young giant's age was said to be nineteen. That will settle the date of the following announcement. " MiRACULA Naturae; " Or, A Miracle of Nature. A.D. ...I7CX)... Monsters. 247 " Being that much-admired Gyant-like Young Man, Aged Twenty Three Years last June; Born in Ireland, of such a Prodigious Height and Bigness, and every way proportion- able, that the lils:e hath not been seen in England in the memory of Man. He was shown to His Late and Present Majesty, and Several of the Nobility at Court, Five Years ago ; and his Late Majesty was pleased to walk under his Arm, and he is grown very much since. And it is generally thought, that if he lives Three Years more, and Grows as he has done, he will be much bigger than any of those Gyants we read of in Story : For he now reaches with his Hand three Yards and a-half ; Spans Fifteen Inches : And is the Admiration of all that sees him. He is to be seen at Cow-Lane-End in Bartholomew Fair, "ViVAT Rex." w/ief-e his Picture Jiangs out. But such wonders, human or bestial, were not to be seen in the Fair only. The Clever Mare, admired by Mr. Pepys, had her own lodgings in town, out of Fair time, and received company all the year round. Jacob Hall set up his rope- dancing booth, when there was no Fair, in Lincoln' s-Inn- Fields, or at Charing Cross. In the poem of the Long Vacation, contained in the first edition (1656) of "Wit and Drollery, Jovial Poems, by Sir F. M., Ja. S., Sir W. D., F. D.," &c., it is not a migration of the Fair people, but of the regular town showmen that is thus described. Vaulter good, and dancing lass On Rope : and man that cries hey tone ; And tumbler young that needs but stoop Lay head to heel, and creep thro' hoop ; And man that doth in chest include Old Sodom and Gomorra lew d. And shew that while the puppets play, Though none expoundeth what they say : And Ape led captive still in chain Till he renounce the Pope and Spain, And white oat Eater that doth dwell In stable small, at sign of Bell, That lifts up hoof to shew the pranks Taught by Magician styled Banks. 248 Memoirs of Bartholomeio Fair, chap.xvi. Men were agape constantly for marvels. In the time of Cromwell's Protectorate, there had been a particular Relation sent from Sluys, in the Low Countries, touching a monster there lately born, a Double child, with one of its faces so misshapen, that the eyes stood where the mouth should be, both together, opening without eyelids, but above had hairy eyebrows. It had no nose, and seemed to have a mouth under the chin instead of over it, with other yet more wonderful peculiarities. In 1674, a pamphlet edified the Londoners with an account of " the Northumberland Monster/" born to Jane Paterson of Dodington. A crea- ture, having the Head, Mane, and Feet, of a Horse, with the rest like a man, which, immediately after birth, was scalded to death by advice of the Schoolmaster of the Town. There was published in 1682, as a broad-sheet, news from an Eminent Merchant in Ostend, of two girls joined together by the Crowns of their Heads. " The one often sleeps, while the other is awake, cries, and eats ; and they are oftentimes both awake, and both eating : I have seen them," ■"says the Eminent Merchant, " both asleep and both awake, and one asleep and the other awake. The Heads are so united together that when that which is awake turns itself, the Neck of the other turns also : they will never be able to go, sit, or stand ; for if the one should sit, or stand upright, the other must stand on her Head with the Heels upward. Their Face, Nose, and Eyes are not directly opposite to one another, but somewhat sideways, so as that one looks toward you, and the other from you. Many People come daily to see them, and give 3 Stivers a-piece." Then there was, in the reign of William and Mary, to be seen every day (during his stay in Town), at the Blue Boar's Head, in Fleet Street, Prince Giolo, son to the King of Moangis or Gilolo, with a particular geographical address, including the Longitude of his own Island Kingdom. This unfortunate Prince was shipwrecked on the coast of Mindanao, when on a voyage with his young sister and his mother Nacatara. The sister was seized in marriage. He and his mother were sold, and embarked for Europe, but he only lived to reach England, and became famous as the ^[Jaintrt ^[Jl'inff, the A.D. ...1700... Monsters. 249 just wonder of the Age. " In him the whole Mystery of Painting or Staining upon Human Bodies seem to be com- prised in one stately piece. The fore part of him shown in engravings are not half his charm. The more admirable Back-parts afford us a lively Representation of one quarter part of the World, upon and betwixt his Shoulders, where the Arctic and Tropic Circles centre in the North Pole on his Neck," and so forth ; romantic particulars are added in the hand-bill, and it is stated that " if any Persons oi Quality, Gentlemen, or Ladies, do desire to see this noble Person, at their own Houses, or any other convenient place, in or about this City of London ; they are desired to send timely notice, and he will be ready to wait upon them in a Coach or Chair, any time they please to appoint, if in the day time." There was also to be seen, at the King's Head near the Maypole in the Strand, a Man about Twenty-one years of Age, with one Head and two Bodies, the Miracle of the whole world. With him went " the Monster's Brother, who came out of the Great Emperor of Mogul's Country, from Surat ; and are both here since baptized in the Christian Faith, and become Christians. They had the honour to be .shewn before their Majesties and all the Nobility at Court." In 1699 there was born a child, afterwards exhibited at the Sign of Charing Cross, at Charing Cross, with but one Body and two Heads. Notice was also given to '' Admirers of Curiosities," that at the Charing Cross Coffee House, in the Corner of Spring Gardens, there was " arrived from France a Man Six-and- Forty Years old, One Foot Nine Inches high, yet fathoms Six Foot Five Inches with his Arms. He walks naturally upon his Hands, raising his Body One Foot Four Inches off the Ground : Jumps upon a Table near Three Foot high with one Hand, and leaps off without making use of any thing but his Hands, or letting his Body touch the ground. He shews some Part of Military Exercise on his Hands, as well as if he stood upon his Legs. He will go to any gentleman's house if required." In June 1698, there was shewn at Moncreff's Coffee House in Threadncedle Street, " for sixpence a-piece, a 250 Memoirs of Bartholornew Fair, chap.xvi. Monster that lately died there, being Humane upwards, and Bruit downwards, wonderful to behold. And a very fine Civet-Cat, spotted like a Leopard, and is now alive, that was lately brought from Africa with it. They are exposed to View, from Eight in the Morning, to Eight at Night." At about the same time there was newly come to the lower end of Brookfield Market, near the Market-House, " a little Scotch Man, which has been admired by all that have yet seen him, he being but two Foot and six Inches high ; and is near upon 60 Years of Age. He was marry'd several years, and had Issue by his Wife, two sons (one of which is with him now). He Sings, and Dances with his son ; and has had the Honour to be shewn before several Persons of Note at their Houses, as far as they have yet Travelled. He formerly kept a Writing-school \ and discourses of the Scriptures, and of many Eminent Histories, very wisely • and gives great satisfaction to all spectators ; and if need requires, there are several Persons in this Town, that will justifie, that they were his Schollars, and see him Marry'd." This Scotchman also exhibited at the King's Head in Smithfield. There was exhibited by David Cornwell, a man who drew stumps for ten shillings and teeth for five, at the Ram's Head in Fenchurch Street, the " Bold Grimace Spaniard." who " liv'd 15 years among wild creatures in the Mountains, and is reasonably suppos'd to have been taken out of his cradle, an Infant, by some savage Beast, and wonderfully preserved, 'till some Comedians accidentally pass'd through those parts, and perceiving him to be of human Race, pur- sued him to his Cave, where they caught him in a Net, They found something wonderful in his Nature, and took him with 'em in their Travels through Spain and Italy. He performs the following surprising Grimaces, viz. : He lolls out his Tongue a foot long, turns his Eyes in and out at the same time ; contracts his Face as small as an Apple ; ex- tends his Mouth six Inches, and turns it into the shape of a Bird's Beak, and his eyes like to an Owl's ; turns his mouth into the Form of a Hat cock'd up three ways ; and also frames it in the manner of a four-square Buckle ; licks his Nose with his Tongue, like a Cow ; rolls one Eyebrow two Inches up, the other two down ; changes his face to such A.D. . 1 700 . . . Monsters. 2 5 i an astonishing Degree, as to appear like a Corpse long bury'd. Altho' bred wild so long, yet by travelling with the aforesaid Comedians 18 years, he can sing wonderfully fine, and accompanies his Voice with a thorow Bass on the Lute. His former natural Estrangement from human Conversation oblig'd Mr. Cornwell to bring a Jackanapes over with him for his Companion, in whom he takes great Delight and Satisfaction." In Bridges Street in Covent Garden, over against the Rose Tavern, was to be seen " a Living Fairy, suppos'd to be a Hundred-and-Fifty years old, his face being no bigger than a child's of a Month : was found Sixty Years ago ; Look'd as old then as he does now. His Head being a great piece of Curiosity, having no Scull, with several Imper- fections worthy your Observation." At the sign of the Golden Lion, near the May-pole in the Strand, was a man-child having in his right eye the words Deus Mens, and the same written in Hebrew in his left eye. At Young Man's Cofiee House, Charing Cross, was a Little Man, Fifty Years of Age, Two Feet Nine Inches high, and the Father of Eight Children, who " when he sleeps, puts his Head between his two Feet, to rest on by way of a Pillow, and his great Toes one in each Ear." A shew of the Fairs was a " Mail Child born with a Bear growing on his Back alive.'' There was an Hermaphrodite at the King's Head, over against the Mevs^s' Gate, Charing Cross ; there were giants and giantesses from all parts of the country ; there was the little German woman, " Dwarf of the World," who, in Jul}', 1700, was at the Brandy Shop over against the Eagle and Child in Stocks Market, and was " carried in a little box to any Gentleman's House, if desir'd." There was a High German woman without hands or feet, who could sew, thread needles, spin fine thread, and fire pistols, to be seen "together with the merry Humours of Jenny and Robin, which is very pleasant and Divertive." There was an Eighth Wonder of the World, born without arms, combing his head and shaving his chin with his feet, taking off his hat with his toes to salute the visitors, and with his feet using a knife and fork and filling a glass from a bottle, 252 Memoirs oj Bartholomeiv Fair, chap.xvi. threading needles, writing six fair hands, and so forth. There was a boy covered with hedge-hog bristles, and another boy covered below the neck with fish-scales. This last-named Monster, before it came to England, was exhibited at Naples in the year 1681. " A collection of strange and wonderful creatures from most parts of the world, all alive," was to be seen in Queen Anne's time, over against the Mews' Gate at Charing Cross, " By her Majesty's Permission." " The first being a little Black Man., being but 3 foot high, and 32 years of age, straight and proportionable every way, who is distinguished by the Name of the Black Prince, and has been shewn before most Kings and Princes in Christen- dom. The next being his wife, the Little JVoman, Not 3 foot high, and 30 years of Age, straight and proportionable as any woman in the Land, which is commonly called the Fairy Queen, she gives a general satisfaction to all that sees her, by Diverting them with Dancing, being big with child. Likewise their little Tiirkey-Borse, being but 2 foot odd inches high, and above 1 2 years of Age, that shews several diverting and surprising Actions, at the Word of Command. The least Man, Woman, and Horse that ever was seen in the World A-live. The Horse being kept in a box. The next being a strange Monstrous Female Creature that was taken in the woods in the Deserts of ^Ethiopia in Prester John's Country, in the remotest parts of Africa .... The next is the noble Picary, which is very much admir'd by the Learned. The next being the noble Jack call, the Lion's Provider, which hunts in the Forest for the Lion's Prey. Likewise a small Egyptian Panther, spotted like a Leopard. The next being a strange, monstrous creature, brought from the Coast of Brazil, having a Head like a Child, Legs and Arms very wonderful, with a Long Tail like a Serpent, wherewith he Feeds himself, as an Elephant doth with his Trunk. With several other Rarities too tedious to mention in this Bill. — And as no such Collection was ever shewn in this Place before, we hope they will give you content and satisfaction, assuring you, that they are the greatest Rarities that ever was shewn alive in this Kingdom, and are to be seen from 9 a Clock in the Morning, till 10 at Night, where true Attend- A. D. , . . 1 700 . . . Monsters. 253 ance shall be given during our stay in this Place, which will be very short. Long live the Queen." Such were not rarities of Jiartholomew Fair to tempt away, once in a twelvemonth, the pence from the pockets of the crowd ; but they were entertainments scattered about the town, visited by gentlemen and ladies, noblemen and Royal Princes, sent for to private mansions for the curiosity of the luxurious, and not disdained even by the Saturnine George the First. In the first years of George the Second, Mathew Buchinger, twenty-nine inches high, born without Hands, Feet, or Thighs, played on the Hautboy, and on the Strange Flute, in concert with the Bag-pipe, Dulcimer and Trumpet ; wrote and drew with a pen ; played cards and dice ; performed tricks with cups and balls ; and, says the handbill that com- mends him to attention, "his playing at Skittles is most admirable. All these being done without Hands, makes all that see him, say, he is the only Artist in the World. His performing such Wonders, has gained him the Honour of shewing before Three successive Emperors of Germany ; and, most of the Kings and Princes in Europe, in particular, several times before his late Majesty, King George. He likewise dances a Hornpipe in a Highland Dress, as well as any man, — without Legs." Even William the Third shared the prevailing taste for marvels. There is a broadsheet in praise of Mr. William Joyce the Kentish Man, shewing how "on Wednesday last, being the 15th of this Instant November 1699, there was English SAMPSON his Strength Prov'd before the K I N Ct. This man's " frequent and repeated (tho' un- parallel'd) performances in and about the City of London and parts adjacent, gain'd so much fame and applause in most parts of England, that his Majesty King William had a desire to see him perform something Extraordinary, and accordingly on Wednesday last, he was introduced before His Majesty at Kensington." He then lifted to a con- siderable height a solid piece of lead weighing a Ton and fourteen pounds and a half, "to die admiration of His Majesty and His Nobles, who were eyewitnesses thereof."' A rope being tied about his middle, he was 2 54 Me7noirs of Bart Jwloniew Fair. chap. xvi. tugged at by "an extraordinary strong horse," which was whipped to exertion, but did not succeed in moving him. Afterwards, having fastened the rope to two posts, one being of extraordinary magnitude, he twitched the rope to pieces as if it were packthread, then put his arms about the posts and broke them down. " At which strange perform- ance His Majesty was mightily well Pleas'd, (and it is said) has orded him a considerable Gratuity, besides an hon- narable entertainment for both he and his acquaintance." On the previous day Mr. Joyce had, at Hampstead, in the presence of some hundreds, pulled up by the roots a tree of a yard and a half in circumference, " modestly computed to Weigh near 2000 weight." Bodily strength is a respectable monstrosity, fit enough to be set before a king ; but the general illustrations here given of the taste of the whole town, abundantly prove that, for some time subsequent to the accession of William and Mary, the Monsters in the Booths of Bartholomew Fair were not, as such things now are in country fairs, there in mere ob- servance of a peculiar traditional usage, but were the true and vigorous expression of a taste then predominating in all classes of society. From the actual handbills I now copy some of the announcements of exhibitors at Bartholomew Fair, from the date of the Revolution to the death of (jeorge the First : " In Bartholomew Fair. " At the Corner of Hosier Lane, and near Mr. Parker's Booth ; Tlicre is to be seen A Prodigious Monster, lately brought over by Sir Tliomas GrantJiam, from the great Mogul's Countrey, being a Man with one Head and two distinct Bodies, both Masculine ; there is also with him his I>rother, who is a Priest of the Mahometan Religion. " Price Sixpence, and One SJiitling tJie best PtacesT "The tall Blact.^, called the Indian King, who was betrayed on Board of an Fnglish Interloper, and Barbarously abused on Board of that Ship, by one Waters and his Men, and put in Irons ; from thence carried to famaica, and sold \.D. ...1700.. Monsters. 255 there for a slave, and now Redeem'd by a Merchant in London ; the Hke hath not been seen in Einj^laud. Now to be seen at the Goldcn-Lyon, near the Hospital-Gate, in Smit/ijield, in his Indian Garb, for 2d." " A Changlini^ Child. " To be seen next door to the Black Raven, in West Sniillijicld, during the lime of the Fair, being a Uving Skeleton, taken by a Venetian Galley, from a Turkish Vessel in the Archipelago. This is a Fairy Child, supposed to be born of Hungarian Parents, but chang'd in the Nursing, Aged Nine Years and more ; not exceeding a Foot and a- half high. The Legs, Thighs, and Arms so very small, that they scarce exceed the bigness of a Man's Thumb, and the face no bigger than the Palm of one's hand ; and seems so grave and solid, as if it were Threescore Years old. You may see the whole Anatomy of its Body by setting it against the Sun. It never speaks. It has no Teeth, but is the most voracious and hungry Creature in the World, devouring more Victuals than the stoutest Man in England. " Vivant Rex et Regina." " Next door to the Golden Hart in West-Sniithfield, be- tween the Hospital-Gate and Rye- Corner, during the time of Bartholomew Fair, is to be seen the Admirable Work of Nature, a Woman having Three Breasts ; and each of them affording Milk at one time, or differently, according as they are made use of There is likewise to be seen the Daughter of the same Woman, which hath Breasts of the like Nature, according to her Age ; and there never hath been any extant of such sort, which is Wonderful to all that ever did, or shall behold them." " This is to give notice to all Gentlemen and Ladies, " That there is to bee seen a Child alive about a year and a half old that has three I^eggs ; Two off one side, and off 256 Me^noirs of Bartholoniew Fair. chap. xvi. one equal length. It hath also sixteen too's : six growing on one foot with two. The strangest work of nature that was ever seen," That announcement is copied from a contemporary transcript. We may take with it a fragmentary account of a monster born the 28th of March, 1706, with "one Body, Two Heads, four Armes and Hands, four Legs and Feet with Toes and Fingers, having Nails upon them very per- fect ; but that which is most remarkable and Amazing, is this, that it was Born with Teeth in each Mouth, which are plain and Visible to all Spectators." There was also shewn at the Fair in Queen Anne's time, next door to the Greyhound, a child with water on the brain described as " but Thirty weeks old, with a prodigious big Head, being above a yard about, and hath been shewn to several Persons of Quality." In the advertisement next quoted, there is a singular illustration of the taste of the town for monsters in Queen Anne's day. " By Her Majesties Authority, " At the Hart's-Horn Inn in Pye-Corner, during the time of Bartholomew Fair, will be seen those strange rarities following, viz. : — A Little Farey Woman, lately come from Italy, being but Two Foot Two Inches high, the shortest that ever was seen in England, and no ways Deform'd, as the other two Women are, that are carried about the Streets in Boxes from House to House, for some years past, this being Thirteen Inches shorter than either of them. If any person has a desire to see her at their own Houses, we 'are ready to wait upon them any Hour of the Day. " Likewise a little Marmazet from Bengal, that dances the Cheshire Rounds, and exercises at the word of command. Also a strange Cock from Hamborough, having Three proper Legs, Two Fundaments, and makes use of them both at one time. " Vivat Regina." A bill issued from Three King Court, Fleet Street, in the reign of Ceorge the First, invites the public to the " Won- derful lall Essex Woman, that had the Honour to shew A . n. . . . 1 700 . . Monsters. 257 herself before their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Prin- cess of Wales, and the Rest of the Royal Family, last Bar- tJwlotnew Fair, with great applause." So that the Fair even then had royal visitors. A Woman with two heads one above the other, also two Mandrakes, and a surprising Thunderbolt had been to the palace, and there " shewn to the King, and all the Royal Family." " By His Majesty's PcTmission, " Next Door to the King Head, in Smithfield, during the time of Bartholomew Fair. '* For the Satisfaction of all curious enquirers into the Secrets of Nature, is to be seen a Woman Dwarf, but Three Foot and one Inch high, born in So)nniersetshire, and in the Fortieth Year of her Age, who discourses excellently well, and gives great Satisfaction to all that ever saw her. " 1^" Note, there is neither Loss of time, or any other inconveniency in viewing this Mistery of Nature. "ViVAT Rex." We may as well pair the dwarf woman with a giant man. '"'■In Smithfield, dureing the time of Bartholomew-Fair; betcveai Hosear-Lane and the Swan-Tavern, at the Saddler's- shop. " Is to be Seen a Tall English-man, Eight Foot Higli, but Seventeen years of Age. He was never shewn before. " He is to be seen any Hour of the Day (at the Place above mentioned), from 8 in the Morning till 8 at Night." The poor tradesman resident in Smithfield seems to have turned many a penny by the letting of lodgings to a Monster during Fair-time. There were exhibiting lodgers also in the numerous Inns called into existence by the weekly market held in Smithfield, and rejoicing annually in the Fair. The resort to the Inns being great, an innkeeper probably would set a high price on his exhibition-room, although a popular sight on the premises must have attracted custom to his house. Either for the sake of economy, or because all the Inns were occupied by other showmen, keepers of giants and other curiosities, not having booths of their own, and of a 258 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xvi. a sort with which the market was becoming over-stocked, transacted business in rooms behind and over shops. But that the Inns were regarded as the more eHgible shew-places, is manifest from the preference given among shops to those that happened to be next door to an Inn. " Next door to the Black Raven:" "Next door to the Golden Hart;" " Next door to the Sign of the Greyhound ; " " Next door to the King Head;" "Over against the Rose Tavern;" were situations evidently chosen with an eye to business. CHAPTER XVII. 2lt llje beginning of l^c (iSigbkeitt^ (iTtnturji. Dolls, now so dear to all young daughters of England were not known by that name before the reign of \ViUiam and Mary. They were called sometimes " poppets " but more usually "babies." Bartholomew Babies have been often mentioned in these pages ; and the references to them formerly made by men who were not otherwise alluding to the Fair, show that they were in unusual repute. Fewer dolls certainly were nursed ; and of these the Bartholomew Babies, elegantly dressed and carefully packed in boxes, seem to have been regarded as the best. In Nabbes' Comedy of "Tottenham Court" (1638) this phrase occurs, " I have packed her up in't, like a Bartholomew Baby in a box. I warrant you for hurting her." Poor Robin's Alma- nack for 1695, says, " It also tells farmers what manner of wife they shall choose : not one trickt up with ribbens and knots like a Bartholomew baby, for such an one will prove a holyday wife, all play and no work." The only lexicographer I find who indicates the modern origin of the word " doll,'"' is Richardson. In his Dictionary- it is observed, that " Dryden translates Tupse in Persius, ' Baby-Toys ; ' " and, in a note, says, that " those Baby-Toys were little Babies, or Poppets, as we call them." But even Richardson guesses the derivation of the word to be from the Dutch dol, senseless ; others derive it— wonderful are some of the thoughts contained in dictionaries— from idol. Nevertheless, Richardson quotes, as an old word of endear- ment, " pretty little Doll-pol ;" which is, but in brief, Doro- thy Mary. Because to the fair sex belong pretty faces and gay dresses, and doubtless also for other reasons known to 3 2 26o Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fail' cY^Kv.yMw. the toy-maker, dolls, with a few ridiculous exceptions, have, at all times, been feminine. Bartholomew babies were illus- trious ; but their name, as the licence of the Fair increased, was of equivocal suggestion. Therefore, when some popular toyman, who might have called his babies pretty Sues, or Molls, or Polls, cried diligently to the ladies who sought fairings for their children, " Buy a pretty Doll " (it was at a time too, when the toy babies were coming more and more into demand), the conquest of a clumsiness was recognised. Mothers applied for Dolls to the men at the stalls, and, ere long, by all the stalls and toy-booths the new cry of " Pretty Doll " was taken up. We have good reason to be tolerably certain that Bartholomew Fair gave its familiar name to a plaything now cherished in every English nursery. A provincial toyman could not have enforced the change; and there was no tradesman in London who could dif- fuse, as private dealer, a new name for the toy in which Bartholomew Fair dealt most especially, and dealt also among throngs. The Fair still represented, in its booths and in its crowds, some part of the political feeling of the nation. In 1693, Admiral Killegrew and Sir Ralph Delaval, chiefs of the British squadron that was to protect the Smyrna merchant fleet against the force of the French navy bent on intercept- ing it, returned to England, leaving Rooke with twenty men- of-war to speed on to a mercantile disaster in the bay of Lagos. In the December following, Killegrew and Delaval were struck out of the Commission of the Admiralty, but in September they had run the gauntlet of the Fair. The showmen, in a play made for the occasion, represented them as flying to the shelter of the Tower, from the guns of a {t\N French privateers. The Jack-Pudding played chorus, and commented to large applauding audiences, not only on the affairs of the Admiralty, but also on other departments of the State, with so much freedom, that his prosperous career was stayed at last by a strong body of constables, who carried the players off to prison. This incident Lord Macaulay relates on the MS. authority of one of the letters sent by the French refugee, L' Hermitage, to the States- General. There will arise presently another occasion for A.D. i695 Beginning of iZth Century. 