What would you see at Scarborough Fair?
Visualizing the market fair of medieval history and the Vanity Fair of John Bunyan.
Rob James
May 2, 2025
It’s so noisy at the fair/But all your friends are there—Neil Young
We get some idea of medieval life from the anachronistic Renaissance Faires, and we listen to the folk-music strains in “Scarborough Fair” by Simon & Garfunkel. What were the market fairs really like? We have heard of Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (through Reese Witherspoon) or the magazines of that name, but what was the original conception in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress? And how were the fairs surprisingly bound up with religious life? Some answers to all those questions are found in these excerpts from Wyndham Anstis Bewes, The Romance of the Law Merchant (1923).
Stourbridge Fair
Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. 1 (1866)
Stourbridge Fair (near Cambridge) was one of the great medieval markets. This description captures the scene in the fourteenth century. Kings would grant safe passage, and the Church would confer the Peace of God, upon foreign traders coming to and going from such fairs for a limited time period.
This fair was proclaimed on the 4th of September and continued for three weeks. The temporary buildings erected for the purposes of the Fair were, by custom, commenced on the 24th of August. The builders were allowed to destroy the corn grown on the spot if it were not cleared before that time, and on the other hand, the owner of the soil was empowered to destroy the booths on Michaelmas day [September 29], if they were not removed before that time.
The space occupied by the fair, which was about half a mile square, was divided into streets, in each of which some special trade was carried on, some of the principal being those of ironmongery, cloth, wool, leather, and books; as well as, in the course of time, every conceivable commodity which could be made and sold. On the 25th of September, the chief business of the fair was the buying and selling of horses. The port of Lynn and the rivers Ouse and Cam were the means by which water-carriage was made available for goods.
A court of pie powder [pied poudre, from the “dusty feet” of the litigants] was held in the fair under the presidency of the Mayor of Cambridge or his deputy, where suits were determined from morning to night, no appeal being allowed. The assize of the fair and its general superintendence [i.e., the jurisdiction and power of the court’s session] were (though not, it seems, without some dispute) the privilege of the Corporation of Cambridge.
The concourse must have been a singular medley. Besides the people who poured forth from the great towns – from London, Norwich, Colchester, Oxford, [there were] places in the beginning of the fourteenth century of great importance, and which gave their names, or, in case certain branches of commerce had been planted in particular London streets, the names of such streets, to the rows of booths.
In the three weeks’ fair of Stourbridge there were, beyond doubt, the representatives of many nations collected together to this great mart of medieval commerce. The Jew, expelled from England, had given place to the Lombard exchanger. The Venetian and Genovese merchant came with his precious stock of eastern produce, his Italian silks and velvets, his store of delicate glass. The Flemish weaver was present with his linens of Liege and Ghent. The Spaniard came with his stock of iron, the Norwegian with his tar and pitch. The Gascon wine grower was ready to trade in the produce of his vineyard; and, more rarely, the richer growth of Spain, and, still more rarely, the vintages of Greece were also supplied. The Hanse towns sent furs and amber, and probably were the channel by which the precious stones of the East were supplied through the markets of Moscow and Novgorod. And, perhaps, by some of those unknown courses, the history of which is lost, save by the relics which have occasionally been discovered, the porcelain of the farthest East might have been seen in some of the booths. Blakeney and Colchester and Lynn, and perhaps Norwich, were filled with foreign vessels, and busy with the transport of various produce, and eastern England grew rich under this confluence of trade.
To this great fair came, on the other hand, the woolpacks, which then formed the riches of England, and were the envy of other nations. The Cornish tin mine sent its produce, stamped with the sign of the rich Earl who bought the throne of the German Empire [Richard, Earl of Cornwall (1209-1272)], or of the warlike prince who had won his spurs at Crecy and captured the French King at Poitiers [Edward the “Black Prince,” Duke of Cornwall (1330-1376)]. Thither came also the salt from the springs of Worchestershire, as well as that which had been gathered under the summer sun from the salterns of the eastern coast. Here, too, might be found lead from the minds of Derbyshire, and iron, either raw or manufactured, from the Sussex forges. And, besides these, there were great stores of those kinds of agricultural produce which, even under the imperfect cultivation of the time, were gathered in greater security, and therefore in greater plenty, than in any other part of the world except Flanders.