261 observing how much less tolerant of the free speech of the Fair upon politics, was the government of William of Orange than, in times more perilous, was that of the high-minded English Statesmen of the Commonwealth. The Fair still was attracting fashionable company. In the Londo7i Gazette of Sept. 9, 1695, we read that there was " Taken from a Gentleman's side on Friday [Sept. 6], at 7 at night, in Bartholomew Fair, a small French rapier, the hilt steel inlaid with gold ; the handle silver, double gilt, the upper part of the blade next the stile being 'graved. Who- ever returns it to the owner, Mr. Champney, at Mr. Secretary Trumbull's Office, Whitehall, shall have \os. more than what any goldsmith or sword-cutler will give for it." But, in spite of visitors with silver and gold rapiers, the strong feeling of the Corporation of London was still setting steadily against the evil that was in the Fair. In 1691, and again in 1694, a reduction to the old term of Three Days was ordered, as a check, to vice, and in order that the plea- sures of the Fair might not choke up the avenues of traffic. In 1697 the Lord Mayor, on Bartholomew's Day, published an ordinance recorded in the Postman, "for the suppression of vicious practices in Bartholomew Fair, as obscene, lasci- vious, and scandalous plays, comedies, and farces, unlawful games and interludes, drunkenness, &c., strictly charging all constables and other officers to use their utmost diligence in prosecuting the same." But there was no suppression of the puppet theatres. Jephtha's Rash Vow was performed in that year at Blake's Booth, as in the year following at Blake and Pinkethman's. Again, on the i8th of June, 1700, stage-plays and interludes a't the Fair were for that year prohibited. They were again prohibited by the Mayor who ruled in the year 1702. But the showmen appeared to be too strong for the citizens, as they were, of course, too strong for the Serjeant Trumi)eter, and other patented tax-claimers, who are met with from time to time in plaintive advertisements, urging their claims on a rebellious tribe. \\\ the Postman for the 26th of March, 1698, the Trumpeter mentioned the twelve- pence a day due to him from every one who blew without a licence, and reminded those " wishing to be easy and dis 262 Memoirs of BartJiolomew Fair. ruAr. xvn. charged from paying him," that they might have their licences (as heretofore) for twenty shilhngs a year. In the year 1698, a Frenchman, Monsieur Sorbiere, visiting London, says, " I was at Bartholomew Fair. It consists of most Toy shops, also Fiance and Pictures, Ribbon shops, no Books ; many shops of Confectioners, where any woman may commodiously be treated. Knavery is here in perfection, dextrous Cut-purses and Pickpockets. I went to see the Dancing on the Ropes, which was admir- able. Coming out, I met a man that would have took off my Hat, but I secur'd it, and was going to draw my Sword, crying out, ' Begar ! Damn'd Rogue ! Morbleu,' &c., when on a sudden I had a hundred People about me, crying, 'Here, Monsieur, See yephthalis Rash Vow;' 'Here, Monsieur, see The Tall Dtitchtvoinan ;' ' See The Tiger ^ says another \ ' See The Horse and No Horse whose Tail stands where his head should do;' See the German Artist., Mon- sieur;' 'See The Siege of JVamur, 'M.o\-i?,\e\\x :'' so that be- twixt Rudeness and Civility, I was forc'd to get into a Fiacre, and with an air of haste and a full trot, got home to my lodgings." Bartholomew Fair was at this period farmed by the City, for a hundred a year, to its Sword-bearer ; and the City profits of the Fair formed part of the endowment of the Mayoralty. In the previous year (1697), there had been printed a proposal to allow the Lord Mayor 4000/. a year for the maintenance of his office, instead of a series of enumerated perquisites, among which one item is " Bartholo- mew Fair — 100/." 'J'he following announcements represent some of the busi- ness of the Fair, in the last year of the seventeenth century. The first is a copy of a bill then posted in Smithfield and its neighbourhood : " Advertisement of a Great Raftling, which is to be in the Cloysters this Bartholomew Fair, 1699. "There being a quantity of curious fillagreen work, set with divers stones, the very best that ever was seen in Eng- land, formerly made in a nunnery and presented to a Lady of Quality lately deceased, which cost above 300/. the making, besides the silver, is now set at but 200 guineas, A. 1). 1699. Beoinniiio- of I'^th Century. 263 there being Ten pieces in number, which is proposed to be raffled for, and that there be two hundred guineas paid into the receiver's hands, who will give the bearer a billet which will entitle him to" as many raffles as he had paid guineas. And if not raffled for, then the guineas to be returned. Billets may be had of Mr. Pinfold, in Lombard Street ; Mr. Harrison and Mr. Ludds, in Cheapside ; Capt. Jenkins, in Essex Street ; Mr. Clark, in the Strand ; Mr. Willcock's, in the Minories (Goldsmith's) ; Mr. White, at the King's Arms in the Hospital (where the goods may be seen)." The gambling spirit was then strong in England, bubble companies were arising, and the advertisement just cited is remarkable in two resj^ects. It is a lottery scheme in the name of a rafiie, put forward in the very next year after a statute had declared lotteries to be public nuisances. It also takes for granted that there is visiting the Fair a public, among whom two hundred tickets may be disposed of at a guinea each. The great Cloister — now gone — in which this raffle was to take place, was the part of the Fair in which lotteries usually were held, also the part in which lures were set for the licentious fops. The rent of standings in the Cloister, formed a portion of the revenue of the Hospital. The Postman for the 17th of August 1699, announces, that " at Mr. Barnes's and Mr. Appleby's Booth, between the Crown Tavern and the Hospital Gate, over against the Cross Daggers, next to Miller's Droll Booth, in West Smithfield, where the English and Dutch Flaggs, with Barnes's and the Two German Maidens' pictures will hang out, during the time of Bartholomev/ Fair, will be seen the most excellent and incomparable performances in Dancing on the Slack Rope, walking on the Slack Rope, Vaulting and Tumbling on the Stage, by these live, the most famous Companies in the Universe, viz., The English, Irish, High German, French, and Morocco, now united. " Th-e Two German Maidens, who exceeded all mankind in their performances, are within this twelvemonth improved to a Miracle." Two years afterwards, according to an advertisement in the Postboy, it was " Her Majesty's Company of Rope Dancers, at Mr. Barnes and Finley's Booth." The two 264 Mauoirs of Bartholomciv Fair. chap. xvn. young maiden rope dancers had "lately arrived from France," and there was specification that " the Famous Mr. Barnes, of whose performances this kingdom is so sensible. Dances with 2 Children at his Feet, and with Boots and Spurs. " Mrs. Finley, distinguished by the Name of Lady Mary for her incomparable Dancing, has much improv'd herself since the last Fair. You will likewise be entertained with such variety of Tumbling by Mr. Finley and his Company, as was never seen in the Fair before. " Note, that for the conveniency of the Gentry, there is a back door in Smithfield Rounds." The Lady Mary here mentioned, is supposed to be the person who especially suggested a remark made by Steele in the Spectator, that the humour of stripping on the stage in- troduced into playhouses, came from Bartholomew Fair. An announcement in the London Post of Monday, Aug. 21 (i 701), informs us that "The Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen " (coming in aid of Government), "have thought fit to suppress the extravagant gaming usual in St. Bartholo- mew's Cloisters during the Fair, to prevent quarrelling." As we pass into another century, again we take a ramble round the scene. In the year 1699, Edward Ward gave in his London Spy (Parts 9 and 10), a detailed sketch of Bartholomew Fair, from which I bring together all points that are noteworthy. The London Spy went to the playhouse in Drury Lane, and there found that many of the players, " all the wiser part of the family of Tom Fools had translated themselves to Bartholo- mew 'Fair," tempted by " the fifteen or twenty shillings a day there to be earned." The Spy then went also to the Fair, but in a coach to escape the dirt and the crowd, and at the entrance was " saluted with Belphegor's concert, the rumbling of Drums, mix'd with the intolerable squeaking of cat-calls and penny trumpets, made still more terrible with the shrill belches of Lottery pickpockets, thro' Instruments of the same Metal with their Faces." The Spy having been set down with his friend at the Hospital Gate, went into a convenient house to smoke a pipe and drink small beer bittered with colo- cynth. From one of its windows he looked down on a A. 1). 1699. Dcgimiing of i^th Cenhiry. 265 crowd rushing, ancle-deep in filth, through an air tainted by fumes of tobacco and of singeing overroasted pork, to see the Merry Andrew. On their galleries strutted, in their buf- foonery of stateliness, the quality of the Fair, dressed in . tinsel robes and golden leather buskins. " When they had taken a turn the length of their Gallery, to shew the Gaping Crowd how Majestically they could tread, each ascended to a seat agreeable to the Dignity of their Dress, to shew the Multitude how Imperiously they could Sit." Then entered the Merry Andrew, whost first jest was " a singular Instance of his Cleanliness, by blowing his Nose upon the People, who were mightily pleas'd, and Laugh'd heartily at the Jest." Then having picked out a member of the Company to talk with, he began "a Tale of a Tub, illustrated with abundance of ugly Faces and mimical Actions ; for in that lay the chief of the Comedy, with which the Gazers seem'd most to be affected." The Spy's friend suggested that " ever since the Andrew was whipp'd for singeing his Pig with Exchequer Notes, and roasting him with Tallies, it has made St. Bartho- lomew Jesters afraid of being witty, for fear of disobliging the Government." The Epilogue of Merry Andrew's Farce was, " Walk in. Gentlemen, and take your Places, whilst you may have 'em; the Candles are all lighted, and we are just agoing to begin ! " " Then screwing his Body into an ill- favoured Posture, agreeable to his Intellects, he struts along before the glittering tram of Imaginary Heroes, leading them to play the Fool inside." Bartholomew Fair, as we have already observed, still sat in judgment on the business of the nation. When, a year or two before the London Spy put his notes upon record, the Merry Andrew singed and roasted his pig with Ex- chequer Notes and Tallies, the country, helped by Paterson, Locke, and Newton, was endeavouring to solve a hard financial problem. Loans were not easily to be obtained by a Revolutionary Government, of which the stability was not assured to foreigners, and the first beginning of the Bank of England had just been made (1694) by the incorporation of certain natural-born English subjects, among w^hom a loan had been raised for the public service. The coinage had been clipped so seriously, that a great recoinage, at a loss of 2 66 Memoirs of Bartholomezv Fair. chap. xvn. more than two millions, took place in 1696; during which, the two-year old Bank was compelled for a time to suspend the payment of its notes. While the Government was struggling with this great financial embarrassment, and Lord Halifiix was endeavouring to direct it in the way of a sound monetary system, either in that year 1696, or the year fol- lowing, there was a Merry Andrew in the Fair, whose jesting, when it tended to create a popular impression that might make the trouble greater, was thought worthy of resentment. For the credit of the authorities we must suppose that their wrath was spent not on an obscure and starveling mummer, but that Phillips, the great Merry Andrew of the day, of whom all talked and to whom all crowded, was the man they whipped. Assuredly it is the same man, one of whose jests Prior, at the same period, transformed into a poem, and, we might almost say, passed into a proverb. The jest of which Ward speaks, and the issue of it, seem to have been the natural forerunners of that to which Prior was a witness, in one of the years (possibly 1697), when at Bartholomew Fair stage plays had been interdicted : ' ' Sly Merry Andrew, the last Southwark Fair (At Barthot meiv he did not much appear : So peevish was the Edict of the May'r) At Southwark, therefore, as his Tricks he show'd, To please our Masters and his Friends, the Crowd ; A liuge Neat's-Tongue He in his Right Hand held ; His Left was with a good Black- Pudding fiU'd. " Thus furnished, he walked gravely up and down, and was brought, in the usual way, into conversation with one of the Company, who declared that his joke seemed a stupid one. In his reply, he said — " That busy fool I was, which Thou art now ; Desirous to Correct, not knowing how ; With very good Design, but little wit. Blaming or Praising Things, as I thought fit. I for this conduct had what I deserv'd ; And dealing honestly was almost starv'd." But he has learnt the secret to be great, and, on solicitation, tells it to his brother Droll : " Be of your Patron's Mind, whate'er He says ; Sleep very much ; Think little ; and Talk less : Mind neither Good nor Bad, nor Right nor Wrong ; But Eat your Padding, Slave ; and Hold your Tongue." M). i6gg. BcginniiiQ; of \Zth Century. 267 Thereupon, of course, holding the Tongue tight, he begins to eat the Pudding lie has brought upon the stage with him. Wilham Phillips must have been the planner of a jest like that. The Poet, with full licence of his art, points it at one whom we should certainly not have expected to find in the crowd at Southwark Fair : " A Rev'rend Prelate stopt his Coach and Six, To laugh a little at our Andrew's Tiicks. But when He heard him give this Golden Rule ; ' Drive on, (he cried,) This Fellow is no Fool.' " If Phillips was, indeed, the subject of the whipping and the actor of the jest crystallized by Prior into couplets, it is not difficult to believe that this prince of the Merry Andrews may have been the man who, at the same period, and under the same name, by which no other man has been identified, is known as the writer of two tragedies, a comedy, and the Bartholomew Fair farce Briton Strike Home. If he be really their author, the plays probably were all written for a booth to which he was attached, since it was in the dramatic companies that Merry Andrews served. ^Ve return now to the society of the Spy, who, finding that the outsides of the Droll Booths were all garnished in this manner, and that there was no more to be seen from his window, came with his friend out of doors again. Buttoning their pockets they launched themselves, he says, into the tempest of the crowd, and were soon off their feet, hurried along in the stream of the rabble. At the Rope-Dancers' Booth, they felt the ground for the first time, and there they remained to watch the tumblers, among whom were women who stood on their heads. They paid their sixpences and entered. First a little child crept about on the rope, with a pole " not much bigger than a large tobacco stopper." Then came two stout lasses, who began by dancing on the rope in trousers, but "doffed their petticoats after a gentle breathing," and began to caper with more energy. These were followed by a negro woman and an Irishwoman — this being the booth of Barnes and Appleby. Then followed a man of authority, who with great airs required sundry adjustments of the rope ; out of Fair time, this was an " Infallible Physician." The person that danced against him was the German Maid, who 2 68 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xvh. as much out-danced the rest as a Greyhound will out-run a hedgehog. After the rope-dancing, followed tumbling, which the Spy preferred. Out in the crowd again ; besieged with the shrill cry of "Nuts and Damsons!" and again into a booth, to see a dwarf Comedy or Droll, called "the Devil of a Wife." Here there were ten men to one woman in the company, and they diverted themselves by eating pears and cracking filberts, while the music scraped. The curtain rose on a short play, in which there was every actor looking, notwith- standing his dress, like what he really was, and not like what he represented \ " that.I fancy'd," says the Spy, " while they were playing, I heard some of 'em crying Flag-Brooitis, some Knives to Grind, and others Chimney-Sweep ; whilst their I^adies were making up the Concert with Buy my Cuciunbers to Pickle; and Heres your rare Holland Socks, four Pair for a Shilling^ Needing refreshment, the Spy and his friend having left this booth, resolved to eat a quarter of a Pig, on purpose to be Fools in Fashion ; and with a great deal of elbow-labour, scrambled through the throng that came pouring into the Fair from all adjacent streets. By inch and inch they gained " Pye-Corner, where Cooks stood dripping at their doors, like their Roasted Swines' Flesh at their Fires ; with painful Industry, each setting forth with an Audible Voice the Choice and Excellency of his Pig and Pork." Some pigs hung upon tenters in the shop-windows, as big as large spaniels, and half-baked by the sunbeams. The visitors entered a large shop, where they had great expectancy of tolerable meat and cleanly usage ; " but had no sooner entered the suffocating kitchen, but a swingeing fat Fellow, who was appointed over-seer of the Roast, to keep the Pigs from blistering, was standing by the Spit in his Shirt, Rub- bing of his Ears, Breast, Neck, and Armpits with the same Wet-cloth which he applied to his Pigs." That sight drove the visitors quickly out again, " through an Army of Flies, encamped at the door, in order to attack the Pig-Sauce." The Spy's next visit was to a show in which was to be seen Doggett, the famous comedian, " who had manfully run the hazard of losing that reputation in the Fair which A.D. i699- Beginning of \%th Centitry, 269 he'd got in the Play house.''' The play was about Friar Bacon, and included in its attractions a Royal Court, Con- juration by Friar Bacon, the Devil, a cheating Miller, and his idiotic son Ralph (that being the part there represented to perfection by the great comedian from I )rury Lane), also a foolish country justice, a Flying Shoulder of Mutton, Dancing and Singing of Devils. It lasted three quarters of an hour, ending with a procession of the whole pomp of the persons of the drama, and with the announcement that it Avould be repeated in half an hour. While waiting for it to begin, the audience cracked nuts, and there were handed round baskets of plums, walnuts, pears, and peaches. Of the peaches of the Fair there is at this period of its life not unfrequent mention. They seem to have attempted a vain contest for fame with its juicy pigs. Opposite the Hospital Gate, this Fair time, was a comical figure between two life-like children in waxwork ; the figure drummed, opened and shut its mouth, and rolled its eyes. That was the invitation to a waxwork show, known as " the Temple of Diana." A young woman described the figures, and the Spy bestows high praise on the illusion. The next visit was paid to a Music Booth. The Music Booths were chiefly to be found in a cluster on the North- west side of the Fair ; two or three scaramouches, with for- bidding faces and inviting voices being at the door of each. As they passed the curtain into one of them and approached the Bar, a weather-beaten woman in white rang a bell, and the attendants, some in masks,- — for here there was much masquerading, — came forward to welcome the new comers arid bad them to the further end of their Fools' Paradise, where they were placed upon "the Hoistings" exempt from the insult of low liquor and low charges. Kettle-drums, trumpets, and fiddles were there clanging and scraping. There followed upon the drums a ballad in two parts by seven voices, a " fine new Playhouse song, by the best com- poser." Then followed the Hautboys, "undoubtedly," observes the critic, " the best wind-pipes in the world, ill- played upon, to scare a man out of his wits; and I dare swear would raise the Father of all Discord, much sooner than ever Fryar Bacon or Cornelius Agrippa could." The 2 yo Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xvh. public thus having had its ears boxed into deafness, there next followed " a Dance in imitation of a Foot-Fad's Fobbei^y; and he that acted the Thief, I protest, did it so much like a Rogue, that had he not often committed the same thing in Earnest, I am very apt to believe he could never have made such a Jest on't ; Firing the Pistol, Stripping his Victim, and Searching his Pockets, with so much Natural Humour, seeming Satisfaction and Dexterity, that he shew'd himself an absolute Master of what he pretended to." A fat woman then bounced about in a dance, with glasses full of liquor on the backs of her hands. Then a young damsel begged a number of swords from gentlemen in the room, and per- formed feats of apparent peril with them in a nimble sword- dance. The rest of the entertainment was too obviously impudent and intolerably dull to be mentioned even by the Spy. The Company was of all ranks of men and many ostensible varieties of women, but whatever their outward differences, few were sober, and all seemed at home in what Edward Ward, who was no " puritanical Alderman," denounced as " the Scandalous Nurseries of all Vice, Vanity, and Villany." This seems to be the advertisement of the Music Booth above described : " Thomas Dale, Drawer at the Crown Tavern at Algate, keepeth the Turk's Head Mustek Booth, in Smithfield Rounds, over against the Greyhouud-lww during the Time oi Bart/io/o/neia Fair, Where is a Glass of good Wine, Mum, Syder, Beer, Ale, and all other Sorts of Liquors, to be Sold; and where you will likewise be entertained with good Musick, Singing, and Dancing. You will see a Scaramouch Dance, the Italian Punch's Dance, the Quarter Staff, the Antick, the Countryman and Countrywoman's Dance, and the Merry Cuckolds of Hogsden. "Also, a Young-Man that dances an Entry, Salabrand, and Jigg, and a Woman that dances with Six Naked Rapiers, that we Challenge the whole Fair to do the like. There is likewise a Young-Woman that Dances with Fourteen Glasses on the Backs and Palms of her Hands, and turns round with A.n. i699- Beghinino- of \Zth CoitiLry. 