To regulate the currency, to secure the country against the loss of specie, and more harmlessly, to prevent the importation of spurious or debased coin, the officers of the King’s Exchange examined into the mercantile transactions of the foreign traders. To form a ready remedy against fraud, the Mayor sat at his court of the “dusty feet.” A mixed multitude were engaged in sale or purchase: the nobles securing such articles of luxury as were offered them, or which law and custom assigned to their rank – their rich robes of peace, their armor from Milan, their war-horses from Spain. The franklin came for materials for his farm and furniture for his house; sometimes, even, to buy rams in order to improve the breed of his flock. The bailiffs of college and monastery were busy in the purchase of clothing. And on holidays and Sundays some canon, deputed from the neighboring priory, said mass and preached in the booth assigned for religious worship.
After the fair was over, the owner of the field in which the gathering took place resumed possession, and found sufficient profit for the temporary occupation of his land in the additional fertility which the unclean habits of medieval life had conferred upon the soil.
Vanity Fair
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
It requires the lurid pen of John Bunyan adequately to capture in his allegory the sordid side of these immense gatherings.
Almost 5,000 years ago there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City and Beezelbub, Apollyon and Legion, with their companions, perceiving, by the path with the pilgrims made, that their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair – a fair where should be sold all sorts of vanity; and that it should last all the year long. Therefore, at this fair are all such merchandise is sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, as harlots, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, bloods, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
And, moreover, at this fair, there are at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knives, and rogues, and that of every kind.
Here are to be seen, too, and not for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false swearers, and that of a blood-red colour. And, as in other fairs of less moment, there are several rows and streets under their proper names, where such and such wares are vended; so here, likewise, you have the proper places, rows, streets (countries and kingdoms), where the wares of this fair are soonest to be found. This fair, therefore, is an ancient thing of long-standing, and a very great fair.
Fairs and Piety
Bewes himself notes wryly that market gatherings and religious gatherings tend to go together. One wonders what Jesus might have done if He had indeed once walked upon “this green & pleasant Land” (William Blake, preface to Milton) and headed down the fair’s Lombard Exchangers Street (Matthew 21:12-13).
It is difficult for us to realise conditions when the needs of a country could only be satisfied once a year, when all distant wares were carried on the backs of camels, horses, and mules in land transport, and in boats for river and sea carriage, and we may well marvel at the energy and organisation displayed by the traders who year in and year out carried painfully their wares for hundreds of expensive miles.
Such journeyings would have been unprofitable without the existence of a sufficient market, and this, at any rate in the later Middle Ages, was secured by synchronizing the trade with the observances of piety. We need not stay to consider whether the saint made the town or the town adopted the saint, but relics or miracles brought periodic veneration and recurrent concourse of pious people, ready to satisfy their temporal needs on the same occasion as they perform their religious practices. The piety paved the way for commerce; as in more recent times missionary zeal has often blazed the way for trade.
The [ancient] fairs, which may not have been quite what we mean by the term, embraced, as we read, precious and other metals, horses, mules, lambs, rams, and goats, precious stones, fine linen and other rich apparel and cloth, embroideries, spices, and “persons of men.”
It has already been observed that merchants were apt to resort where any great concourse of people was to be expected with regularity, and few of such gatherings were so constant or so great as those which, in times of more vivid beliefs, were wont to assemble for the great festivals of the church, held in honour and veneration of the patron saint. On the other hand, what more likely to increase the attendance of these pious practices than the opportunity of satisfying the needs of the household from the traveling trader, who alone could replenish the depleted stores, and that generally but once a year? It is not to be wondered that the church threw its protection over the merchants and enforced the Peace of God at the fairs and during the journeys to and fro. The richest towns, says Huvelin, are those which have the best relics.