271 them above an Hundred Times, as fast as a Windmill turns ; and another Young Man that Dances a Jigg incomparably well, to the Admiration of all Spectators. " Vivat Rex." In further illustration of the entertainment at the Music Booths, reference may be made also to the hand-bill of James Miles from Sadler' s\\'t\\<^ at Islington; who kept the Gun Musick Booth in Bartholomew Fair, and specified nineteen of the dances performed at his establishment. Among them were, a Dance between Three Bullies and Three Quakers ; the Wonder of her Sex, a Young Woman who dances with the Swords and upon the Ladder with that Variety, that she challenges all her Sex to do the like ; a Cripples' Dance by Six Persons with Wooden Legs and Crutches in Imitation of a Jovial Crew ; and a New Enter- tainment between a Scaramouch, a Harlequin, and a Punchi- nello, in imitation of Bilking a Reckoning. By this time, the Spy having left the music booth, goes on to tell us that it was almost dark, and he and his friend took a turn on the outside of the Fair among the Whirligigs or Flying Coaches. They passed two puppet-shows, outside which there were monkeys imitating men, and men mimick- ing monkeys. So they again came to the Hospital Gate, and entering that came into the Cloisters, which they described as a Bedlam for lovers. In the raffling shops the sharpers who attended, led a fashion of presenting winnings to the next woman who might stand near, althoutjh a perfect stranger; and in this way the winners were enticed to return what they would otherwise have carried off, to the female accomplices of the proprietor. The last event in this visit to the Fair was a creep from the Cloister '' up a pair of Stairs as narrow and as steep as the Stone Steps of a Belfry, over which was written in Golden Capitals, in two or three places. The Groom Porter's ; design'd, as I suppose, for Fools to understand it was the Honester Place for his Name being there, and that they might as fairly fling away their Money here as in any place in Christendom." Those stairs led to a gambling den, containing a room in which clerks and footmen could risk sixpences, and a room in which 2/2 ]\Ienioirs of Bartholomeiv Fair. chap. xvh. "money was tossed about as if a useless commodity, and several parts of the Prodigal Son were being acted to a miracle." •Surely there is in this picture of the Fair much justifica- tion of the efforts made for its restriction. The great Fair near Cambridge, Stourbridge Fair, was in the days of which we are now speaking a place of large commerce ; but at the Fair in the Metropolis, the element of sober trade was choked by its excessive development as a great pleasure fair. The 'massive crowds of people that by the growth of London had been placed ready to throng in upon Smith- field, by their compact mass almost closed the avenues of traffic in its neighbourhood. The cloth trade in Bartho- lomew Fair died naturally; but the other trades that perished from it, died by suffocation. In the year 1701, Bartholomew Fair was presented as a nuisance ("next only to that of the play-houses") by the Grand Jury of London ; and of the nature of the nuisance in the first year of the new century of life into which it had passed, we have record, less elaborate, indeed, than that for the last year of the century departed, but even more em- phatic. Four pages quarto printed for R. Hine near the Royal Exchange, 1701, are entitled A Walk to Smithfield, or a True Description of the HUMOURS OF BARTHO- LOMEW FAIR, with the very comical Intrigues and Frolics that are acted in every particular Booth in the Fair, by persons of all ages and sexes, from the Court Gallant to the Country Clown. " With the Old Droll-players' Lamentation for the loss of their Yearly Revenues : being very Pleasing and Diverting." (Seven or eight lines of pointless verse.) The writer says, in more words than we need repeat, that he went on the first day of the Fair, to visit Saint Bartho- lomew in Smithfield Rounds, to support there the yearly customs of debauchery ; that he found a crowd as thick as at a Covent Garden Conventicle or Quakers' Meeting- house ; that the Bartholomew babes of Grace were most attentive to Jack-Pudding doctrine ; but that he was himself somewhat surfeited at the old threadbare arguments of A.D. I70I. Bcf^iniiiiii:; of \%th Century. 273 Merry Andrews and the other Fools without the booths, and had an itching fancy to see the asses of both sexes within the wooden tents of Iniquity. He found it difficult to stir from booth to booth, three yards in half-an-hour's time ; and for a man who would have us think that he scorns the booths as iniquitous, the pamphleteer in the crowd proceeds to forget decency to a remarkable extent. Having at last squeezed his way to Pye-Corner, he was informed that our English Sampson was performing there, and having paid his money at the door, was admitted to a seat three stories high, when presently the Man of Kent appeared, " equipped like one of the London Champions on the Artillery Ground, at the mock-storming of a Castle." We have already, in com- pany, in company with King William the Third, seen a performance by this Sampson. The next booth was the puppet-show oi Jcphthah' s Rash Voiu : or f/ie Virgin Sacrifice. The explorer paid two pence and entered. While Jephthah made his vow, the author of the pamphlet boasts that he was indulging himself with more than a little nastiness, and a gold watch and diamond ring were stolen. If the be- haviour of the audience at a puppet-show at all resembled the sketch here given, there was no company at the Virgin Sacrifice fit for an honest woman to sit down among. Obliged to follow our foul guide, because he gives us a few points of information, we next enter the booth that con- tained "Pinkeman's Medley." Having seen the Vaulting of the Horse, and part of the Ladder Dance, our guide began to give his whole sympathy and attention to whatever was disgusting in the conduct of the audience. Then he sought " the Dutchwoman's booth," and " with some difti- culty made a hard shift to get in where Danish, Dutch, German, and Bohemian Frows made such a chattering in commendation of one another's dexterity, in derision of Mr. Barnes and other English heroes, that I fancied myself in the French camp in Flanders. However, considering the Wheelbarrow dance by a little girl of ten years of age, and other strange performances, nothing but miracles could equal them." As he came out of that booth, a bill was thrust into his hand, with a picture of a man and woman fighting for the breeches, but the play was called T/ie Dei'il T 2 74 Memoirs of BartJioloniew Fair. chap. xvn. and Dr. Faustus. Content with the Dutch rope-dancers sent him to the English performers taking the same line, and in Barnes's booth he found " Lady Mar>' as far out- doing the Dutch Frovvs as a lady of honour exceeds- a milkmaid in dancing a borrie or minuet." I leave out of account the filth with which every fact given in this narra- tive is strongly seasoned. The author looked to the Music booths, "but considering that Reformation of Manners had suppressed them all but one (they were prohibited by an order of the Sixth of August, in the previous year), I declined going thither lest I should be thought a debauched person ; therefore, to complete all but the Cloister Walls, I designed to end my police in the booth called The Creation of the World." There is no more information to be gleaned from the pamphlet, but several playbills of the puppet-show of The Creation of the World are extant, curious reminders of the first days of the Fair. It was in a subsequent year, at Heatley's Booth over against the Cross Daggers, next to Mr. Miller's Booth, and was there presented during Bartho lomew Fair as " a Litde Opera, called the Old Creation of the World, newly reviv'd, with the addition of the glorious Battle obtained over the French and Spaniards, by the Duke of Marlborough." At another Fair time, the same puppets were in Crawley's Booth, " newly reviv'd with the addition of Noah's Flood; also several fountains playing Water during the time of the Play." " The last scene," says the placard, " does present Noah and his Family coming out of the Ark, with all the Beasts, two by two, and all the Fowls of the Air seen in a Prospect sitting upon the Trees. Likewise over the Ark is seen the Sun rising in a most glorious manner ; moreover, a multi- tude of Angels will be seen in a double rank, which presents a double prospect, one for the Sun, the other for a Palace., where will be seen six Angels ringing six Bells. Likewise Machines descends from above, double and trible, with Dives rising out of Hell, and Lazarus seen in Abraham's Bosom, besides several Figures dancing Jiggs, Sarabands, and and Country Dances, to the admiration of all Spectators ; with the merry conceits of Squire Pwich and Sir John Spendall. A.D. 1 70 1. Bcgiiming of I'^th Centiny 275 "All this is completed with an Entertainment of Singing and Dancing with several Naked Swords, Performed by a Child of Eight Years of Age, to the general Satisfaction of all Persons." Joseph Clark was a posture master, famous at this period of English history. Clark lived in Pall Mall, and was rather stout than thin, but he could imitate almost every sort of deformity and dislocation. He had also a remarkable power of disguising his identity by change of face. It was a trick of his to send for a tailor and cause himself to be measured for new clothes as a man with a hump on the right shoulder. 1 1 W S?i ( \ 1 _Wi — y^= ^^m -^K^-;t:X-,r.^ -^^ !« 8 When the clothes were brought home, the tailor reproached himself for negligence on finding that the hump was on the left shoulder. He apologized for his mistake, made a new coat, and found his customer's back, when he brought it, to x '2 276 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xvn. be perfectly straight. Clark used also to pay successive visits with a succession of new faces to Mr. Molins, an eminent surgeon of his day, and cause himself to be examined for all kinds of horrible dislocations and contortions which were pronounced to be of the most interesting character, and quite incurable. His successor as a posture master was a man named Higgins. of whom less is known. To Mr. Joseph Clark's accomplishments in his own art, his portrait testifies. He died, it is supposed, towards the close of the seventeenth century. A.D. ijoi. The Playhouse at the Fair. 277 CHAPTER XVIII. flje ^(nnljousj; at i\t ^^^ir— ^Ihnnalj ^dtlc. Elkanah Settli-: has been named already in these Memoirs as the manager in 16S0, of the pageant of the Burning of the Pope. In that year, aged thirty-two, and already the author of five or six tragedies, he wrote " the Character of a Popish Successor, and what may be expected from such a one," opening a controversy which he pursued into a second pamphlet; and in 1681, author of two more tragedies, he had replied with " The Medal Reversed " to Dryden's poem of " The Medal." The reader knows how he appeared before the town as Dryden's rival, and advanced against " Absalom and Ahithophel," his " Azaria and Hu- shai." When the Popish Successor was inevitable. Settle became a Tory, disgraced himself with " Animadversions on the last Speech and Confession of William Lord Russell," and wrote in due time a poem on the Coronation of the Popish Successor, "theHighand Mighty Monarch James XL," as he wrote also for the Corporation of London annual panegyrics on the Lord Mayor's Show, which he called *' Triumphs for the Inauguration of the Lord Mayor." There were men who had called Settle a better poet than John Dryden ; but none called him so in the days of his adversity, after the expulsion of the Stuarts. The Laureate of James the Second, became the laureate of Mrs. Mynn in Bartholomew Fair, receiving from that showwoman and her daughter, Mrs. Leigh, a salary as their dramatic author. In the year 1707, Mrs. Mynn produced in her booth, on a scale of unprecedented grandeur. Settle's Siege of 2'roy. It was not a political play, but a Bartholomew spectacle, upon one of the themes known to the old Moralities. 278 Memoirs of Bartholomezu Faii^. chap. xvm. To visit Mrs. Mynn's booth is our main intention in this chapter ; but we must walk to it at a leisurely pace along the high road of the annals of the Fair. The handy Tiger who in the year 1701 showed how he had been trained to pluck a fowl, is not to be denied his sentence in the chro- nicle. And those sad-coloured threads varying the pattern of our woof, the lines of melancholy admonition that were incessantly being reeled off by the Serjeant-Trumpet and the Master of the Revels, must not be snapped short and thrown aside. Impoverishing was the obstinacy of the showmen; and we manifest only a decent respect for insulted dignity, in dwelling on the sorrows of the Patentees. It will be seen, that the Masters of the Revels and the Trum.peters have by this time discovered a magnificent and charitable way of stirring up on their behalf, the dormant energies of magistrates and constables in all the towns and villages of England. The following appeared in the Flying Post during Bartholomew Fair time in the year 1700 : " These are to give Notice, to all Trumpeters, Drums, Fifes, &c., who have, or ought to have Licences from the Serjeant-Trumpet, that Matthias Shore, Esq., being lately deceased, the Licences by him granted are determined, and they are forthwith to apply themselves for new ones to his son \\'illiam Shore, at the Adam and Eve, near Biingcrford Market in the Stratid, who is sworn into the Place of Ser- jeant-Trumpet. And all Civil Officers are desired not to suffer any Person to Sound, Beat, or Play, without Licence from him, or paying the said Serjeant-Trumpet's due of i2d. each day they so do, which he gives (as his Father formerly did) to the use of the Poor of the respective Places." In 1708, it was John Shore whom Her jNIajesty had appointed to this office. Soon afterwards it was again during Bartho- lomew Fair time, that in the Postmmi for the 8th of Septem- ber, 1702, Charles Killegrew, Esq., as Master of the Revels, and Thomas Salby, Gent, Controller of the same, named several of the " Stage-players, Mountebanks, Rope-dancers, Prize-players, Puppet-showers, and such as make shew of motion and strange sights,'' who defied their licence ; and desired all Constables, Bor.sholders, Churchwardens, and Overseers of the Poor, to oppose and stay their actings, A.D. 1 701-2. The PlayJiouse at the Fair. 279 "unless they pay you 2s. per day for so long time as they stay among you, without the said Master and Controller's Licence" -on which there are two sixpenny stamps — "in part of what money is due from them to the said Master and Controller, upon the account of their not having Licence." The money so paid is to be distributed to the poor of the district, from which it is raised, but notice is to be given of the whereabouts of the men, " so as they may be prose- cuted." The defiant showmen went on their accustomed way. They blew their horns in the face of the Trumpeter, and fought the Master of the Revels with their puppets. The Great Hog, the genius of the Fair, which had been in the Fair since Ben Jonson's time, and was there, perhaps, in Rayer's time, grunted against the claims of these private proprietors of taxes the contempt begotten of his large expe- rience. It is an absurd thing to be reminded of the Wander- ing Jew by a stationary pig, but in that Great Hog there was some likeness to Ahasuerus ; and unpardonably defec- tive would these Annals be, if they did not contain one of his manifestoes. The subjoined appeared in Queen Anne's day. The reader will observe that a mysterious silence is preserved as to the age of an animal which was a show in almost pre-historic times, while we are told with alacrity the age of the young colt that occupied the place of companion in his establishment : " By Her Majesty's Permission. This is to give Notice, to all Gentlemen, Ladies, and others, that at the Hospital Gate in Smithfield, during the time of Bartholomew Fair, is to be seen A LARGE BUCKINGHAMSHIRE HOG, about 10 feet long, 13 hands high, above seven foot and a-half round the Body; also 5 feet round the neck, and 18 inches round the fore Leg, above the Joynt." " Likewise a Colt, about 5 months old, that was foal d without any fore Legs, and walks upright at the word of Command on his two hind legs. — These tvvo strange and Wonderful Creatures are to be seen at any time of the day without loss of time. ,. y.^^^ j^^^.^^^„ Then, again, how can we venture to pass by the )'ear 2 8o Memoirs of Bartholomczv Fair. chap, xvi 11. 1702, and overlook the distinction enjoyed by the Fair that year in the presence of a company " by all owned to be the only amazing Wonders of the World in Every thing they Do.' The Documents of these Ministers of Pleasure, are the true State papers of our history, and here is a State paper that I have not dishonesty enough to suppress : " At the Great Booth over against the Hospital Gate in Bartholomew Fair, will be seen the Famous Company of Rope-Dancers, they being the greatest performers of Men, Women and Children that can be found beyond the Seas, so that the World cannot parallel them for Dancing on the Low Rope, Vaulting on the High Rope, and for Walking on the Slack, and Sloaping Ropes, out-doing all others to that degree, that it has highly recommended them, both in Bar- tholomew Fair and May Fair last, to all the best persons of Quality in England. And by all are owned to be the only amazing \\'onders of the World, in every thing they do : It is there you will see the Italian Scaramouch dancing on the Rope, with a Wheelbarrow before him, with two Children and a Dog in it, and with a Duck on his Head ; who sings to the Company and causes much Laughter. The whole entertainment will be so extremely fine and diverting, as never was done by any but this Company alone." Tempests were frequent in the playhouse of the Fair ; chiefly, I am convinced, for the fine opportunity given by that particular theme to the big drums. The great emphasis laid in all acting booths upon the kettle-drum will hereafter become conspicuous, and Ben Jonson, when he alluded years ago to plays on such a topic, in his Prologue to Every Man in His Humour, defined them by references to the "nimble squib,"' and "the tempestuous drum;" a few squibs, and a little robust exercise of the elbows, made, in fact, a cheap sensation. Yet shall we say that expense was spared in this perfectly new Tempest } — " Never acted before. At Miller's Booth over against the Cross-daggers, near the Crown Tavern, during the time of Bartholomew Fair, will be presented an Excellent new Droll, call'd The Te^ipest; or the Distressed Lovers. With the English Hero and the Island Princess, with the Comical A.n. I702. TJie Playhouse at the Fair. 281 Humours of the Inchanted Scotchman ; or Jockey and the Three Witches. Showing how a Nobleman of England was cast away upon the Indian Shore, and in his Travel found the Princess of the Country, with whom he fell in l.ove, and after many Dangers and Perils, was married to her ; and his faithful Scotchman, who was sav'd with him, travelling thorow Woods, fell in among Witches, when between 'em is abundance of comical Diversions. There in the Tempest is Neptune, with his Triton in his Chariot, drawn with Sea- Horses and Mair Maids singing. With Variety of Enter- tainment, performed by the best Masters : the Particulers would be too tedious to be inserted here. " Vivai Regina." From among the actors at Drury Lane, there was always at this time a strong body detached for performance at the Fair, where there was more money to be earned than in the theatre. For this reason, and not because they began the world as strolling showmen, it has to be said of not a few good actors, that they performed in booths at Smithfield. William Penkethman, or Pinke(th)man, a low comedian, of doubtful popularity, who had been, at the close of the seven- teenth century, a member of the Drury Lane Company, an incorrigible talker to the galleries, in which he was dearly beloved by the name of Pinkey, did not overlook his own peculiar qualification for success at Bartholomew Fair. After the year 1700, if not earlier, he becomes an established feature of the festival whenever stage-plays are permitted by the City, keeping his booth in partnership with one or two brother actors. — Thus, in one year early in the century, it belongs to Pinkeman, Mills, and Bullock, and is " in the old place over against the Hospital Gate, where there is pre- sented a New Droll called The Siege of Barcelona, with the Taking of Fort Mount-jouy. Containing the pleasant and comical exploits of that Renown'd Hero, Captain Blunderbuss and his Man Squib : His adventures with the Conjurer, and a Surprising Scene of the Flying Machine, where he and his Man Squib are enchanted ; Also the Diverting Humour of Corporal Scare Devil." The actors are Mills, representative of serious Gentlemen, as second to Wilks and Cibber ; 282 Memoirs of BartJiolomezv Fair. chap. xvm. Bullock, another low comedian ; Norris, who had performed in 1699, the part of Dicky in Farquhar's Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee, and again in 1701, in its sequel, Sir Harry Wildair, and v/ho appears in the Bartholomew Bill, as Mr. Norris alias Jubilee Uicky. Bullock must have been tall and Norris short, for the Spectator, speaking of the shifts of small dramatic wits to raise a laugh, says, " Bullock in a long coat, and Norris in a short one, seldom fail of this effect." There were also three other performers. A Dialogue printed in 1702, containing "a Comparison between the Two Stages" (attributed to Gildon), thus de- scribes two of the managers of this booth, Penkethman and Bullock : —Sidle7i. But Pinkethman the flower of — Critic. Bartholomew Fair, and the idol of the rabble : a fellow that over does everything, and spoils many a part with his own stuff. Sullen. Oh, but Bullock — Critic. Is the best comedian that has trod the stage since Nokes and Leigh, and a fellow that has a very humble opinion of himself" After the play just cited, in which Penkethman himself did not appear, that actor, who also performed harlequin parts at Drury Lane, added his own performance with Mr. Simpson, a famous Vaulter, " who has had the honour to teach most of the Nobility in England" (!), and who was with Mr. Pinkeman, " to let the world see what Vaulting is. Being lately arrived from Italy." The last clause was added in deference to a taste, then as strong in Bartholomew Fair as elsewhere, for ministers to entertainment who came from abroad. "About this time," says Daniel O'Bryan in his Memoirs of the actor Wilks, " the English Theatre was not only pestered with Tumblers and Rope Dancers from France, but likewise Dancing Masters and Dancing Dogs ; shoals of Italian Squallers were daily imported ; and the Drury Lane Company almost broke." Upon the production of Farquhar's Love in a Bottle (1698), "the facetious Jo. Haynes, com- posed this Epilogue and spoke it in mourning." As a speaker of Prologues and Epilogues written by himself, Haynes had a special reputation. " This epilogue " we take for granted, but the taste rebuked in it concerns us. Wright in his Historia Histrionica, written in 1699, says that plays could A.n. 1702. The Playhotise at the Fair. 283 hardly draw an audience, unless some foreign regale was ex-, piessed in the bottom of the bill. In 1702, Drury Lane Theatre closed on the 22nd August until after Bartholomew Fair, and in that year the famous Thomas Doggett, praised by Gibber as the most natural actor of his time, who eight years before was acting leading comic parts in the same cast with Leigh or Betterton and Mrs. Bracegirdle, was among the wooden horses, Merry Andrews, and pickle herrings, using his famous skill in the dressing of parts, as actor for the Fair in an old woman's petticoats and a red waistcoat. Though joint manager of Drury Lane, from which he retired with a competence when Booth, for his successful personation of Addison's Cato, was by the interposition of a noble lord thrust also into the direction, Doggett himself, during the Bartholomew holiday at Drury Lane, kept a booth in the Fair. Here is one of his bills : " At DOGGETT S BOOTH,?i\.Hoskr-Latie End,^mmg the Time of Bartholomeiu Fair, will be Presented a New Droll call'd the Distressed Virgin or the Unnatural Parents. Being a True History of the Fair Maid of the West, or the Loving Sisters. With the Comical Travels of Poor Trusty, in Search of his Master's Daughter, and his Encounter with Three Witches. " Also Variety of Co f nick Dances and Songs, ivith Scenes and Ala chines nrjer seen before. Vivat Pegina." It was said that Thomas Doggett could represent all degrees of age, and give character to the least detail of the dress he wore. His name lives with the Coat and Badge, which, being a zealous Whig, he, after the accession of King George the First, gave to be rowed for by six watermen on every xst of August, that being the anniversary of the event it was his loyal purpose to commemorate. In 1 704 Doggett's Booth at Bartholomew Fair was a partnership venture, maintained by Parker and Doggett, the play being Bateinan, or the Unhappy Marriage. Penkethman's Booth in that year was kept in partnership with Bullock and Simpson, and 284 Memoirs of Bartholomezv Fair. chap. xvin. the play wzis /ephthah' s Rash Vow ; Penkethman and Bullock taking in it the Bartholomew farce characters of Toby and Ezekiel. In 1705 Vanbrugh opened his new Theatre in the Hay- market ; and in the Haymarket also, under whatever manage- ment, the actors usually or always closed their House during Bartholomew Fair. It was also usual at Drury Lane and the Haymarket to perform, shortly before or after the great festival, Ben Jonson's play of Bartholo7neza Fair. May Fair also seems at this time occasionally to have caused the closing of the theatres. These considerations greatly lessen our sense of the fall experienced by Elkanah Settle, when he accepted a salary from Mrs. Mynn, and adapted to a Bartholomew audience in 1707, the operatic spectacle of t/ie Siege of Troy, which he had produced in 1701 at Drury Lane, Mills, one of Penketh- man's partners, being then the Menelaus, Wilks and Mrs. Rogers Paris -and Cassandra, and Mrs. Oldfield the Queen Helen The Drury Lane Play was a miserable piece of ^vriting, full of directions for expensive decoration of the Stage. The Prologue begins at once by calling it, in Mrs. Mynn's fashion, " This costly play." In adapting it for Mrs. Mynn, the poet left out four or five serious characters, cut down all the serious dialogue, and reduced his work from five acts to three, interpolating a sufficient quantity of right Bartholomew buffoonery. The new form of the play seems to have been tolerably popular ; for, in the following year, it was reprinted before a sixpenny History of Troy. Of the book issued on behalf of Mrs. Mynn, and of the play as performed at the Fair, if the promise of the book may be trusted, this is an account : The SIEGE of TROY, a Dramatick Performance. Presented in Mrs. MYNiYS BOOTH, Over against the Hospital Gate, in the Rowids in Smithficld, during the Time of the present Bartholomew FAIR. Containing A Descrip- tion of all the Scenes, Machines, and Alovenients, with the whole decoration of the Play, and Particulars of the Enter- tainment. A.D. 1707. ElkanaJi Settle. 285 LONDON, Printed and Sold by Bcuj. Bragge at the Blacli Raven in Paternoster- Row. And also at the Booth all the time of the Fair. TO THE RFADER. A Printed Publication of an Entertainment /if^r/z/^rt'*?;/ a Smithfield-Stage, w/iic/i, how gay or richly soever set off, will hardly reach to a higher Title, than the customary name of a DROLL, may seem somewhat new. But as the presoit tindertaking, the work of ten Months' preparation, is so extra- ordinary a Performance, that withoict Boast or Vanity we may modestly say, In the whole several Scenes, Movements, a)id Machines, // is no loays Inferioiir even to any one Opera yet seen in either of the Royal Theaters ; we arc therefore under some sort of Necessity to make this Publication, thereby to give ev'n the meanest of our Audience a full IJght into all the Object they will there meet in this Expensive Entertainment; the Proprietors of which have adventur'd to make,tmder some small Hopes, That as they yearly see some of their happier Brethren Undertakers in the Fair, more cheaply obtain even the Engrost Smiles of the Gentry and Quality at so much an easier Price ; so on the other side their own more costly Projection (though less Favourites) might possibly attain to that good Fortune, at least to atti-act a little share of the good graces of the more Honourable part of the Audience ; and perhaps be able to pur- chase some of those smiles which elsewhere have been thus long the profuser Do/iation of particular Affection and Favour. Under the head of Actors' Names, the Characters of Menelaus, Ulysses, Helen, Cassandra, and the rest, are de- scribed in a form suitable to the taste and understanding of all patrons in the Fair. The Siege of Troy. Act I. The Curtain is drawn up, and discovers King Menelaus, Ulysses, Attendants, and Guards. The King and Ulysses in a short discourse of four and thirty lines, reveal the whole situation as it regards — " that tall Wooden Horse We have prepar'd, in w hose dark Womb of Fate, Five hundred generous Volunteers all wait, All at one stroke to give the fatal Hlow : Fear not Success. 286 Memoirs of Bartholomezu Fair. chap. xvm. King. No : wise Ulysses, no. When thy great Hand's the Royal Engineer, 'Tis by such Pilots I to glory steer. Ulys. Consider, Sir, what managing Hand I've found To move this vast Machine ; the Honest Sition: A Man so hearty in your Royal Cause, That he has dismembered e\-en his very Face, Cut off his Lips and Nose, and torn his Eyes out To make himself the Object of their Pity. " That by his moving Looks and artful Tears He may so lull the Credulous Trojans' Ears, To draw that fatal Horse v.-ithin their Walls. King. Now Fate, curst Troy, for thy Destruction .calls. Revenge, Oh ! dear Revenge," and so on, but not for a long time so on • because the author of a booth-play must remember, Time is Money. Next follows the comic scene between Bristle a Cobler, and his Wife. The wife will go out of Troy " to see the great Horse the Grecians have left behind 'em," and the husband will not let her go. Her talk is as the talk of Ursula thepigwoman ; her husband, to keep her at home, gives " a lick of Styrrup Leather." " Wife. Help, help, Murder. Within. Huzzah ! huzzah ! Enter Mob. \st Mob. I speaking i The Horse, the Horse, the Horse. 2d Mob. > all to- I The Greeks, the Greeks, the Greeks. 3^ Mob. j gether ( All run, run, run. Bristle. Hold, hold, hold. Neighbours. Let one Man speak at once. All. Ay, ay, let our Neighbour Bristle speak first. Bristle. Then mark me, good Folks ; we are all going to see this great Horse. All. Ay, ay, the Horse, the Horse. Bristle. Look ye then, Neighbours ; let us march Soberly and Decently, in roaring good Order, as those Civil Gentle- men called the Mob, should do ; and I'll be Captain Tom, your Leader." The Cobler therefore leads the mob to see the Horse ; leaving his wife behind with a member of the mob, whom she, in Bartholomew phrase, thanks kindly for kissing her. [Exeunt. A.D. 1707. Elkanah Settle. 287 The Scene opens and discovers Paris and Helen, fronfifig the Audience, riding in a Triumphant Chariot, drawn by two White Elephants, vioiinted by two Pages in embroyder'd livery. The side IVings are ten Elephants more, bearing 07i their Backs open Castles, iimbragcdtvith Canopies of Gold ; the ten Castles fiirdwith ten Persons richly drest, the Retinue of Paris ; and on the Elephants'" Necks ride ten more Pages in the like rich Dress. Beyond and over the Chariot, is seen a Victor of the City of Tvoy ; on the Walls of which, stand several Trumpeters, seen behind and over the head of Paris, who sound at the opening of the Scene. Poor indeed was the wit joined to these glories of stage upholstery, in which Bartholomew Fair taught how a public might be satisfied with least toil to the brain. Says Paris to Helen — " We '11 tune our trumps of War to Songs of Peace," and so forth ; but Cassandra comes. " Oh my dear Paris," exclaims Helen, " is that Screech owl here ! " Cassandra calls her bad names, talks to Paris about angry gods " who with all the Bolts of Fate, Blood, Fire, and Sword, for his destruction wait." Paris, being annoyed, threatens the Screech owl, that if she abuses Helen any more — ' ' by all the Pow'rs I swear lie drive my Chariot o'er thy trampled Head, Beneath my rowling wheels He crush thee dead." Cassandra departs savagely ; then " Hark," says Paris, "what Celestial Musick's this I hear." [Venus descends in a Chariot drawn by two Swans. She makes a soothing speech in six lines ; upon which cries Paris — " Oh I am lost in Raptures, this high Grace ! But Where's my Vassals ? where's my waiting Train ? Quick, quick, ye Slaves, for Goodness so Divine, Jo\Ti all your Ayrs, your Songs of Triumph Joyn." The ten Rich Eigures in the Castles of the Elephants, address themselves to the Goddess 7vith this followitig piece of Alusick in Chorus : 288 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chaf. xvm. SONG. Hail Beauteous Goddess all Divine, Our up7'ais'd Ryes and Hearts all thine, To Love we pray, To Love we kneel : Thy poiv'r we own. Thy Darts we feel. To thy bright sway, thy Sovereign Throne Not suppliant mortals bend alone ; To the Blind God, thy Boy, and Thee, Even Jove, Ahnighfy'^ove, here boivs a knee. And upon that grand spectacle of song and show, the curtani falls, for so the first Act ends. Act 1 1. The Scene opens, and iti a Wood without the Walls of Troy, appears the Trojan Horse, being a Figure of that Magnitude, that 'tis 1 7 Foot high to the top of his Back. The whole Figure 7Jiagnificcntly adorn'd with all the Trappijigs, Furniture of a War Horse, set off with rich Gildings, Plumes of Feathers, and all other suitable Decorations. Under his Feet lies Sinon, with a. mangled Face all bloody, his Nose cut off, his Eyes out, cn^., bound in Irons. The Mob enters, led by Bristle, to talk foolishness. Bristle's wife enters, with her new friend, to talk foolishness also. Ulysses enters in disguise and beguiles them. Sinon is found and questioned ; Ulysses persuades the mob that, since the gates are too low, they should make a breach in the wall, through which to drag into the city the horse left, according to a warning of the gods, as a monument by the Greeks and pledge of peace ne'er to return in arms. The mob goes out huzzaing to pull down the walls. Ulysses makes a speech by himself in six lines, and exit. Enters Cassandra, makes another speech in seven lines, and exit. The Scene opens aiul discovers the Temple of Diana, being a magnificent Structure richly adorn'd, the Capitals, Urns, Crescetits, Festoons, and other carved Worh, all gilt, consisting of ten pieces of Fainting, in each of ivliich, in a large Nych in each Front of these Paintings, are seen ten Statues of the Heathen gods, viz., Jupiter, Juno, Pallas, A])olIo, Neptune, Thetis, Mars,' Venus, Ceres, and Mi^rcxwy, each Figure near A.n. 1707. Elkanah Settle. 289 five Foot hi^h, and all gilt. In the back of the Stage, in the Center of the Temple, is a rich Altar-piece, bearing 3 Nyches in the J Vails, in the middle of which, on a Pedestal 18 Inches high, stands a young Woman drest in Cloth of Gold, repre- senting the Statue of Diana, holding a Hunting Spear in her Hand ; and on ticee and Harper's Booth, presently to be referred to. A.i). 1728. Under the First Georges. 305 Here, says the writer of the ehicidation upon Setchel's print, the Siege of Bethulia is being acted. This was so far rom being possible in 1721. that it was not possible in 1728. It was only in 1732 that there was first presented at this booth, " the Droll of the Siege of Bdhulia, coiiiaining i/u X 3o6 Memoirs of Dartholomeiv Fair. chap, xx Ancic7it History of Judith and Holof ernes, with the Comical Humours of Rustego and his Man Terrible." Holofernes, Mr. Mullart ; Rustego, Mr. Harper ; Terrible, Mr. Morgan ; [ndith, Mr. Spiller; Dulcementa, Mrs. Purden. The "Ancient History " attached to the Siege of Bethuha was of old stand- ing in the T'air. Locke, early in his life, as we have found, saw Judith and Holofcrnes there, and there is not a word about Bethulia in the preceding picture. A.r>. 172S. Under the First Georges. 307 Another glimpse of pleasure is a promise of Rope-dancing in " the Great Booth over against the Hospital Gate." The proprietor invites attention with his trumpet, for blowing of which the Serjeant Trumpeter's man in the Fair has claimed his fee. There is a boy here in the corner wanting six pence. X 2 ,o8 Memoirs of Bai'tholorjtcw Fair. chap. xx. This is the booth in which Fawkes the famous Conjuror displays his dexterity of hand. Here again the few lines of description attached to the / /l-T- /(/J^ ''';^im / v print issued by Setchel are in error. The sketch on the board is said to be the only portrait of Fawkes extant. This statement leads me to believe that the description itself has been wrongly ascribed to Caulfield, who does indeed adopt from thissketch his picture of Fawkes in the ''Remarkable Characters," but who there refers to a more elaborate portrait of him in another volume. Below are Ups-and-Downs and sausages. The artist, finding that the fourth stall in the machine would complicate his picture, has got it under altogether ; and with a view also to artistic effect he has denied legs to the gentleman who is tasting his ale with so much relish, while the hot A. p. i72cS. Under the First Georges 309 sausage grows cold upon his plate. We are to suppose that lie has been drinking till he lost his legs. Bad, however, as the art is, the representation of details in these pictures is exceedingly instructive. Michael Angelo could not have displayed the anatomy of a Samson with more care than the Fan painter has bestowed on the anatomy of anUp-and- Down. Finally there is Pye Corner with its " delicate Pig and Pork," upon which a high nobleman, who is confidently 3IO Memoirs of Bartholomei^' Juiir. chai-. xx. pronounced to be the premier, Sir Robert Walpole, has been feasting. It was always a tradition that Sir Robert Walpole frequently was to be seen among the visitors to Bartholomew Fair. The sketches here given, although detached, are exact facsimiles from portions of the coloured plate ; and, except some unimportant figures with which spaces are filled, they are all that it contains. In Lee and Harper's booth, Harper was chief Comedian. He was a fat round-faced man, with a jolly laugh that quali- A.D. 1728. U)idcr the First Georges. 31J fied him, more than his wit, for the position he lield as the Falstaff of his time. He is remembered also as one of the comedians who, in 1733, revolted from the patentees at Drury Lane, and established themselves at the Little Theatre in the Llaymarket. George Lee was an adventurous printer, who did business in Blue-Maid Alley, Southwark. His name, except as manager, appears only as printer of the Drolls. Fawkes, at his Booth at the lower end of Lee and Harper's, over against The King's Head Inn, in the Fair, exhibited entertainments in tlie manner following : " His surprising and incomparable dexterity of hand, in which he will perform several entirely new Curiosities, that far surpasses any thing of that kind ever seen before. A curious musical clock, that he lately purchased of Mr. Pinch- beck, Clockmaker in Fleet Street, that plays several fine Tunes on most Instruments of Musick, and imitates the melodious Notes of various Kinds of Birds, as real Life : also Ships sailing, with a number of curious and humorous Figures, representing divers Motions as tho' alive." He had also a piece of clockwork called *' Ait's Masterpiece, or the 31 2 Memoirs of Bartholomeiv Fair. cHAr.xx. \'enetian Lady's Invention," with a Dutch Tumbler and his little posture-master, a child of about five years of age, some of whose feats are represented in the picture. Fawkes began his performances at two o'clock, and ended them at eight. His Christian name is unknown ; we know only that he was married, and that he was the chief professional Juggler of tlie days of George the First. Hogarth has introduced his name in his print of Burlington Gate, as part of an inscrip- tion on a board : " Fawkes's dexterity of hand." He died on the 25th of May, 1731, having acquired by his art 3 fortune of ten thousand pounds. r / A.D. I72S. Fielding s Booth at the George Inn. 313 CHAPTER XXI. .ficlbiug's ,^oot^ at the fliforgt |im |;Erb. The authority of the Master of the Revels suffered a severe blow in the year 1715, when Sir Richard Steele was associated with Wilks, Gibber, and Booth as a playhouse manager. The oftice of the Master of the Revels had been created in the year 1546, and Charles Killegrew, in whose person it practically became extinct, reigned until January, 1724-5. It was he who expunged the whole first act of Gibber's Ricliani III., because he thought that the dis- tresses of King Henry the Sixth would remind people of King James. Steele and his friends resolved to try the right of this official to be paid by them for meddling with their plays. They politely urged patent against patent, and gained their point. In 1725, Charles Henry Lee succeeded Killegrew in his office, and held it for nineteen years, unable to assert his claims against those who might set them at defiance. In the year 1727-8, Gay's Beggars Opera was produced and took the foremost place among the pleasures of the town. It took a foremost place, also, among the pleasures of the next following Bartholomew Fair, being acted during the time of the Fair, by the Company of Comedians from the New Theatre in the Haymarket, at the George Inn, in Smithfield. William Penkethman, one of the actors who had become famous as a booth manager, was then recently dead, and the Haymarket Comedians carried the Beggar's Opera out of Bartholomew into Southwark Fair, where "the late Mr. Penkethman's great Theatrical Booth " afforded them a stage. One of the managers of this speculation was Henry Fielding, then only just of age, a young man who with good 314 Memoirs of Bartholomezv Fair. chap. xxi. birth, fine wit, and a liberal education both at Eton and at Leyden University, was left to find his own way in the world. His father agreed to allow him two hundred a-year in the clouds, and, as he afterwards said, his choice lay between being a hackney writer and a hackney coachman. He lived to place himself, in respect to hterature, at the head of the prose writers of England, — I dare even venture to think, of the world. That his inclinations led him to begin his town life as dramatic author, and that he entered into close association with the players, everybody knows ; it is known also that he joined in the management of a booth at Bar- tholomew Fair in the year 1733 ; but the simple act of turning over old newspapers imposed as a duty on the writer of these Memoirs, first brings to light the fact that Fielding, on beginning life in London, at once looked to the Fairs as a source of income, and was a booth-keeper during not less than nine years of his life. The management of the performance of the Beggar's Opera at Bartholomew Fair in 1728, was anonymous, but the removal of the same company from the George Inn in Smithfield, to the late Mr. Penkethman's booth at Southwark Fair, is specified by a newspaper of which I have seen only a cutting labelled simply with the date, which, as complete files of old papers are not accessible, I cannot directly verify. It is, however, indirectly and completely verified by the Daily Post for the 12th of September, 1728, in which the company is advertised as being at Southwark Fair, and Fielding's name stands first as manager. At FIELDING and REYNOLDS'S GREAT THEATRICAL BOOTH, At the Lower End of Blue Maid Alley, on the Green in Southwark, dunng the time of the Fair, will be performed the Beggar's Opera, by the Company of Comedians from the Haymarket.^ All the Songs and Dances set to Music, as performed at the Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. N.B. There is a commodious Passage for the Quality, and Coaches through the Half-Moon Inn, and care will be taken that there shall be Lights, and People to conduct them to their Places. It was at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre that the Beggar's A. p. 1720. Ficldinos Booth at the George Inn. 315 Opera had been produced, on the 29th of the preceding January, and it was acted there for the sixty-third night of its memorable "run" on the day after the date of this ad- vertisement. The Haymarket Company had, of course, never performed the piece in its own house. Again in the year following, 1729, the Beggars Opera\\2,% performed during the Fair, the place of peformance being " the Black Boy on the Paved Stones near Hosier Lane, Smithfield," and the actors, Rayner and PuUen's Company of Comedians. That is to say, the company of Mrs. Rayner and of Mrs. Pullen, who performed Polly and Lucy ; the Macheath being that Mr. Powell whom the Spectator, without saving words of praise, accused of a disposition to obtain " a loud clap " by the artifice of using violence of manner where his author had been tranquil. Mrs. Rayner also sang and danced ; and the performances in this booth were repeated successively during twelve hours, namely from eleven in the morning till eleven at night. Hall and Jo. Miller formed a theatrical firm at Bartho- lomew Fair in this year, and, in the Daily Journal oi Sept. 5th, on the twelfth day of the Fair — so little did the will of Mayors prevail — advertised that they would perform Batc- inan during its continuance : Bateman by Mr. Gates ; Soarrow by Mr. Miller ; Old Sparrow, Mr. Hall. Giffard, a comic actor, attached to the Haymarket Com- pany, succeeded to the Management of Penkethman's Theatrical Booth, which he opened in the name of Penketh- man and Giffard, and in which he presented in the year 1730, "Wat Tyler and Jack Straw; or the Mob Reformers. A Dramatic Entertainment." From Penkethman we may part also with a reference to the good word written on his behalf by the Spectator. After saying that " the Craft of an Usurer, the absurdity of a rich Fool, the awkward roughness of a fellow of half-courage, the ungraceful mirth of a creature of half-wit, might be for ever put out of countenance by proper parts for Doggett," he goes on to observe that " the petulancy of a pee^•ish old fellow, who loves and hates he knows not why, is very excellently performed by the inge- nious Mr. William Penkethman in The Fop's Fortune, where he answers no questions but to those whom he likes, and 3 1 6 iMejnoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxr. ivants no accounts of anything from those he approves. Mr. Penkethman is master also of as many faces in the dumb scene, as can be expected from a man in the circumstances of being ready to perish out of fear and hunger: he wonders throughout the whole scene very masterly, without neglect- ing his victuals." It is well to be reminded of such praise in annals by which the actor is presented chiefly as a showman. The success of the Bcggai's Opera had excited instant imitation. The opera of the Beggar's JVedding, written by Colley, was produced at Dublin, and then reproduced at the Haymarket, to be performed again with its three acts fused into one long act at Drury Lane, when the part of Justice Quorum was sustained upon the public stage by Henry Fielding. One of the dated scraps of newspaper, pasted, without the name of the paper from which it came, into the Guild- hall collection, but corroborated perfectly as we shall see, is, in anticipation of the Fair of 1729, to this effect : — "We hear that Mr. Fielding, from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, designs to entertain the town, at his Booth in the George Inn Yard," (the phrase may be thought to imply the fact that he occupied it in the previous year,) " in Smith- field," during the Time of Bartholomew Fair, with the Beggar's Wedding, having engaged Mr, Charke, Mr. Hulett, Mrs. Egleton, Mrs. Roberts, Miss Shireburn, and others, in order to give a general satisfaction to all spec- tators." I find, accordingly, in the Daily Post for Saturday, the 23rd of August, 1729, that At Air. FIELDING'S great theatrical booth, In the George Inn Yard in Siniihfidd during the Time of Bartholomew Fair, will be Acted a diverting Dramatic Opera called HUNTER, or THE BEGGARS WEDDING : with Alterations. Consisting of Variety of English, Scots, and Irish Ballad Tunes, with additional Songs never perform'd therein before ; par- tictilarly a Song of the Chimes of the Times, and the Conceited Farmer, sung by Mr. Mountfort. The characters are as announced in the preceding extract; Mrs. Egleton plays Tippit. There is Dancing and Flarle- \.vy:\'i2^).Fieldmg s Booth at the George Inn. 31 / quinade, partly by Mr. St. Luce, lately arrived from Paris; the Songs and Music are to be Perform'd by a good Band of Instruments, accompany'd by a Chamber Organ provided on this occasion, and play'd upon by the best Hand in England. N.B. The Booth is very Commodious, and the Inn-yard has all the Conveniencies of Coach-room, Lights, &c., for Quality and others; and shall perform this evening at Four, and every day during the time of the Fair ; beginning exactly at Two o'Clock, and continuing every Hour till Eleven at Night. Of course every play or opera was much abridged in adap- tation for the Fair. In this year also there was a dramatic battle fought with Fielding by the members of the Haymarket Company. Fielding, attached to Drury Lane, was presenting in the Fair the work that had been just produced on their own stage, giving it the new first title of Hunter, and, for an obvious reason, advertising Alterations. The Haymarket actors, therefore, came into the Fair to act him down, and under the management of Reynolds, his former partner, opened " Mr. Reynolds's Great Theatrical Booth, Between the Hospital Gate and the Crown Tavern, in Smithfield." Mrs. Nokes, though actresses of note seldom repeated their parts in the Fair, retained her own Hay- market character of Tippit. Mr. Ray was brought over from Drury Lane to play the part of Hunter. They had also the Haymarket band and scenery. But their original representative of Chaunter, King of the Beggars, Fielding had lured away. His own men claimed him ; Fielding claimed him; and throughout this Fair time, in every number of the Daily Post from the 25th of August to the 30th of August, where there is a break in the file accessible to me, Fielding and Reynolds advertise the same play with- out a syllable of allusion one to the other, and both claim to have Hulett acting in the part of Chaunter. How he managed to repeat the same part every hour in two booths at once, I cannot say. The design of Reynolds probably was to establish ground of action, if desirable. Hulett's name after this time disappears from the Haymarket play bills, and he is found to have been received among the actors at Lincoln's Inn Fields. On the first day of the J 1 8 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxi. Fair, August the 23rd, only Fielding's advertisement appears. Having acted the Beggar s Wedding until eight in the eve- ning, Reynolds's Company went on until eleven at night with the Opera of Damon and Phillida, ending always with an entertainment of grotesque dancing, called the Humours of Harlequin. Bullock had a booth to himself that year, in which was performed Dorastus and Faunia, and the adaptation of Doggett's Country Wake, "after the manner of the Beggar's Opera,'' called Flora. To Reynolds's advertisement on the 2nd of September is the following : " Note. This being the Fast for the Fire of London, we shall not play till to-morrow." The Beggar's Opera still led the fashion of the stage. There was pro- duced at Lee and Harper's Great Theatrical Booth, in 1728, an adaptation of a piece that had been printed in 1725 — "the Prison Breaker, or the Adventures of John Shepherd, a Farce, as intended to be acted at the T. R. in Lincoln's Inn Fields ;" the adaptation of this other story of a thief being styled the Quake/ s Opera. In 1730, Lee and Harper, still dealing in ballad operas and outlaws, produced at Bar- tholomew Fair the Opera of Robin Hood. To this year, 1730, belongs a characteristic state paper, which will be found printed in the Daily Post for the last day of August : "These are to give notice to all Ladies, Gentlemen, and others, " That at the end Hosier Lane, in Smithfield, are to be seen, during the Time of the Fair, Two Rattle Snakes, one a very large size, and rattles that you may hear him at a quarter of a mile almost, and something of Musick, that grows on the tails thereof; of divers colours, forms, and shapes, with darts, that they extend out of their Mouths, about two inclies long. They were taken on the Mountains of Leamea. A Fine Creature, of a small size, taken in *Mocha, that burrows under ground. It is of divers colours, and very beautiful. The Teeth of a Dead Rattle Snake to be seen and handled, with the Rattles. A Sea Snail, taken on the Coast of India. Also, the Horn of a Flying Blxk. Together with a curious Collection of Animals and A xi. \^2()-lr. Ft elding s Booth at the George fiui. 3 [9 Insects from all Parts of the World. To be seen without Loss of Time/' The dramatists are not to have this part of the history entirely to themselves, and readers of these Memoirs must be prepared for the occasionally sudden intrusion of a rattle- snake or other monster on their quiet meditations. Another show in the year 1730, was Mr. Pinchbeck's (the watclimaker's) Grand Theatre of the Muses. This probably was the machine containing a hundred moving figures which had been exhibited by Penkethman in the Litde Piazzas, Covent Garden, as "the Pantheon, or the Temple of the Heathen Gods." In 1730, Fielding was determined that nobody should accuse him of unfair play. He still occupied his booth at the George Inn, now, however, in partnership with a Drury Lane Comedian, and acted himself in a new play, written by William Rufus Chetwood, tutor of Barry, and for many years Drury Lane Prompter. In the Daily Post for August 21st, and following days, in 1730, it is announced that "At Gates and Fielding's Great Theatrical Booth, at "the George Inn Yard, Smithficld, during the time of Bartho- lomew Fair, will be presented an entire new Opera, call'd The Generous Free Mason, or the Constant Lady. With the Comic Humours of Squire Noodle and his Man Doodle, by persons from both the Theatres. The parts of the King of Tunis by Mr. Barcock ; Mirza, Mr. Paget ; Sebastian. Mr. Gates; Clerimont, Mr. Fielding," &c. (Here the Capitals are mine.) "Queen, Mrs. Kilby ; Maria, Miss Gates," &c. All the characters newly dress'd with several entertainments of Dancing by Mons. de Luce, Mademoiselle de Lorme, and others ; particularly the Wooden Shoe Dance ; the Perrot and Pierotte, and the Dance of the Black Joke, &c. " Beginning every day at Two o'Clock." Reynolds's Booth that year had also a new play. It was called Scipid's Triumph, or the Siege 0/ Carthage. With the Pantomime of Harlequin's Contrivance, or the Plague of a Wantoji Wife. In the following year (1731), at Miller's, Mills's, and Gates's Great Theatrical Booth over against the Hospital Gate, the play acted was the BanisJied General, or the Dis- 320 Memoirs of Bartholomezu Fair. chap. xxi. tressed Lovers, Mrs. Roberts being the chief actress, and Mills, Gates, and Miller the chief actors. At the end of the first act was the " English Maggot " dance. At the end of the second act, appeared two Harlequins. " The whole concluding with a Grand Dance and Chorus ; accompany'd with Kettle Drums and Trumpets. All the Scenes and Decorations entirely new." Gates had entered into a new partnership, but Fielding still held to his old ground in the George Inn Yard (in 1 731), and was managing his booth at Bartholomew Fair in company with Hippisley and Hall. It was announced both in the Daily Post and in the Daily Advertiser, as Fielding's, Hippisley's, and Hall's Great Theatrical Booth, in the George Inn Yard, West Smithfield, with a Company of Comedians from both the Theatres. They presented a New Dramatic Gpera, called TJic Emperor of China, Grand Vulgi, or Love in Distress and Virtue Reivardcd : written by the Author of the Generons Free Mason. With the Comical Humours of Squire Shallow, in his Treatise of Marriage, and his Man Robin Booby, intermixt with Variety of Songs, Old Ballads, and Country Dances. The part of Shallow, the Welch Squire, by Mr. Hippisley, being the first time of his appearing in the Fair. Emperor of China, by Mr, Roberts, &c. The other persons of the play were Carlos ; Resident ; Eugenio ; Fidelia, Mrs. Templar ; Isabella ; Robin Booby, Mr. Hall ; Sir Arthur Addleplot, Mr. Pen- kethman (Penkethman, the younger) ; Freelove, Mr. Berry; "and the part of Loveit, the Chambermaid, by Mrs. Egleton." With Dancing, and " the whole to conclude with the favourite air in the Opera of Fonts; accompany'd with Fiddles, Hautbois, Trumpets, and Kettle Drums. Scenes and Cloaths entirely new. Beginnmg every day exactly at One o'Clock." At that Fair time it is recorded that an alarm of fire in the booth next to Mrs. Fawkes scared Mrs. Fawkes into a premature confinement. This very slight record is the sole hint I have found of a casualty by fire in the crowded, careless little town of boards and canvas. In the next year, 1732, Fielding was still in the George Inn Yard, and held with Hippifley the Great Theatrical A- n- 1 73 1 '?,2. Fielding s Booth at the George In/i. 3 2 i Booth there. Their advertisement is in successive num- bers of the Daily Post. The play was, The Efivious Statcs- inan, or the Fall of Essex; the Part of the Queen by Mrs. Mullart. With an adaptation, of course by Fielding, of Le Medecin Malgre Lui, called " tlie Humours of the Tdrc'd Fhysician, done from the French of Moli^re, and intermixed with Variety of Songs to old Ballad Tunes and Country Dances. The part of the Physician by Mr. Hippisley." John Hippisley was a wit and a low comedian, who had succeeded to the characters of Penkethman, and was a favourite at once with men of wit and with the mob. He was attached to the new Covent Garden Company, when, by the opening of Covent Garden, rivalry of other houses, and the competition of the foreign opera, the profits of the players were reduced so greatly in the year 1733, that an unusual effort was in that year made by the actors to draw treasure out of Bartholomew Fair. Cibber then first came into the Fair. There were four great Theatrical Booths. One of them, opened in the joint names of Cibber, Griffin, Bulloclc, and Hallam, performed the Drury Lane play of Tamerlane the Great, and Fielding's Miser, which he had at the close of the previous winter adapted from Moliere, and in which Miss Raftor, better known to us as Mrs. Clive, had appeared at her last bene.'it. In Tajnerlane Cibber himself was the Bajazet, and It Irs. Charke, his youngest daughter — who descended in her latter days to the keeping of a puppet-show, and the selling of sausages — was Hal\\ In the Miser, Grifhn played to the Fair people his own part of Lovegold, but Miss Raftor's part of Lappet was transferred to Mrs. Roberts, neither did any other of the ladies who first acted in it travel with the play to Smithfield. There were also an Arlequin and Arlequinne dance, and there was an Fpilogue by a little girl dressed in boy's clothes. These entertainments were repeated several times a day. It is recorded that this booth had rich deco- rations, and was lighted by candles in glass lustres. A second booth in 1733 was, of course, Lee and Harper's, in which Jephthalis Rash Vow, was the enter- tainment, " with the comical humours of Captain Bluster and his man Diddimo."' Hulett, then attached to the y 322 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxi. Theatre in Goodman's Fields, was engaged to play the part of Diddimo, and stout Mr. Harper — -who was still a member of the Company at Drury Lane — was Captain Bluster. Mr. Harper, who has been already mentioned as the natural Falstaff of his day, had to contradict, by public advertise- ment, the rumour that he was engaged to perform Falstaff, in the Fair, at Cibber's Booth. A third Great Theatrical Booth was maintained by three other members of the Drury Lane Company of Comedians, Miller, Mills, and Gates. They acted "the True and Tragical Story of Jane Shore, with the Comical and Diverting Humours of Sir Anthony Noodle and his Man Weazle." Noodle, Mr Miller ; Mr. Shore, by Mr. Mills ,; Timothy Stampwell, Mr. Gates ; Jane Shore, Miss Gates. They gave French Dancing at the end of one Act, and a hornpipe at the end of another. They concluded with a dancing entertainment called " the Gardens of Venus, or the Triumphs of Love," and they undertook to amuse the company, while they were waiting for the play to begin, with rope-dancing and tumbling, by the celebrated Signer Morisini, Mons. Jano, and particularly the famous Itahan Woman, Mademoiselle de Reverant, and (candour is great) her daughter. Among the Drury Lane actors in that year, 1733, was the young Drury Lane author — then aged six-and-twenty — again at his old place in the George Inn Yard, and again opening his booth as partner with John Hippisley. The competition among the Theatrical Booths must have been great. They were all doubly baited with French posturing and rope-dancing. Fielding and Hippisley's play-bill for this year, is the following : At FIELDING'S and IIIPPISLE Ts, GREAT THEATRICAL BOOTH, In the George Inn Yard in Smithfield, During the Time of Bartholomew Fair, will be presented a Dramatick Entertainment (never performed there before), call'd LOVE AND JEALOUSY, OK THE DOWNFALL OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. The Fart of Alexander b\- Mr. Rosco ; Clytus, Mr. Huddy ; Hephestiaii, A.D. 173-,. Ficldiuif's Booth at the Gt'oro-c Inn. ^ T T Mr. Houghton; Lysimachus, Mr. Mullart; Rosaiia, Mrs. Muilart ; Statira, Mrs. Hougliton. To which will be added a Ballad Opera call'd .\ CURE FOR COVETOUSNESS, OK THE CHEATS OF SCAPIN. Done from the French of Molikke. The Part of Scaplii by Mr. Hippisley, from the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden ; Old Gripe, Mr. Penkethman, Son to the late facetious Mr. Wm. Penkethman ; Sly, Mr. Salway ; Odavian, Mr. Jenkins ; Shift, Mr. Hevvson ; Lucia, Miss Binks ; Loveit, Mrs. Pritchard ; Medlar, Mrs. Martin. With the diverting Humours of the Original Marquess en Chian, from the Ridotto Al' Fresco. All the Characters, both Roman and Modern, entirely new dress'd. With several Entertainments of Dancing between the Acts, by Mens. Le Brun, Mrs. Ogden, Mr. Fisher Tench, and Mademoiselle D'Lorme. And farther, to divert the Audience during the Filling of the Booth, the famous Mr. Phillips will perform his surprising Postures on the Stage. N.B. An E.xtraordinary Band of Music is provided, consisting of Violins, Hautboys, Bassoons, Kettle Drums, Trumpets and French Horns. Note. The Passage to the Booth will be commodiously illuminated with several large Moons, for the Conveniency of the Company ; and Person? of Quality's Coaches may drive up the Yard. To begin every day at one o'clock, and continue till Eleven at Night. This was not Fielding's last year in Bartholomew Fair, although the only one of which mention is made by his recent biographer. Mrs. Pritchard, born Miss Vaughan, had recently made her first appearance before the public in one of Fielding's pieces at the Haymarket, and had performed also at Good- man's Fields ; but it was in this part at Bartholomew Fair, also one of Fielding's adaptation, that she first won the popularity that secured her an engagement at Drury Lane, and the opportunity of at once establishing a high theatrical reputation in the character of Shakespeare's Rosalind. A duet sung by her in the Fair with Mr. Salway, called " Sweet, if you love me, smiling turn," created so large a demand lor copies, that Fielding and Hippisley caused an unlimited number to be printed and given away gratis dail\ at their Booth while the Fair lasted. Mr. Hipi)isley added to the entertainments made unexpectedly so popular, " his comic scene call'd the Drunken Man." Mrs. Pritchard came to the stage a married woman ; her husband, Mr. W'm. Pritchard had some oftice in Drury Lane Y 2 324 Mefnoirs of BartJwlonieiu Fair. chap. xxi. "rheatre : she brought to her profession an unblemished character, and lived to the lust in private honour as a wife and mother, not less than in public honour as an actress. From the day of her first success as Loveit, in Fielding's Booth at Bartholomew Fair, to the day thirty-four years afterwards when, a stout woman advanced in life, she gave, in the year of her husband's death, her farewell performance as Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of Garrick, the respect and admiration of the town abided firmly by her. In the midst of the severities of his Rosciad^ Churchill paused to honour Pritchard by nature for the stage design'd In person graceful, and in sense refin'd ; Her art, as much as nature's friend became : Her voice, as free from blemisli as her fame. •> Wlio knows so well in majesty to please, Attemper'd with the graceful charms of ease ? That praise was written six-and-twenty years after the first real discovery of her genius made at Bartholomew Fair, when it was very creditable in P H , to send im- mediately to the Daily Post, certain lines that attest rather his faculty of criticism than of song : To Mrs. Pritchard on her playing the Part of Loveit at Mr. Fielding's Booth in Bartholomew Fair. If to attract the Eye, to cliarm the Ear, And touch the Heart, an Actor's Heights appear ; Nature and Wit so strong in thee combine, Excellent Fair ! — those Heights will soon be thine. In \\r^' first Essay ev'ry meaning stroke Awaices our Senses, and supports the Joke ; Surpriz'd we view thy dawning E.xcellence, Thy Tones and Gestures— all result from Sense. From hence transplanted to a brighter stage, (And Prophet may I be !) thou'lt charm the Age When Art, with delicate Experience join'd. Shall form thy Action and improve thy Mind, How wilt thou, perfect both in Voice and Mien, Add pointed Beauties to the painted Scene? Thus far, then, it has appeared that in the first six years of Fielding's literary life he looked to Bartholomew Fair as a source of income. Fresh to his work, dependent wholly on his ingenuity for bread, and only twenty-one years old, he found London astir with the fame of Gay's operatic jest A. n. 1734. Fielding's Booth at the George Inn. 325 and speculated safely in the establishment of a booth in the George Inn Yard, wherein he also might profit by the crowding of the public to the Beggar's Opera. The specu- lation was inevitably profitable, and by the George Inn Yard, Fielding abided. Next year he looked for profit to a reproduction with some colourable alterations, of the Hay- market novelty, the Beggar's Wedding, and engaged from the Haymarket its chief actor in the piece. The Haymarket people, thougli the piece had not been written for them, resented this possession of their chosen ground, ran their own play against Fielding's in the Fair, and battled with him for possession of the truant actor. The actor, doubtless, though announced to play in both the booths, played only at the George, for we find him from this date struck off the list of the Haymarket Company. There was perhaps temper concerned in the fact that when, next year, Drury Lane also seized upon the Beggaj^s Wedding, Fielding appeared in it as actor. But at the Fair in that next year, determined to avoid a repetition of unprofitable contest, he was cheering the heart of the Drury Lane Prompter by producing a play of his composition, an entirely new play, and himself acting before the Fair in one of its parts. The jests that the Fair needed, he furnished then and afterwards, not by the usual buffooneries, but by adapting for his booth the gayest of the comedies of Moliere. In this adventure he was pros- perous, for- in the next year he produced another of the prompter's plays. In the fifth year of his booth management he entertained the Fair with a piece which seems to have been of his own devising, called the Earl of Essex, and with another jest from Moliere adapted by himself That his booth by this time had become famous for the good amusement he provided, is attested by this paragraph from the Daily Post of the 30th of August, 1732 : — " Yesterday the Prince and Princess went to Bartholomew Fair, and saw Mr. Fielding's celebrated Droll called the Earl of Essex and the Forced Physician, and were so well pleased as to stay to see it twice performed.'" A paragraph suggestive not only of the strength of Fielding, but of the strength also that yet abided by the Fair. Still renting the George Inn Yard at the next Bartholomew Fair, Fielding's booth became more 326 Mevioirs of Bartholo^new Fair. chap. xxi. than ever famous through the brilUant reputation suddenly acquired in it by Mrs. Pritcliard. But that was not the closing year of the career of Fielding as a booth-keeper. In 1734, he was again at Bartholomew Fair, for the seventh time manager of the booth in the Yard of the George Inn. Mrs. Pritchard, who in the interval liad won lier place at Drury Lane, did not withdraw herself from her first hearty and effectual public friends. It was then " Fielding and Oates's Great Theatrical Booth in the George Inn Yard, West Smithfield, during the time of Bartholomew L'air." The play was Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, without interpolation of buffoonery. Then followed a new ballad opera, the Constant Lover, in which Gates was Ragout, Mr. Stoppelaer played the part of Springgame, and Mrs. Pritchard was the Cloe. There were dances, postures, kettle-drums. The performances were continued every day from one o'clock until eleven. Even now we have not traced to the end this essential feature in the life of the great Master of all Novelists. The next year, 1735, i^ that in which the Court of Aldermen came to a " final resolve touching Bartholomew Fair, that the same shall not exceed Barthomew's Eve, Bartholomew's Day, and the Day after ; and that during that time nothing but stalls and booths shall be erected for the sale of goods, wares, and merchandise, and no acting be permitted." They had come to many such resolves at divers times, but the passive resistance of the showmen was too strong for them ; an energetic Mayor might compel obedience in this year or that, but the fourteen day Fair had recovered from all corporate attacks, chiefly because there was no law sharp enough for use against rebellious players. But in 1735 there was an energetic Mayor, Sir John Barnard, who could defy a premier and compel obedience from a showman ; and shortly afterwards the Licensing Act became a law, which reduced all unlicensed players to the grade of vagrants, over whom the Magistrate had a despotic power. That Act at last gave to the City Magistracy power enough to command obedience. For this reason it happens that after the year 1735 Bartholomew Fair could be restrained, actually and not nominally, to the original limit of three days. Neverthe- \- " ^iy:)-yi . Fieldinc^'' s Booth at the Geori^c Inn. 327 .ess, after a {q.\n years it again had broken bounds, and had to be confined again in the year 1750. A complete interdict upon stage plays was in each year the personal act of the Mayor, and valid only in his mayoralty. In 1735 they were forbidden ; Fielding, therefore, was not at the George Inn Yard, nor were there any other players in the Fair. Had there not been an interdict, Fielding, no doubt, still would have been absent, for that was the year of his marriage and retirement to the country. But before the next Bartholomew Fair, when for the three days stage plays were permitted, he was poor again, seeking a livelihood in London; and again, therefore, in the year 1736, he was to be found at his old quarters. It was then Melding and Hippisley's booth in the George Inn Yard. Don Carlos was repeated, and Moliere's Fourberies de Scapin adapted for the Fairgoer in search of " Humours," as the Cheats of Scapin. Faithful Mrs. Pritchard came also to the Fair again to serve her friend, taking a part in the Moliere piece, in her old part of Loveit, which reminded people of her earliest success. For the next year, record is wanting to me. In the accessible files of newspapers those are omitted Avhich contain the booth advertisements, and I have only two or three dated slips in the collections, among which there is no slip telling by whom the booth at the George Inn Yard was occupied. In the year following, Fielding having joined one of the Inns of Court, his name does not appear as manager of the booth in the George Yard. It was " Hallam's Booth," and the play acted was the Dragon of Wantky, to be played by the Company of Lilliputians from Drury Lane. After that date, it is obvious that Fielding looked no more to Bartholomew Fair for a portion of his income. If we may assume that Fielding occupied the George Inn Yard in 1737, then it is over ten years of his life that his connection with Bartholomew Fair must be said to extend. If we reject what is a most uncertain surmise, the certain fact remains, that for nine years of his life Fielding was connected with the Fair, making his name familiar in men's mouths as a booth proprietor ; year after year renting the same piece of ground ; holding it during Fair time, now with one actor, now with another, as his 2,28 Memoirs of Barthohnieiv Fair. chap. xxh. partner, in uninterrupted i^ossession during all that time ; and never absent from the Fair, except in the one year when all stage-playing was excluded. -This is something that entirely differs from the accidental partnership in a booth at the Fair, during the year of distress at Drury Lane, which induced even Gibber to appear upon a stage in Smithfield. In the Musical Companion or Ladies Magazine for 1741, are some verses, entitled A Trip to Bartholomav Fair. Though printed in 1741, they must have been written some time before, or founded on old memories. They begin by assuming that a wife steals out to the Fair during her hus- band's absence, in hope of finding a trustworthy spark. With him she savs, 1 would ramble The Fair all around ; I'd eat and I'd drink Of the best could be found. There's Fielding ard Dates, There's Hippesley and Hall, There's Bullock and Lee, And the Devil and all. Here Fielding's connection with the Fair is, to a con- temporary, so obvious, that his name is the first to come to mind in an enumeration. v.i). 1733.... State Papers. 3^9 CHAPTER XXII. ^tate papers. Although such monarchs of the stage as Betterton, Quin, and Garrick, were not induced by large profits and quick returns to perform six times a day before a Smithfield audience ; and although no actress of high standing, except, for good reason and in good company, Mrs. Pritchard, and in one year Mrs. -Gibber, brought her genius to market in the Fair ; yet had the Smithfield Drama certainly its golden age in the days of which we have been speaking and now speak. The three or four " Great Theatrical Booths " were, in fact, three or four playhouses, sustained by nearly all the favourite comedians of the day. The names of actors who had made themselves most clearly the favourites of the town by their drollery, served as attractive labels to the booths they managed. If, for the sake of illustration, Imay take a moment's libert}- with the names of actors living in our time, I should say that had they lived in the middle of the last century they would have established, without loss of professional or social credit, such Theatrical Booths m Bartholomew Fair as " Robson's and Keeley's," or " Buck- stone's, Compton's, and Wright's;" and that they would have acted pieces altered or written to suit the occasions of the Fair in association rather with their brother actors of the playhouse, than with the strolling players who were left a few years later in the sole possession of the booths. We have seen that a Smithfield Theatre was in those days able to attract to itselt Royal visitors. Two playhouses, at least, were closed during the Fair, and their audiences flocked into Smithfield for amusement. That a large part of the audience in one of the principal Theatrical Booths was composed of 330 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxh. the regular play-goers is suggested by the fact when, in 1733, Gibber the younger announced from the stage in the Fair, that on the 20th of September next following, the Hay- iiarket Theatre would be opened with Congreve's Love for Love, such an announcement made in that place was received with strong applause. Of course there was also in the Fair the party of the Pig- Woman to be considered, and the rough English mob, raw n)aterial of the more polished English people, which has a predominant delight in jesters. I believe that the quiet love of what is best called " fun," in which the Englishman stands high above all rivalry, and his quick instinct for the ridicu- lous, which is a part of it, have been even more serviceable than his patriotism in checking dangerous extravagance and keeping safe sense uppermost in public writing and in public action. If there had been no spirit of fun in us, we might have gone to ruin in one Revolution ; and then, good patriots as we all are, have clashed about the fragments of our constitution in the chaos of a dozen revolutions more. Therefore I look with no contempt at all the fooleries of Bartholomew Fair. The jack-puddings are gone, but we have still good store of clowns every Christmas, and the nation is the stronger for its power of enjoying them. The ■' Humours interspersed " at the Fair with tales of Rome and Babylon, still live in the farces and burlesques which keep us merry at the theatres. We practise ourselves well in laughter over feigned absurdities, and we in the mean- time learn to subdue with laughter also real absurdities of life, which, in a nation holding itself to be wiser for its want of foolishness, would prompt only to follies that occasion tears and groans. Then let us not stand aloof magnificently from the nonsense of the Fair. The ludicrous things to be read in the Manifestoes of its Ministers of Pleasure, are in the worthiest sense State Papers to us, if we understand them thoroughly. Such State Papers have done more good to England than will ever be done to her neighbour country by the programmes, with no fun in them, proceeding from the manager, who, regardless of expense, has produced the Tragi-Comedy of " the Empire " at his great Theatrical Booth somewhere in Paris. It is wiser as well as merrier to A. n. 1 736-38. ^ State Papers. 331 have at Bartholomew Fair than at Westminster a Dragon of Wantley represented by a Company of Lilliputians. Having thus claimed due respect for them, I shall produce some more Bartholomew State Papers. A just interest in Henry Fielding makes it right that we should clearly know what the Fair was when he was part of it, and how, there- fore, his booth-keeping touches our impression of his character. The George Inn Yard and the ground facing the Hospital gate were the two principal sites for a Smithfield playhouse. In (1736) the hrst year of plays after the reduction of the Fair to its original three days, the only Great Booth, except Fielding and Hippisley's, was Hallam and Chapman's, where, as the managers mournfully announced, ''during the Short 'J'ime of Bartholomew Fair, the performances con- sisted of Fair Rosamond and a Ballad Opera. In 1737, at Hallam's Great Booth, over against the Hospital Gate, the play was All Alive and Merry ^ with the surprising performances of various Tumblers and Posture masters, having French and Dutch names, also the Italian Shadows by "the best Masters from Italy, and which have not been seen here these Twenty years." The whole to conclude with a grand Ballet Dance call'd Le Badinage Champetre. "With a Complete Band of Musick of Haut- boys, Viohns, Trumpets, and Ketde Drums. All the Decorations entirely new. To begin every Day at One o'clock, and continue till eleven at Night. The F"air begins to-morrow at One o'Clock." In the same year at Yeates" Senior and Junior's Great Booth facing the Hospital Gate, the Artificial Moving Wax ■^ork, five feet high, presented tlie Lover his own Rival. There was also a machine coach and horses made by Mr. Cornues of France. Yeates' junior's dexterity of hand. Also the famous tumbler. All new. " Note. The Tap is to be lett." In 1738, at Penkethman's Great Theatrical Booth against the Hospital Gate, there was, " during the Short Time of Bartholomew Fair," a New entertainment called The Man's Be^c'iiched, or the Devil to Do About Her. Diego, Furioso's Man, Mr. Penkethman (the Younger). Added to this was Memoirs of Bai'tholomew Fair. chap. xxh. the Country Wedding or the Roving Shepherd, and an ex- traordinary Band of Music, not forgetting kettle-drums. Time i a.m. — ii p.m. At Hallam's Great Theatrical Booth in the George Inn Yard, a celebrated burlesque opera, The Dragon of Wanfky, was performed by the Lilliputian Com- pany from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. And during the time of filling the Booth, the famous Mons. Rapinese was to perform his surprising postures on the Stage. " Note the extraordinary band of music, Violins, Hautboys, Bassoons, Kettle-Drums, Trumpets, and French Horns. The Passage to the Booth will be commodiously illuminated with several large Moons and Lanthorns, for the Conveniency of the Company, and that Persons of Quality's coaches may drive up the yard. " The Fair begins to-morrow and will end on Saturday Night. Time, i— ii." In 1739, at Lee and Phillips' Great Theatrical Booth, corner of Hosier Lane, there were serious and comic enter- tainments. I. A Grand Scene of Cupid and Psyche. 2. A Scaramouch Dance by Mr. Phillips and others, which he perform'd at the Opera House in Paris, upwards of forty successive nights, with universal applause. 3. A Dialogue between Punch and Columbine. 4. The Drunken Peasant, by Mr. Phillips. To which was added, a Dramatic Panto- mime Entertainment, call'd Columbine Courtesan. Harlequin, Mr. Phillips from the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Colum- bine, Mrs. Phillips, Spaniard and Clown. The Booth at the George Inn was occupied that year by Hippisley, Chapman, and Legar, who played The Top of the Tree, with a (then famous) dog scene, and a Harlequinade of Perseus and Andromeda. A new taste for harlequinade was then predominant in the playgoer, and the Booths of the Fair made haste to take advantage of it. Hallam, opposite the Hospital Gate, played in this year Harlequin turned Philosopher and the Sailor's IVedding. In 1740, at the Booth in the George Yard, Hippisley and Chapman played the Cheats of Scapin, which Fielding had presented as a ballad opera, at a time when the Beggar's Opera had brought all kinds of Ballad opera into request, but which was presented now in accordance with the change A.D. 1739-40. Siatc Papers. 333 of taste that Rich estabUshed, as Harlequin Scapin. In this Booth, Hippisley, Oates, and Yates all acted. This ^Yas the bill :— " At Hippisley's and Chapman's G. T. B., in the George Inn, Sraithfield. Harlequin Scapin, or the Old One Caught in a Sack, with the Comical Tricks, Cheats, and Shifts of ScapiiCs Two Companions, Tim the Barber and Bounccaboiit the Bully. The part of Scapin by Mr. Hippisley ; Tim, Mr. Chapman ; Bounce- about, Mr. Arthur; . . . Slyboots, Mr. Yates. With entertainments of Singing and Dancing by Mr. Oates, . . . . Mr. Yates, Mrs. Phillips and others, particularly a new Whimsical and Diverting Dance called the Spanish Beauties. The whole to conclude with a new Musical Entertainment called The Parting Lovers, or the Frcss-ga?ig. The part of Tom Trueblue, by Mr. Bencroft ; Old Briton, Mr. Arthur ; Lieut. Dreadnought, Mr. Arthur ; Nancy, Mrs. Villeneuve. With a grand chorus accompanied by Violins, Bassoons, Hautboys, French Horns, Trumpets, and Ketde-Drums. Note. The Fair ends this Day." In the same year, Yeates and Flallam maintained separate booths opposite the Hospital Gate, one playing Orpheus and the Death of Eurydice, with the Metamorphoses of Harlequin, the other playing The Rambling Lover, with Comical Humours of Squire Softhead, his Man Bullcalf, Mother Catterwawl, and so forth. There was also a Great Theatrical Booth maintained in that year, by Fawkes, Pinchbeck, and Terwin. In the following year there Avas so large a muster of the players in the Fair, that we might suppose they had already conquered the three days' restriction, if they were not all advertising their performances for " the short time of Bartholomew Fair." Hippisley and Chapman were at the George Inn acting a Droll called The Devil of a Duke, with the Comical Humours of Capt. Tipple. Hallam from Covent Garden had Fair Rosamond ; another Hallam pro- duced Rope Dancers and Tumblers. Fawkes and Pinch- beck had a working model of the ingenious clockmaker's manufacture, advertised as " the true and exact Siege of Cartagena,"' with an announcement that " Before the Siege begins, will be spoken and given gratis the authenticated 1 -7 4- Memoirs of Bartholomew Pair. chap. xxn. Speech of the Admiral ; " — a reflection again of the great world in the Fair, thrown back, not from the passions of the people, but from the mechanical skill in which they had begun to excel and delight, and of which the Fair, therefore, now displayed abundant evidence. Fawkes and Pinchbeck promised a Comedy after the mechanism, and invited custom with a burlesque flourish meant for fun. The Comedian Yates, in this year, 1741, appears for the first time as a manager at Bartholomew Fair, where he was destined to be very popular : In characters of low and vulgar mould, Where nature's coarsest features we behold, Where destitute of every decent grace, Unmanner'd jests are blurted in your face, There Yates with justice strict attention draws, Acts truly from himself and gains applause. In the Fair, if anywhere, he could earn that opinion from Churchill. We have seen that he made his first appearance there in the preceding year. This year he ruled the booth of Turbutt and Yates, opposite the King's Head and Grey- hound, where, after the dramatic pantomime of Thaiuas Koidi Kan, the Persian Hero — founded on news of the day from the East— he acted "a Drunken Epilogue, in the character of an English Sailor." English sailors now, in war time, begin to form an important and liberal part of the public at the Fair, and performances not seldom con- clude with a tribute to them in a grand scene of the Temple of Neptune. Finally, there was in this year, the theatrical booth of Lee and Woodward, opposite tlie Hospital Gate, in which was to be seen Darius, King of Persia, or the Noble Engiiskman, with the Comical Humours of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, at the Siege of Babylon (!) Fielding, it will be seen, had parted altogether from the Fair. It was in the next year, 1742, that his first novel was issued. We pass on — crossing the blank year 1744, in which the Mayor and Aldermen of London again interdicted stage-plays at the Fair— to the year 1748, in which we find a hint of Smollett's ])opularity. The George Lm Yard was then occupied by Bridges, Cross, Barton, and Vaughan, A.n. 1748- State Papers. 335 with a Company from the Theatres Royal, and they acted An Historical Drama (on events comparatively recent), never acted before, called, the Northern Heroes, or the Bloody Contest between Charles the Twelfth, and Peter the Great, Czar of Muscovy, d^r., Interspersed with a Comic Interlude, never acted before, called the Volunteers, or the Adventures of Roderick Random, and his Friend Strap, with entertainments of dancing, &c. Boxes, 2x. bd. Pit, is. 6d. First Gallery, \s. Upper Gallery, 6d. New Dresses. Begin at 12. In the same year, Cousins and Reynolds, at the G T. B. over against Cow Lane, played the True and Ancient History of King Henry IV., or the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, &c., with several diverting Scenes between Squire Punch and his Man Gudgeon. Likewise there wa*s a beautiful representation of the Court of the Queen of Hungary in Waxwork, being the most beautiful figures in England, and as big as life. With Variety of dancing between the Acts. To conclude with the Italian Sword dancers, who had the honour to perform before His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, with great applause. Pit, \s. First Gallery, dd. Upper Gallery, 3^. In the same year we find reference to Foote, for by a Company of Comedians from the Theatres, after there had been performed for the delight of the sailors, at Hussey's G. T. B , facing the Hospital Gate, a new Droll, called the Constant Quaker, or the Hunwurs of Wapping ; there was singing and dancing, including " a new dance, called Punch's Maggot, or Poole's Vagaries, by Master Harrison and Master Dominique. Then a Pantomime, Harlequin's Frolics, or the Rambles of Covent Garden. " The whole to conclude with a magnificent Piece of Fireworks, never exhibited before, in Honour of the approaching Peace ; in which will be represented a superb Temple of Apollo, adorn'd with a grand Triumphal Arch, decorated and embellished with various Trophies of War ; to be accompanied with a chorus of vocal and instrumental music. Boxes, 2s. Pit, \s. Gallery, 6^/. To begin each day at Twelve o'clock." In that year also there Avas a show^ at the first house on the pavement from the end of Hosier Lane, which contained a Camel, a Hyaena, a Panther, a " young Oronutu Savage," 2,2,6 Memoirs of Bartholouieiv Fair. chap. xxh. and "the wonderful and surprising satyr, call'd by Latin authors, Pan." The genius of the Fair has not departed from it : still there is — The greatest Prodigy in Nature. To be seen during the Pair, on the Pavement, near the End of Cow-Lane, Smithfield, A most extraordinary Large Hog, near Twelve Feet long, and weighs 120 Stone. Being the most remarkable Sight ever offered to the Public. His Keeper is the amazing little Dwakf, Being the smallest Man in the World. Admittance only yi. each. The Hog is of all time. The next advertisment is pro- bably of older date than the year under which it is inserted. THE GERMAINE MASTERPIECE. BEING That F.\MOUS Kniffe, which hath been for some time in England, and highly applauded by y^ most Exquisite Artists, containing in the Haft sixty odd several Figures, some Engraved, others Carved, and all to the admi- ration of those that behold them ; it hath two Keys, which open seaven Locks, including those various Rarities contrived therein : it was seaven years a Making, and Valued by the Authour, that famous Artist of Germany, at Fifteene Hundred Pounds, and is now exposed to publique View, for Englands satisfaction. To be seen At Bartholomew Faire, against the King's Head, with other Rarities. By me, John Gifford. w- To the Nobihty and Gentry, and to all wlio are Admirers of the Extraordinary Productions of Nature. There is to be seen in a commodious Apartment, at the corner of Co.. - Lane, facing tlie Sheep-Pens, West Smithfield, During the short time of Bartholomew Fair, MARIA TERESIA, the Amazing Corsican Fairy, who has had the Honour of being shown three Times before their Majesties. Ig^ .She was exhibited in Cockspur-Street, Hay-market, at two-shillings and sixpence each Person ; but that Persons of every Degree may have a Sight of so extraordinary a Curiosity, she will be shown to the Gentry at sixpence each, and to Working People, Servants, and Children, at Three- pence, during this Fair. This most astonishing Part of the Human Species was born in the Island of Corsica, on the Mountain of Stata Ota, in the year 1743. She is only thirty-four Inches high, weighs but twenty-six Pounds, and a child of two Years of Age has larger Hands and Feet. Her surprising Littleness makes a strong Impression at first Sight on the Spectator's Mind. Nothing dis- agreeable, either in Person or Conversation, is to be found in her; although most of Nature's productions, in Miniature, are generally so in both. Her Form affords a pleasing Surprise, her Limbs are exceedingly well pro- portioned, her admirable Symmetry engages the attention ; and, upoi the A. p. 1749. S/n/c Papers. 2)2)1 whole, is acknowledged a perfect Beauty. She is possessed of a great dea of Vivacity of Spirit; can speak Italian and French, and gives the in- quisitive Mind an agreeable Entertainment. In short, she is the most extraordinary Curiosity ever known, or ever heard of in History ; and the Curious, in all countries where she has been shown, pronounce her to be tiie finest Display of Human Nature, in Miniature, they ever saw. *jt* She is to be seen, by any Number of Persons, from Ten in the Morning till Nine at Night. In 1749, Cross and Bridges, opposite the Hospital Gate, announced in the General Advertizer, that they would pre- sent a new Dramatic Droll, called the Fair Litnatick, or the Generous Sailor. Being founded on a Story in Real Life, as related in the Memoirs of Mrs. Constantia Phillips. In which will be introduc'd a new Scene of Bedlam, call'd Modern Madness, or, A Touch at the Times. Interspers'd with a merry interlude, call'd the Jovial Jack Tars, with the Comical Humours of Nurse Prate and Will Bowling, the Jovial Tars ; as also of Jack Handspike, Nick Hatchway, and Simon Buckely, Sailors ; with Mary the Chambennaid, Susan of the Dairy ; Kate of the Kitchen, and Nan the Spinner. The whole to conclude with the Jubilee Ball, dances, trumpets, and kettledrums. In the same year, Yeates was alone, opposite the George Inn, with the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, and the Bottle Conjuror out-done. He was also opposite the Hospital Gate (during the short time of Bartholomew Fair), with Lee and \\'arner, acting the History of Whittingtoji " per- form'd in the same manner as it was by Mrs. Lee, fifteen years ago." Also in this year, " Yates from the Theatre Royal />/ Drury Lane," had the (jreat Theatrical Booth in the George Inn, and performed according to announcement in the General Ativertizer, A New, Pleasant, and Diverting Droll, call'd the Descent of the Heathen Gods, w^ith the Loves of Jupiter and Alcmena ; or Cuckoldom no Scandal. Interspersed with several Diverting Scenes, laoth Satyrical and Comical, particularly the Surprising Metamorphosis of Jupiter and Mcrcioy : the very remarkable I'ryal before Judge Puzzle- cause, witli many Learned Arguments on both Sides, to prove that One can't be Two. Likewise the Adventures and whimsical Perplexities of Gormand'ne Simple the Hungarian Footman ; with the wonderful Con- versation he had with, and the dreadful Drubbing he received from, Bis Own Apparition : together with the Intriaues of Dorothy Sqiieezep>urse\.\\Q Wanton C'hamberi»aid, _ ^;i,8 Memoirs of Bartholomen' Fair. chap. xxn. Aiid so forth , very much reminding us of Hero a Wench o' the Bankside, who was spied by Leander landing at Trig- stairs. The part of Jupiter was by Mr. Oates. Mr. Yates mixed with the Heathen Gods as the Hungarian Footman, and Miss Hippisley was Dorothy the Chambermaid. The last booth-bill belonging to this school of Bartholo- mew Fair drama that I care to quote, is that issued in the same year of the Fair by "Gushing, from the Theatre Royal /;/ Covent Garden." His booth was opposite the King's Head, Smithfield, and he also announced in the General Advertizer^ with special emphasis, that it was during the Short Time of Bartholomew Fair, he meant to present " The Tragical History of the Life and Death of King John. Interspersed with a Comic Piece, call'd the Adventures of Sir Lubberly Lackbrains, and His Man Blunderbuss. The Tragedy contains the barbarous con- trivances of King John, against his Nephew, Prince Arthur; his method of persuading Hubert to undertake the cruel Murder of that Youth ; the Sufferings of Arthur in his con- finement, where Hubert attempts to put out his eyes, with Red-hot Iron " &c. " The comic contains the exquisite Drolleries of Sir Lubberly," and includes a Tom Rash, a Jeffery Holdfast, and a Moll Tatler. Sir Lubberly, Mr. Gushing ; Lady Constance, Mrs. Gushing ; Prince Arthur, by Miss Yates, from Drury Lane. " Violins, Hautboys, Bassoons, Tnmipets, Kettledrums." There is a man here named Ford, who was famous in Bartholomew Fair and in London by the name that his cry gave him, of Tiddy Doll the Gingerbread Baker. His dis- appearance from his usual station in the Haymarket in 1752 (when he was gone among the country fairs) gave rise to a Grub-street halfpenny account of his murder, which pro- duced a week's wealth to its publisher. The annexed sketch of him is by Hogarth, who introduces him into the picture of the Idle Apprentice executed at Tyburn. After a {&\\ years, one more of the best com.edians of this generation, became famous also as a booth-manager in Smithfield. Yates in the Fair was soon followed by Edward Shuter: A.D. 1749-52. State Papers. 339 Shuter who never cared a single pin Whether he left out nonsense or put in. It is a hard fate for the actors of a hundred years ago, that their features come most readily to mind in the sharp hnes with which Churchill drew them in The diosciaii. Shuter, it is to be remembered, was the man who took the thrust into his ribs with the best humour. In him the line of true comedians acting at the Fair became extinct, but while he played he ruled there, for he was the darling of the crowd : From galleries loud peals of laughter roll, And thunder Shuiers praises — he's so droll. 340 Memoirs of Bartholouiew Fail', chap. xxii. In 1760, when The Rosciad \i^.% written, he was monarch of the Smithfield stage, on which the Satirist bade Murphy seek his proper throne : A vacant throne, high placed in Smithfield, view. To sacred Dulness and her first-born due. Thither with haste in happy hour repair ; Thy birthright claim, nor fear a rival there. Slniter himself shall own thy juster claim, And venal Ledgers puff their Murphy's name ; While Vaughan, or Dapper, call him which you will, Shall blow the trumpet and give out the bill. A writer in the St. James's C/ironide (March 24, 1791) wished to place upon record the fact, that it was Shuter who, in the year 1759, when Master of a Droll in Smith- field, invented a way, since become general at Fairs, of informing players in the booth when they may drop the curtain and dismiss the company, because there are enough people waiting outside to form another audience. The man at the door pops in his head and makes a loud inquiry for John Audlev?" There lived about this time a popular Merry-Andrew, who sold Gingerbread nuts in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, and because he received a guinea a-day for his fun during the Fair, he was at pains never to cheapen himself by laughing, or by noticing a joke, during the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the year. In 1760, there was still enough life in the Smithfield drama to give expectation of a Smithfield Rosciad from Chin-chill. But very soon afterwards, the History of the English Stage parted entirely from the Story of the Fair. No actor of note appeared in a booth after Shuter's time. Garrick's name is connected with the Fair only by stories that regard him as a visitor out of another world. He ofifLrs his money at the entrance to a Theatrical booth, and it is thought a jest worth transmitting to posterity, that he is told by the check-taker, " We never takes money of one another." He sees one of his own sturdy Drury Lane porters installed at a booth door, when he is pressed sorely in the crowd and calls for help. "It's no use," he is told, "I can't help you. There's very few people in Smithfield as knows Mr. Garrick off tlie stage."' The great actor was in A.n. I759-60. State Papers. 341 the Fair simply a little man, born to be always worsted lu the crush. Bartholomew Fair did indeed witness some 01 the first flashes of the genius of Edmund Kean, as Master Carey, and may also have seen him, as tradition says it did, with no known father, and a doubtful mother, falling as a boy-rider, in the circus, and receiving the hurt to his leg of which the mark remained in later years ; but I have sought in vain among its state papers for any mention of the name of " Master Carey." The playhouse of the Fair left to itself by the playhouse of the Town, had no more royalty of rank or wit before the curtain. Every year it sank, till it had fairly suited itself to the taste of its new public. Absurd and wretched as were the pieces played in Yates's and Shuter's time, yet it was certainly a notable fall when the Bartholomew Addison tumbled into a pit full of skeletons, and murderers, and spectre brides, out of the company of Cephalus and Procris, or Orpheus and Eurydice, even though Squire Gawky intruded there, and Master Ferg performed a solo on the kettle-drums. Smithfield, no longer in the suburbs, had not only been hemmed in by the growth of London until it had become a central point in the Metropolis, but it chanced also that it was immediately hemmed in by regions, black with neglected ignorance, in which were some of the most famous haunts of London thieves. By every thief living in London, Bar- tholomew Fair was regarded as an annual performance for his benefit; and all the ignorance and vice of the town, poured therefore, as it had always done, into the Fair : but the town was become larger, the tide of evil in it fuller and stronger, and the old breakwaters were gone. Decency did indeed go to the Fair to buy toys, and enjoy the outside gaiety of all its bustle ; but its recesses were left usually un- explored by creditable visitors, and showmen were left to discover, that an ignorant and vicious rabble was the public by whose pleasure they must live. One evidence of this we shall find in the fiict that, during the last years of liar- tholomew Fair, nearly all the shows charged but a single penny for admission. But in the year 1760, there was outside Smithfield still a taste that made some corners of it, in due season, an Elysium 342 Meinoirs of Bartholomeiv Fair. chap. xxti. to the fashionable. " These people," said Goldsmith's Citi- zen Philosopher, writing in that year, " are not more fond of wonders than liberal in rewarding those who show them A fellow shall make a fortune by toss- ing a straw from his toe to his nose ; one in particular has found that eating fire was the most ready way to live ;" This is the man g^ His name was Powell. " and another, who jingles several bells fixed to his cap, is the only man that I know of, who has received emolument from the labours of his head." This is the man i|^~ His name was Roger Smith. I have no wish to be the show- man's Plutarch. Details of the last and least interest- ing part of the Fair's history are those which most abound, but the main facts illus- trated by them A.D. 1760. State Papers. 343 are few in number. The accidental excess of materiaf must not diveit our attention from the plan and purpose ol the history we build. The roof is not to be as large as the house, because we chance to have more tiles than bricks at our disposal. One use, however, it will be worth while to make of the increased mass of documents connected with the last days of the Fair. In these last days, as ordinary arts of life advanced in England, picture makers multiplied, and showmen indulged freely in cheap illustrations to their handbills. Comic engravings also found both publishers and purchasers in plenty. Therefore it is now easy to tell much to the eye that formerly was to be told only through the ears, and from this new advantage we must get what benefit we can. A Fair is full of sights, and we must use our eyes as much as possible before we leave it ;44 Mcinoij^s of Bartholomeiu Fair. chap. xxm. CHAPTER XXIII. X'ast gears of lljc Conbtmncb. Old custom had established that as the civic procession passed, on its way to Cloth Fair, under Newgate, it passed while the keeper of that prison drank to the Mayor in what is usually described as " a cool tankard," but is more par- ticularly defined in the Weekly "younial or British Gazetteer for the Fair time in 1728, as "a lemonade." It is defined, however, as a " cup of sack, &c.," in a newspaper for September, 1779. Doubtless, it was a very comfortable lemonade. Sir John Shorter, Mayor in 1688, and maternal grandfather to Horace Walpole, let the lid of the tankard fall with a click that startled the horse, and caused the rider a fall of which he died. Succeeding Mayors changed, there- fore, the new saddle for the State Coach, and lumbered in it to the Fair, where they were received, again according to old custom, by three strokes from the bells of St. Bartholo- mew. The State Coach at first traversed Cloth Fair, but after the time of Alderman Bull's Mayoralty, it was left in the street, and the Mayor walked through the adjoining house of a Smithfield tradesman into the gateway between Smithfield and Cloth Fair, which was the place of proclama- tion. The proclamation was read in the Mayor's presence by a clerk, who then announced whether his Lordship would allow stage plays and interludes. If he forebade them, yells and riots followed. If he allowed them, all the drums, kettle-drums, and trumpets, wild men and wild beasts in the Fair, clashed and roared to their satisfaction. There remained a memorial of the ancient privileges of A. n. 1 752-54. Last Years of the Condemned. 345 the Priory, in a toll payable to the representatives of the Rich Family, from those who brought goods to the Fair in West Smilhfield. The Earldoms of Warwick and Holland, together with the Barony of Kensington, became extinct in the year, 1759, in the person of Edward Rich, cousin and heir male of the Earl, whose mother had married Joseph Addison. But Francis Edwardes married a daughter of the house of Rich, and their son William Edwardes became in default of the direct line, heir to its estates. This William was created, in 1776, Baron Kensington of the Peerage of Ireland, and the inheritors of his barony inherited also his rights over Bartholomew Fair. Even as late as the year 1826, when the collectors of Lord Kensington were resisted in an attempt to levy toll for standings even outside Smithfield, in Giltspur Street, the claim so made was regarded not as an unjust but as a doubtful one. But on behalf of the citizens of London, in the year 1752, a leather-seller in Newgate-street, Mr. Richard Holland, resolved to claim immunity from toll. On the first day of the Fair in that year, Mr. Holland entered it carrying under his arm a small bundle of leather, and when this was seized for the fee by a Toll collector, Mr. Holland fetched a constable to take him into custody for an unlaw- ful invasion of the rights of citizens. On the 30th of June in the next year, there was a large crowd assembled at Guildhall, to hear the trial of the case between Mr. Richard Holland, plaintiff, and the Proprietors of the Bartholomew Fair Toll, defendants. Objection was made on the part of the defence to a jury of citizens, and the cause was post- poned, but it was determined at Guildhall, on the 17th of July, 1754, in favour of the right claimed for the citizens. At the Fair time in 1753, while the question in dispute still remained open, on Monday the 3rd of September— Mr. Richard Holland's cart, loaded with hay, passed unmolested by the Toll collectors at Smithfield Bars and Pye Corner into Bartholomew Fair. On one of the Horses' foreheads was fixed a writing, and round his neck a halter dressed with flowers. On the front of the Hay another writing was fixed, with a halter hanging by the side of it. As the Crowd might prevent many persons from reading the two papers, 346 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxm. Mr. Holland made his appearance in good time before the Cart, and read his poems to the populace. On the Horse's forehead he had inscribed : My master keeps me well, 'tis true, And justly pays whatever is due. Now, plainly, not to mince the matter. No Toll he pays, but with a Halter. On the Hay was written : The Time is approaching, if not already come, That all British Subjects may freely pass on ; And not on pretence because it's Bartholomew Fair, Make you pay for your passage with all you bring near. When once it is try'd, ever after depend on. Will incur the same fate as on Finchley Common. Give Caesar his due, when by law 'tis demanded. And those that deserve, with this Halter be hanged. To complete the story of this civic patriot and poet, 1 have only to add that on the 9th of August, 1758, at the Election of Sheriffs, Richard Holland, Esq., Leather Seller in Newgate Street, was proposed, but pleaded incapacity on account of his advanced age. He was then 69 years old, and in his address to the livery set forth that "he had been always a zealous asserter of the rights and privileges of the Corporation, and had not been sparing of either time or money on that account." He died in 1760, worth a quarter of a million, and left 5000/. to the person by whom he was first placed out in the world. It was a part of the Mayor's duty when he proclaimed the Fair, to open formally the Court of Piepowder, which was a part of the Fair to the end. Its efficiency was in- creased by the Act, 19 Geo. in., cap. 70, which secured that against the decisions of the Piepowder Courts a writ of error might lie in the nature of an appeal to the Courts of Westtninster, and that such Courts should have the riglit to issue writs of execution, in aid of their process after judg- ment, where the person or effects of the defendant were not in the Fair, and therefore beyond the ancient limits of their jurisdiction. The officers of the Piepowder Court vvere — ■ until some years before the close of the seventeenth century. A. D. 1758. • Last Years of the Coiidanned. .•)4/ but never later — an Associate, who was the Common Ser- jeant or one of the Attorneys of the Mayor's or Sheriff's Court ; six Sergeants at Mace (two for the Mayor, two for the Poultry, and two for the Giltspur Street Compters) ; and in later days, a Constable appointed by the steward of Lord Kensington to attend on his behalf Its jury was termed "the Homage." In the year 1804, a newspaper reports an action brought in the Fair, before the Court of Piepowder on the 5th of September, by a fire-eater against one of the spectators of his tripks, who had half suffocated him by suddenly clapping a bundle of lighted matches under his nose. The defendant was fined a guinea by the Homage, and the Steward gave charge to the constables to turn the man out of the Fair if he appeared in it again. The appearance of the Court of Piepowder is represented in the subjoined picture. The case before the Court is a dispute between several members of a Grand Theatrical Booth. 34S Metnoirs of Bartholomew Fail', chap. xxhi. The degeneration of these booths is forcibly shown in another sketch which displays Proteus and his Brother Actors taking refreshment during the short interval between the performances at Bartholomew Fair. After the Mayor had made proclamation of the Fair and opened the Piepowder Court, it was usual for him to station at the Ram Inn one of the City Marshals and a strong body of Constables to keep the peace. The City Marshal, when the Fair was over, gathered from the showmen fees for his services in this respect, varying from one guinea to three from each proprietor. His services, however, were not in the highest degree valuable. The constables of old had never dared to cope with Lady Holland's Mob. And yet upon the establish- ment of a good system of City Police, it was suppressed at will, and so came to its end before the Fair of which it had so long remained a formidable feature. This Mob made, with an orderly and solemn form of words, its premature and illegal jjroclamalion. This was the form of it : " The Form of the Proclamation for Proclaiming TJie Fair of Saint Bartholomew : at 12 o'clock of the Night Pre- A.U...I750... Last Years of the Condemned. 349 viouij to the Day on which it is Proclaimed By the Lord Mayor of London, O yez ! O yez ! O yez I All manner of persons may take notice that in the Close of Saint Bartholomew the Great and West Sniithfield, London, and the streets, lanes, and places adjoining, is now to be held a Fair for this dav and the two days followiny;, to which all people may freely resort and buy and sell according to the Liberties and Privileges of tie said Fair, and may depart without disturb;! ncc, paying their duties. And all persons are strictly charged and commanded in His Majesty's name, to keep the peace, and to do nothing in the disturbance of the said Fair, as they will answer the contrary at ihcir peril, and that there be no m&nner of arrest or arrests, but by such officers as are appointed : And if any person be aggrieved, let them repair to the Court of l-'ie-Powder, where they will have speedy relief, according to J ustice and Equity. God savf, the King." The Mob proceeded then to break the peace. In the year 1735, three armed horsemen met the proclaimers at night, in Long Lane. "Smugglers ! Smugglers 1 " was the cry. The Horsemen turned and fled ; the Mob following in a wild hunt through the streets, and therein accounting itself faithful servant of the law. But its ordinary character is not ill represented by the record of its behaviour in 1802, when its members abused, knocked down, or robbed, almost every person they met ; knocked down a carpenter who came to his door with a light ; snatched a watch from a tradesman who was at his own door, and beat him seri- ously with bludgeons upon his endeavouring to seize the thief Those who came with lights to their windows were assailed with volleys of stones, and " it was impossible for the watchmen '" to secure even one offender. The course of this narrative again follows the order of the years. In 1750, Alderman Blackford, being Mayor, proclaimed in the middle of July his determination to reduce the Fair to its original three days, and to use the powers of the Licensing Act (10 Geo. IL) for the more effectual punish- ment of rogues and vagabonds. He acted upon the repre- sentation of more than a hundred of the chief graziers, salesmen, and inhabitants of Smithfield, who complained that the " insolent violation of the law "' by the fair people, not only encouraged profligacy, but also obstructed business for six weeks : the time occupied in putting up and taking 350 Memoirs q/ Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxm. down the booths being a time also of great hindrance to the usual Smithfield marketing and trading. The Mayor and Aldermen resolved that this should be suppressed ; and from this year the real suppression of the Fair as a fourteen day riot, may be dated. In the same year, there was at No. 20, Hosier Lane, during the time of the Fair, " the Wonderful and Astonish- ing Arabian Poney," who could count the spots on cards, and tell the time to a minute b\- the watch of any visitor. He could find out particular persons, and do other clever things before an audience that had paid for admission six- pences and threepences. In 1752, JSIr. Birch, Deputy Marshal, died of a beating received in the Fair, and a detected pickpocket was very roughly treated. Evans, a rope-dancer, fell from a wire in the George Yard, and broke his thigh. In that year there was " At the Greyhound in West Smithfield, the famous Italian Female Samson, who has been applauded in Courts of Europe and in England at last Bristol Fair. Walks barefoot on a bar of red-hot iron. A block of marble, 2 or 3 thousand weight, on her person, she will throw to a distance of 6 feet without using her hands. She puts her head on one chair, and feet on another, and bears six large men from her stomach to her instep. Performs from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Pit, I.5-. Gallery, 6^." In 1752, occurred an event that worked strongly in aid of the Licensing Act to secure permanence to the restriction of time for the Fair. The alteration of the Calendar trans- formed in that year the third of September into the four- teenth, to the consternation of the million who thought themselves defrauded of so many days' work and income, and shouted " Give us back our Eleven Days ! " Old Bartholomew's Day thus stood at a new date in the Calendar; and in the follomng year, 1753, the Fair that jvas associated with it, also passing out of the Month of August, was proclaimed — tlien and from that time forward — on the third of September. From the third of September onward a fourteen day Fair would have carried Smithfield Revels to an unaccustomed date. Its first days had been effectually severed from it, but use and habit were against A. u. 1752-60. Last }'rars of the Condemned. 351 addition to its last days of a period with which it seemed At no time to have been associated. A rough instinct against innovation came, therefore, in aid of the endeavours of the London Corporation. The " Ups and Downs" in the Fair broke down in 1754, but none of the persons who fell with them were seriously hurt. The Mob seized and burnt them, and to make the better bonfire, burnt also the chairs, tables, and other pro- properties of the black-pudding sellers. In the year following, four or five boys from Bridewell escaped into the Fair. In a subsequent year, for such a cause, a crowd of people out of Smithfield, mobbed the gates of Bridewell, and knocked down officers of the place who came out to speak to them. In 1758, we find a writer in the Chronicle, complaining of the conduct of the rabble at Bartholomew Fair, which bawled " King George for Ever ! " while knocking down every person who came in their way, and behaving other- wise in an outrageous manner. A sad little fragment from the life of the Fair in the following year, further illustrates the dark side of its character. A woman with a child in her arms went into a public-house there, and called for a pint of beer. About the payment for this there ensued a quarrel, and the drawer, striking at the woman, struck the child and killed it on the spot. On the third of December, in the year 1760, the London Court of Common Council referred it to its City Land's Committee to consider the Tenures of the City Fairs, with a view to their abolition. The subject was then carefully discussed, and a final report sent in, with the opinions of counsel, upon which the Court came to a Resolution, that our Lady Fair at Southwark, over which they had the sole control, should be thenceforward abolished ; but that, be- cause of the interest of Lord Kensington in Bartholomew Fair, that was a nuisance which they could endeavour only by a firm practice of restriction to abate. In 1760, George the Third came to the throne, and in the year following, Shuter presented at his booth hi the Fair, the Triumph of Hymen, a j\Iasc[ue, with the landing of the Queen. (It was printed in AMgnell's Poems, 1762.) 352 Memoirs of BartJiolomeiu Fair. chap. xxm. The Court of Common Council recommended, in the Mayoralty of Sir Samuel Fludyer (1762), that plays should be interdicted at the Fair; and at the legal close of the Fair time, the Mayor sent constables to prevent its unlaw- ful continuance. There can be no doubt whatever, that in all this contest with the people of the Fair, the London Corpo- ration fought the battle of good order, and deserved well of the citizens ; but, as regards the players, certainly the battle was at times fought with ungenerous severity. Sometimes, as in this year, the announcement that there were to be no plays, was not made until after poor men, who were strug- gling for a livelihood, had incurred expense in the erection of stages which they suddenly were ordered not to use. A comedian in 1762, had paid to an innkeeper, forty pounds for the right to erect a booth upon his ground, and had begun to build. But when the interdict appeared, the pub- lican retained the money and dispute arose. It was decided that the money paid by him to the innkeeper, should be returned to the comedian, and that the comedian was to pay for the booth he had begun. These measures also pressed severely against innkeepers, in whose rents Bartholomew Fair perquisites had been considered by the landlord. The following was, in the year 1762, A Description of Bartholomew Fair in London. By George Alexander Stevens : While gentlefolks strut in their silver and satins, We poor folks are tramping in straw hat and pattens ; Yet as merrily old English ballads can sing-o, As they at their opperores outlandish ling-o ; Calling out bravo, ankcoro, and caro, Thof I will sing nothing but Barllemew fair-o. Here was, first of all, crowds against other crowds driving, Like wind and tide meeting, each contrary striving ; Shrill fiddling, sharp fighting, and shouting and shrieking. Fifes, tnmipets, drums, bagpipes, and barrow girls squeaking, Come my rare round and sound, here's choice of fine ware-o, Though all was not sound sold at Bartleniew fair-o. There was drolls, hornpipe dancing, and showing of postures. With frying black-puddings; and op'ning of oysters ; Witli salt-boxes solos, and gallery folks squawling ; The taphouse guests roaring, and mouthpieces bawling, Pimps, pawnbrokers, strollers, fat landladies, sailors, Bawds, bailiffs, jilts, jockies, thieves, tumblers, and taylors. A.i\ijt2-:e. Last Years of tJie CQitdenincd. m Here's Punch's whole play of the gun-powder plot, Sir, With beasts all alive, and pease-porridge all hot, Sir ; Fine sausages fry'd, and the black on the wire, The whole court of France, and nice pig at the fire. Here's the up and downs ; who'll take a seat in the chair-o ? Tho' there's more up and downs than at Bartlemew fair-o. Here's Whittington's cat, and the tali dromedar}', The chaise without horses, and queen of Hungary : Here's the merry-go-rounds, come who rides, come who rides. Sir? Wine, beer, ale and cakes, fire-eating besides. Sir ; The fam'd Icarn'd dog that can tell all his letters. And some men, as scholars, are not much his betters. The world's a wide fair, where we ramble 'mong gay things ; Our parsons, like children, are tempted by play-things ; By sound and by show, by trash and by trumpery. The fal-lals of fashion and Frenchify'd frumpery. What is hfe but a droll, rather wretched than rare-o ? And thus ends the ballad of Bartlemew fair-o. In 1769, not only were plays and puppet-shows prohi- bited, but seventy-two officers were appointed to prevent all gambling within the Fair, and to see all places of resort in it clear by eleven o'clock at night. At this period of the Fair's history, the great Wild Beast Show in the Fair was Pidcock's, consisting of animals brought from the Menagerie in Exeter Change. Pidcock, whose charge for admission was a shilling, afterwards gave up attending, and to his place of honour there succeeded a Wild Beast Showman named Polito. Miles was another chief of a menagerie. There was a fine collection of stuffed birds and beasts exhibited between the years 1779 and 1782, by " the ingenious Mr. Hall of the City Road, Islington." In 1775, ^"^ account of profits of the Mayoralty, delivered to Alderman Wither on his taking ofiice, shows that the profits of the Fair no longer formed an element in the Chief Magistrate's official income. In lieu of it there are set down, "two Freedoms yearly," value twenty-five pounds each. In that year a Turkish artist danced on a rope thirty-eight feet high above the ground. Alderman Bull, Mayor in 1776, who was re-elected two years aiterwards, was a tea-dealer in Leadenhall Street, and a leading man among City Dissenters, attached warmly to Wilkes and Liberty. As he refused to permit the erection of booths for shows during his Mayoralty, the mob broke A A 354 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap, xxm.- the windows of almost every inhabitant of Smithfield. Alderman Sawbridge also, when Mayor, suppressed the shows, and riot was the consequence. In 1778, a foreigner exhibited at Bartholomew Fair curious serpents from the East, who danced on silk ropes to the sound of music. Flockton, who was nearly throughout the last half of the eighteenth century one of the great showmen of Bartholo- mew Fair, was at this time in his meridian splendour. He was the Prince of Puppet-showmen, and his puppets were called the Italian Fantoccini. He had also at one time a fine-. Newfoundland, whom he taught to fight with and overcome the Devil. This is the form of one of his state-papers, issued in 1789. " Mr. Flockton's Most Grand and Unparallelled Exhi- bition. Consisting first, in the display of the Original and Universally admired Italian Fantoccini, exhibited in the same Skilful and Wonderful Manner, as well as Striking Imitations of Living Performers, as represented and exhi- bited before the Royal Family, and the most illustrious Characters in this Kingdom. Mr. Flockton will display his inimitable Dexterity of Hand, Different from all pretenders to the said Art. To which w^ill be perform'd an ingenious and Spirited Opera called The Padlock " . . . . principal vocal performers, Signor Giovanni Orsi and Signora Vidina. " The whole to conclude with his grand and inimitable Musical Clock, at first view, a curious organ, exhibited three times before their Majesties." In this clock there were nine hundred figures at work upon a variety of trades. His prices were for the pit tj-., and for the gallery 6N. Last Years of the Condemned. 355 the publication of a sixpenny mechanical sheet of pictures opening and shutting to display a whole performance. This is the outside sketch of Punch's Puppet-show. The next is a scene msidc — uu the old story of " Pull devil, pull baker," which shows that not only did Flockton retain the traditions of the puppet-show, but that he re- tained also some of the earliest traditions of the English stage. The picture carries our thoughts back to one of the first chapters of these Memoirs. In 1792, a Puppet Showman, venturing to revive in another form an ancient humour of the Fair, turned satirist upon the Camp at Bagshot, with wooden puppets which he gave out as " equal if not superior " to the originals. He carved one of his puppets into a likeness of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, attacked Henry Dundas, and introduced a figure dressed in black, labelled in brass upon the fore- head, " Dirtv work done at a moment's warnmg by the A A 2 356 McDioii's of Bartholonieio Fair. chap. xxm. Rose of the Treasury." Treasury Servants-of-all-Work followed, with a Toad upon their banner. In 1797, Jobson and other puppet-showmen were prose- cuted for having made their puppets talk, and do the busi- ness of players in spite of the Licensing Act. The enormous sale of pig in Bartholomew Fair came to an end in the middle of the last century, and its place was taken by beef sausage. There was a strong gale from the S.S.W. when the Fair opened in 1778, and a contempo- rary newspaper reportir found it advisable to " steer half a A.ti. 1778-97- L(7sf Vears 0/ the Condemned. 357 point to windward of the sausage stalls." In that year the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester rode through the Fair, by Flockton's, Jobson's Grand Medley, Ive's, Basil's, Clark- son's, and the other booths, entering at Giltspur Street, and passing out through Cow Lane into Holborn. They passed the establishment of Mr. Lane, his Majesty's Conjuror, who represented himself thus upon his handbills, and by that of Mr. Robinson, Conjurer to the Queen. Some of Mr. Lane's manifestoes headed by the preceding picture were in verse. The painter and the poet joined to do him honour ; the painter as above, the poet in this happy vein. It will make you to laugh, it will drive away gloom, To see how the egg it will dance round the room ; And from anothei ^g% a bird these will fly. Which makes the company all for to cry, O raxe Lnne, Cockalorum for Lane, well done Lane, You are the Man, He ended his entertainment with " the two Miss Surprising Lane." Many persons, Lane's Ann Posturing, and a Hornpipe by Miss that year, were impressed in the Fair, 35<^ Memoirs of Bartholomeiv Fair. chap, xxi'i, and among tlie rest a Merry Andrew, of wliom a news- paper wit asked how it could be conceived that he had no visible way of living, when he was asking all the Fair to look at him. In 1779, the British Press paid homage to the Genius of Smithfield, still in the midst of the Fair, and said, " Of all the curiosities that are now to be seen at Bartholomew Fair, it is a surprising large Hog, who receives the greatest applause. This amazing animal is near fourteen feet long, and when he rises from the ground for the spectators to see him, he roars in such a manner that his voice seems to mix, as it were, with the earth." He is an Earth spirit of course. Still, a profound silence about his age. The American War came to an end in the year 1783, and the peace of Paris was signed at Bartholomew Fair time. In the Fair, that year, this little tract was distributed among the great number of sailors w-ho attended it. LARGE SIEVES AND PLAIN TRUTHS. Attend you Seamen all unto the Lines I have here penn'd ; the Truth doth speak. You are all my Countrymen ; and if you are not, I am yours. My Tongue and my Heart, and my Pen goes now to speak my Mind ; for we poor Sailors are compelled to speak the Truth, for now the War is over, we poor Sailors, who it pleased God to let live, where many of us was bom and brought up ; who was taken away from our Wives and Children, from our Fathers and Mothers, Sisters and Brothers, Trades and Callings, full sore against our Will, to serve our King and Country, to face our Enemies where Balls do wilfully fly, to spill our Blood, to receive our Wounds, and leave our Limbs. I'll tell you how we are rewarded for all our pains, to go in the streets and beg, thieve, or star\-e and be Hanged for what they care what become of us. We once fought like Men, the same as we go unregarded, and die like Dogs ; we who was prized once, are now despised, and become the Objects of hatred. I will only ask you my countrymen, what must we do, to see my poor children cry for bread, I turn into the streets publickly to declare it. Dare I to speak my mind, — I say we have been used cruel after all our ser\'ice ; can any one of you say we are well used after all our service ; I must say, we leave it to any man to judge how hard we have fought for our Country and the Gold, and 'cannot get it now, for the war is over. For to see the Numbers of poor Seamen swann about the Nav}' Office to demand their Wages and Prize Money ; it would grieve you to see the French Horn, Lamb, the Globe, the Ship, the While Horse, the Cheshire Cheese, crowded with Wives and Widows, Fathers and Mothers, Sisters and Brothers, how they come for it, and return as they come. Suppose a War breaks out with England again, what will we do to get Men ; for my part I do not know. I do pray to God to blf^ss our good and A.D. 1779-83. Last Years of the Coiidevmed. 359 gracious King, to preserve him and his Crown and his Land, all gallant officers, such as Hood and Elliot. Now I conclude in hopes tliat some of you will take compassion on us poor Sailors, who fought for the honour of the Nation, its Rights to maintain. My prayers to God that we may be paid with all speed, so farewell my countrymen. Tlie above is printed for the benefit of Anthony Jackson, late Mariner of the Wr.rwick of 50 guns, commanded by Robert Clayton, Esq. ; the above Seaman is stabb'd in his left Breast wiih a Bayonet, shot in his right arm, and wounded in his head, having a wife and one child, humbly hopes for generosity. Here is a copy of a pen-and-ink sketch of a flower of the Fair, taken in the year 1787. It is Kelham Whitelamb, born at Wisbeach, age twenty-two, height (?) inches. On page 360 is a picture of the famous Unicorn Ram. shown at Bartholomew Fair, in the year 1790. 360 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxm. Of the last of the true Comedians in Smithfield, the memory survived in 1790, when the Fair also paid its respects to the French Revolution. There was entertain- ment " during the Short Time of St. Bartholomew Fair, Smithfield. At the Original Theatre (Late the celebrated Yates and Shuter, of facetious Memory), Up the Grey- hound Inn Yard, the only real and commodious place for Theatrical Performances. The Performers selected from the most distinguished Theatres in England, Scotland, &c. The Representation consists of an entirely New Piece, called. The Spaniard Well Drub'd, or the British Tar Victo- rious .... The Piece concludes with a Grand Pro- cession of the King, French Heroes, Guards, Municipal Troops, &c., to the Champ de Mars, to swear to the Revo- lution Laws, as established by the Magnificent National Assembly, on the 14th of July, 1790. Hornpipe dancing by the renound Jack Bowling," and, among other things, " Mr. Swords will deliver his Olio of wit, whim, and fancy, in Song, Speech, and Grimace." Box and Pit, \s. Gallery, dd. On page 361 is depicted the famous Ram with Six Legs, shown at Bartholomew Fair in the year 1790. The fair had given birth to so many public-houses in the parishes of St. Bartholomew the Great, that on the 30th of March, 1791, the Court of Aldermen agreed to suggest to the General and Quarter Sessions, to receive no recommen- dation for licences in that parish which was not signed by the Alderman either of Aldersgate, or Farringdon Without. In 1792, with tlie preamble that the Author of Nature is A I). 17X7-91. Las/ Vrars of the Condemned. 361 wonderful even in the Least of His Works, it was an- nounced that a Caravan in Bartholomew Fair contained MR. THOMAS ALLEa, the most surpnsmg Small Man ever before the Public. He had at the Lyceum in the Strand excited in the breasts of the Dukes of York and Clarence, sensations of wonder and delight. Also Miss Morgan, the Celebrated Windsor Fairy, known in London and Wifidior by the Addition of LADY MORGAN, a Title which His Majesty was pleased to confer on her. This unparallelled Woman is in the 35th year of her age, and only 18 pounds weight. Her form affords a pleasing surprise, and her admirable symmetry engages attention. She was introduced to Their Majesties at the Queen s Lodge, Windsor, on Saturday, the 4th of August, 1781, by the recommendation of the late Dr. Hunter ; when they were pleased to pro- nounce her the finest Display of Human Nature in miniature they ever saw. — But we shall say no more of these great Wonders of Nature : let those who honour theni with their visits, judge for themselves. Let others boast of stature, or of birth, This Glorious Truth shall fill our souls with mirth : " That we now are, and hope, for years, to sing The Smallest subjects of the Greatest King ! " t^° Admittance to Ladies and Gentlemen, 15. — Children, Half Price. * § * In this and many other parts of the Kingdom, it is too common to show deformed persons, with various arts and deceptions, under denomi- nations of persons in miniature, to impose on the public. This Little Couple are, beyond contradiction, the most wonderful display of nature ever held out to the admiration of mankind. N.B. The above Lrfdy's mother is with her, and will attend at any Lady or Gentleman's house, if required. As another illustration of the literary powers of the show- man's author at the close of the eighteenth century, I quote 62 Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxm. the description of a Lion, from a handbill issued in the Fair ir 1794. The Noble Lion and Lioness (from the Tower of London), Whose like Earlh bears 7wt on her spacious Face Alone of Nature stands tlie Wondrous Race. These most magnanimous Animals need no other Recommendation than to behold them. The Lion is universally allowed to be the King of all the Brute Creation, whose majestic Looivs, and Voice like Thunder, strikes Terror to the whole kingdom of Quadrupeds ; yet these tremendous Beasts are so Tame, by being brought up from a few days old by suckling of Goats instead of their Dam, that the most Timorous may approach them with the greatest safety. Flockton's successors, when he had retired on his small fortune, were " the Widow Flint and Gyngell, at Flockton's original Theatre up the Greyhound Yard, Smithfield." They presented in one year Mr. Gyngell's sleight of hand and musical glasses, Mrs. Gyngell's singing with Fantoccini, from Sadler's Well's, and (late Flockton's) the Grand Musi- cal Clock, with five hundred (Flockton had advertised nine hundred) " figures at work in diff"erent trades and callings." In 1798, a pickpocket, caught in the Fair, protested to the City Marshal that he got a very honest living by buying and selling bad shillings. There were in the Fair that year according to a newspaper wit, " Some of the first actors, the first singers, the first dancers, and the first horsemen in the whole world ; ghosts, spectres, bluebeards, and bleeding nuns, descending amidst flashes of rosin, and ascending amidst clouds of tobacco." In a coloured picture of Bartholomew Fair, by Rowland- son, published in 1799, we see some things that hitherto we have but talked about. Here is part of the line of shows drawn up against the pavement, with their backs to the backs of the gingerbread stalls that faced the houses, and their fronts to the free area of Smithfield. The chaise with- out horses introduced into the picture, is, outside, a place of frolic and a post of observation \ inside, a reception room. And here is a corner of a booth, showing how folks before the scenes enjoy their entrances and exits. The author of these sketches is Thomas Rowlandson, a famous political and social caricaturist, best known as the illustrator of Dr. Syntax's Tour in Search of the Picturesque, A.I). 279^-98. Last Years of the Coiidcnmed. 363 He died in the year 1827, at the age of seventy-one. Among his works are two pictures of Bartholomew Fair, which, as the reader will perceive, admit of being separated into groups ; for while, in each case, the whole picture is effective, every group in it is a perfect little study of some .•;64 Alcmoirs of Bartholomew Pair incident or featuro of the scene. One of the two pictures is founded on a drawing by another hand. The kind of audience obtained by the actors, is expressed in other ut melted lead into her mouth, and spat it out marked A.p. iSi4-i5- Last Years of the Condcunicd. 373 with her teeth, passed red-hot iron over her body and Hmbs, her tongue and her hair, thrust her arm into fire, and washed '^M-:i I fc i-yc. her hands, not only in boiUng lead, but also in boiling oil and aquafortis. Mr. .Simon Paap, the celebrated Dutt li Dwarf, 26 years of age, weighs 27 Pounds, and only 2S Inches high, had the 374 Mevwirs of Bni'f/colowezv /}?/;-. chap. xxm. honour of being presented to the Prince Regent and the whole of the Royal p'amily, at Carlton House, May 5th, 1 81 5. He was introduced by Mr. Daniel Gyngell to the Lord Mayor on the ist of September, 181 5. and was ex- hibited in the course of four days in Smithfield to upwards of 20,000 Persons. A collector of the autographs of little men procured the following : r^ ^^, A.i)....i8i5. Last Years of the Condemned. 375 The fourteen day Carnival had now been effectiially sup- pressed, and the utmost Hcence obtained by the showmen was the holding of Bartholomew Fair for three days, in which the day of proclamation (made at noon by the Mayor, Sheriffs, and City Marshals) was not counted. The Mayor, having made his proclamation, usually returned as he came ; but John Wilkes, Esquire, distinguished himself by making the entire circuit of the booths in his State Coach. The ground of Smith field was entirely parcelled out in booths and standings. In the centre among the sheep-pens, were those who sold in booths or at stalls oysters and sausages. Tables were set for company in a most fasci- nating style, and in 180S women invited passers by into the sausage rooms with an appeal to their patriotism — for the popular political feeling still had its representation in the Fair. "Walk into Wilkes's parlour" was their cry; the sausage -rooms being in those days called Wilkes's parlours. Outside the pens, the exhibitions were set in a row closely side by side, with their backs to the pavement and their fronts to the central space of Smithfield. There also was the immense multitude of up-and-downs and round-abouts, many of them elevated to a dangerous and painful height. On the pavement before the houses, fronting their closed doors and shutters, were the lines of gilt gingerbread and toy stalls. The show booths had, in 1808, lately become gay with unwonted decoration, and with many-coloured lamps. Horse-riders were favourite performers. Astley, in his day, used to attend with his "learned horse." In 180S, Saunders kept the best of three or four horse-riding exhibi- tions. Itinerant musicians congregated in the Fair. There was a famous London street-band consisting of a double drum, a Dutch organ, a tambourine, violin, pipes, and " the new Turkish jingle, used in the army," which used to play military pieces for a long time on winter evenings before the Spring-Gardens coftee-house, and opposite Wigley's great room, to entertain the diners. This well-known street orchestra was generally engaged by one of the chief booths m Bartholomew Fair ; but there was always too much jangle of more discordant instruments, and too much bawling of "Show them in ! Just going to begin !'' to make their har- 3 76 Me)7ioirs of Barlkolomew Fair. chap. xxm. monies of any consequence to the fair-goers. There was a large caravan of well-known tumblers and posture-men. Bear dancing, a street sight, was an incident of bustle in tht outer crowd. The bear now and then turned a good sum- mersault and generally danced to the bagpipes. His com- panions were some little dogs dressed in red jackets, and a monkey who usually rode on the bear's back. Pupils of the celebrated Fair conjuror, Mr. Lane, practised the sublime art of legerdemain. There were tricks with cards, and tricks with balls, and there was fortune-telling. Knives were run through the hand without producing blood ; knives and forks were taken as pills ; flames and sparks, as from a forge, were blown out of men's mouths. The more ambitious Puppet-shows were in their decline, and Punch in the full tide of his popularity rioted over their decay. A.I). i8i5. Last Years of the Comieiinied. 377 At this date there was a noted person in the Fair, who walked about hatless, to sell slices of hot plum-pudding, with his hair powdered and tied en queue, his dress neat and his apron spodess, jesting wherever he went, with a mighty voice in recommendation of the pudding, which for the sake of greater oddity he sometimes carried on a wooden platter. This was James Sharp England, the flying pieman. Rowlandson, in one of the extracts I have taken from his pictures, represents a negro pieman of the same description, who seems to have been England's predecessor. Other such characters of the Fair are this and the one on page 378 which speak for themselves : i'he blind pig-dealer's wares are made of piecrust, and have currant eyes. Certainly not a piecrust pig, hardly indeed to be diought of as pork, was the learned Toby, to whom we are now brought a litde prematurely by association of ideas. The genuine Toby first appeared in the Fair in the year 181 7, and is said to have been the pupil of one Master Nicholas Hoare. He must have arrived therefore at a pig's years of , 7^ Mevioirs of Bartholomew Fair. chap. xxm. discretion, when he appeared in the year 1833, as the '• Unrivalled Chinese Swinish Philosopher, Toby the Real along tailPig.qi* afKort tailEgopoPig ] ■without atail.a So-vv Pig", or a Boar jPi^.oraPlg witliaCttTliTirf tail Learned P;g. He will spell, read, and cast accounts, telJ A.D...1817.... Last Years of the Cjondenuied. 379 the points of the sun's rising and setting, discover the four grand divisions of the Earth, kneel at command, i)erform bhndfold with 20 handkerchiefs over his eyes, tell the hour to a minute by a watch, tell a card, and the age of any party. He is in colour the most beautiful of his race, in symmetry the most perfect, in temper the most docile. And when asked a question, he will give an Immediate Answer." On the faith of the handbill here is the portrait of the most beautiful of pigs. Insolent, indeed, was the pretension that opposed against Toby, this counterfeit beast, under the name of the Amazing Pig of Knowledge. A peculiarity, however, about the Amazing Pig of Knowledge (who was to be seen in a commodious room at the George), which may account for his somewhat shabby appearance, is, that he knew the value of money. He also could tell black from white, distinguish colours; with a shrewd eye count his audience; and even tell people their thoughts. J. Fawkes, the pro- prietor of '' this most amazing pig," which was to be seen for three-pence, summed up his handbill with these very suitable and lucid observations : A learned Pig in George's reign To ^Esop's Brutes an equal Boast ; Then let mankind again combine, To render Friendship still a Toasi 3S0 illcinoirs of .Bartkolomezv Fair. chap. xxm. Let Albion's Fair superior soar, To Gallic Fraud, or Gallic Art ; Briton's will e'er bow down before The Virtues seated in the Heart. But while the Great Hog of the Fair was thus subliming himself into pure intellect against the day when he was to vanish altogether, human life in the Fair was dropping fast into the hog's old position. In September, 18 15, there w-ere heard in one morning at Guildhall, forty-five cases of felony, misdemeanour, and assault, committed in Bartholo- mew Fair. To this fact let me add the titles of a few of the plays performed at Richardson's Great Booth. I select some of those in which I\Irs. Carey was an actress. The Castles of Athlin a?id Diinbaine, or the Spectre of the North. Glenroy, Mr. H. Carey. Julia (of the House of Ross), Mrs. H. Carey. After this play, Mr. Carey played the Pantaloon, in a Fair version of Mother Goose. DoJiald and Rosalbie, or the Spectre of the Rocks. Donald (rightful heir of Athlin), Mr. H. Carey. Spectre of Marian, Mrs. Carey. Agnes of Bavaria^ or the Spectre of the Dajiube (no Mr. Carey) ; Agnes, Mrs. H. Carey. The Haujited Cavern, or Mysterious Chest (no Mr. Carey) ; Emeline, Mrs. H. Carey. The Hall of Death, or Who's the Murderer ? Car- dinal Gonzaria, Mr. H. Carey. Ducheza Rosanna Vin- senza, Mrs. H. Carey. One does not wonder that the men zealous for souls began to flock into the Fair with pious tracts ; that exhor- tations to discountenance the Fair were distributed among householders in its neighbourhood ; that, in one year, "Boatswain Smith" set up a pulpit at the end of Long Lane, over which floated a flag, with the inscription, " Bethel Union," and opened his business with a hymn, beginning — Hinder me not ; for Fll proceed. Though Earth and Hell oppose Wiser men than that rude enthusiast longed for the release of London from a yearly riot of iniquity. In one year a strong mob of pickpockets formed wild rings about decent women who approached the Fair, and tore their garments from their backs. A.D. 1817-25. Last Years of the Coiideuiiied. .0 , There was a disfigurement upon the Fair greater than that here represented in the picture of " the Beautiful Spotted Negro Boy," who was to be seen in his travel- ling pavilion, and who was afterwards engaged by Mr. Richardson to appear at his theatre, where he stood on the bills between the Monk (Did Murderer, or the Skeleton Spectre, and Love and Liberty, or LLarlequin in his Glory. The writer, in 1S37, of a small pamphlet called A Poetical description of Bar- iholoniew Fair, by One under a Hood, a lament- able imitation of the puns of Thomas Hood without his wit, tells pleasantly enough what, no doubt, was a real incident, and a strange one : — At Richardson's so tedious 't^\as Before they would begin ; A wag proposed the gap to stop, By giving out an imn ! This striking /w-propriety Made one and all to crave it : 1 1 ^\■as so ob\-iously wrong, They cried that's right, let's have it ! In 1825, Mr.Hone, in his Table Book, expecting the end of the Fair, carefully described it as it thenwas for the information of posterity. At the same time he published a few interesting notes by way of contribution to its early history. In that year, the Fair began on Saturday, and trading was forbidden on the Sunday, although thousands then visited in its quietude the scene of noise and bustle. He tells us that the largest of the toy-stalls had eighteen or five-and-twenty feet of frontage ; that the shutters of the 3^2 ATemoirs of Bartholomezu Fair. chap. xxm. houses were all up, and the doors closed ; that sausages and oysters, yielding three-penny or four-penny dinners, were sold at tables with cloths on them, in the sheep-pens ; but that the stalls were no longer called by such names as Brighton Pavilions, or Fair Rosamond's Bowers. Among the shows were these : A peep-show of the Murder of Mr. Weare, of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, &c., to be seen for one penny. A penny giant. Penny tumbling at Ball's Theatre. A Sixpenny wild beast show — Atkins's — with "that Colossal Animal, the wonderful per- forming Elephant, upwards of ten feet high ! ! Five tons weight ! ! His consumption of Hay, Corn, Straw, Carrots, Water, &c., exceeds 800 lbs. daily." Eight musicians were outside this booth, in scarlet beefeater's coats and with skin caps, and a stentorian showman drowned the music with his shouts of " Don't be deceived. The only Lion and Tigress in one den that are to be seen in the Fair, or the proprietor will forfeit One Thousand Guineas. Walk in ! walk in ! " Richardson's platform was lined with green baize, fes- tooned with crimson curtains, and lighted with fifteen hun- dred variegated lamps. His moneytakers sat in Gothic seats. He had a band of ten beefeaters, and a parade of his dramatic force. Samwell, a very fat man in tight satin jacket, led a troop of tight-rope-dancing children, and the Dancing Horse. Clarke, from Astley's, had a spacious platform, ten feet liigh, and a large booth, of which the interior was lighted by gas in a single hoop. Wombwell is sharply censured by Hone for having ex- posed his fine Lion Nero, to be baited by dogs, at Warwick. He displayed a disgusting picture of the figlit outside his show. He is described in the Table Bo6k as " undersized in mind, as well as in form, a weazen, sharped-faced man, with a skin reddened by more than natural spirits, and he speaks in a voice and language that accords with his feel- ings and propensities." Of this man, who began life as a cobbler in Monmouth Street, I find only unfavourable record. He had a yellow rard, with a Tiger above his A.n. 1S25. Last Years of the CondeuDied. or gerie address, of " Wombwell, \ViId Beast Merchant, Commer- cial Road, London. All sorts of Foreign Animals, Birds, &c., bought, sold, or ex- changed, at the Repository, the Travelling Mena- He must, how ever, have had unusua ability and energy in his peculiar way. His collec- tion was good. Its boast, in 1830, was the Elephant of Siam, a theatrical per- former in the spectacle of the Firc-fiaid, wherein it uncorked bottles and de- cided for the Rightful Prince. On each side of it he had in his show two miniature elephants the " smallest ever seen in Europe." Mr. Hone saw the Mer- maid, and sketches the beautiful siren, painted on the outside canvas o^" the booth. But if things of the earth fallen in water suffer " a sea- change into something rich and strange," things of the water being hauled on earth may have a land change to go through. In the case of a Sea Nymph this is proved to be the case by the annexed study published at the time by Mr. George Cruikshank, of the Mermaid as exhibited inside the booth. The kind of public to which the sights of the Fair were left, is indi- cated by the fact that in 1830, except that Wombwell, Atkins, and Richardson charged 6c/., and Morgan, a part of Womb well's, 3