Courant articles
For inclusion with Jeannine’s introduction
Originating in the early 12th century as an occasion for trading cloth, the Fair’s popularity quickly spawned numerous attractions, including freak shows, wild animals and other entertainments (see p.xx). The event continued almost annually until banned by the Victorians. Now revived thanks to a vigorous campaign by Matthew Bell (p.xx) and with help from enthusiastic locals, among them David Wilcox (https://bartsfair.city/), City Envoy Brendan Barns, John Foley (p.xx), John Griffiths and Eamonn Mullally, this Bartholomew Fair revival is part of the Corporation’s major Destination City initiative.
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Trivial connections : so useful for that next pub quiz – perhaps at one of the many pubs in the Barts area. Among them is the Hand and Shears in Cloth Fair (estab. 1532), where it’s believed that the ceremony of cutting a ribbon to open an event (bridge, hospital, supermarket, etc.) began, and from whose doorway the Lord Mayor officially welcomed Bartholomew Fair for many years. For the answers go to https://bartsfair.city/
1. What connects Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes to Bart’s Hospital?
2. What have Poet Laureate John Betjeman and ‘Monty’ (Viscount Montgomery of Alamein) in common with 41-42 Cloth Fair?
3. What connects The Beatles 1969 Abbey Road album to Thomas Dekker’s 1603 Patient Grissel, later performed at Bartholomew Fair by puppets?
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Hidden in Plain Sight
Easy to pass by unnoticed, 41-42 Cloth Fair opposite the Church of St Bartholomew the Great has two claims to fame. Besides being the oldest inhabited house in the City of London (built between 1597 and 1614), it’s also believed to be the only private house still standing to have survived the Great Fire of 1666.
Originally a cloth merchant's, the property has in its more than four-century history been many things, including a pub (The Eagle and Child), a woollen draper’s shop and a cutlery workshop. Under threat of demolition by the City of London Corporation in the 1920s the house was saved by two architects, Seely and Paget, who restored the building, and lived and based their practice there. It’s currently the home of Common Councillor Matthew Bell (see p.xx).
Over the years 41-42 has been visited by a wide variety of notables, among them Methodism founders John and Charles Wesley, playwright and novelist J. B. Priestley, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, actress Joyce Grenfell, the Queen Mother, and more recently film director Ken Loach, MP Tony Benn, Irish President Mary Robinson and first Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who accidentally locked himself in the loo.
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[Box item] Bartholomew
Little is known about Bartholomew the man. One of the Twelve Apostles, he was martyred around 70 AD. Due to the manner of his death (according to legend he was skinned alive), he’s the patron saint of tanners, bookbinders, leatherworkers and glovers, among others – and, aptly for Bart’s Hospital, skin diseases.
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All the Fun of the Fair by Matthew Bell
Bartholomew Fair is back! And if Members of the 1855 City of London Corporation were reading this, they would doubtless be wringing their hands in puzzled concern as to why one of their number in 2023 has for several years been pushing to resurrect the Fair after they’d fought for so long to close it down.
It’s especially important for its restoration this year as 2023 marks the 900th anniversary of the founding of the Priory of St Bartholomew, which became St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the churches of St Bartholomew The Great and The Less.
In 1133 Henry I granted a Charter to the Priory for the Fair ‘to be kept yearly at Bartholomew-tide for three days,’ as one chronicler records, ‘to wit the eve, the day, and next morrow; to the which the clothiers of all England and drapers of London repaired and had their booths and standings within the churchyard of the priory.’ However, it’s likely that as a trade exchange for cloth the Fair was up and running before this date in order to help fund the Priory’s foundation and to secure continued financial support. It’s therefore reasonable to suppose that 2023 could also be Bartholomew Fair’s 900th anniversary.
Not surprisingly, the Fair’s history over more than eight centuries is a chequered one. It’s also a convenient lens through which to view London’s political, religious and social interests. This was no less true of when it died in 1855, much to the satisfaction of those oh-so-virtuous Victorians, who were not known for their tolerance of anything ‘down and dirty’. To be fair to them, the event had become a problem long before the 19th century.
From the Fair’s debut in the churchyard on St Bartholomew’s Eve, 23 August 1133, it grew steadily in popularity, not just to promote cloth (hence the name of the adjacent tiny street of Cloth Fair) but increasingly as an important venue for other goods. It was, too, an occasion for public spectacle and a space in which to remind anyone with subversive ideas of the penalties of stepping out of line: during the 1305 Fair the Scottish hero and patriot Sir William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered.
By 1377 the event had outgrown the confines of the Priory, which took up most of the land immediately around the church and hospital, and was overflowing beyond Smithfield. By the 1450s, it was moving towards Holborn and Islington.
With the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1539 and the disposing of church land, the Fair and Priory grounds were sold to Henry’s toadying lackey Sir Richard Rich, and kept in his family until bought by the City of London Corporation in 1829.
Following Charles I’s execution in 1649, Oliver Cromwell reduced the Fair’s duration to three days. After Cromwell’s demise, however, it expanded to two weeks and also in size, becoming even more of a jamboree. To accompany booths and stalls selling foods, fancy and otherwise (with roast pork a must) and of course copious alcohol, there were at various times displays of human strength, acrobatics, tightrope walking, boxing, wrestling, fire-eating and waxworks. There was even a type of Ferris wheel, a precursor of today’s London Eye. Shows featuring ‘beasts’ such as crocodiles as well as human ‘freaks’ were presented to the delight of enthusiastic and often drunken crowds. Anyone who has seen the film ‘The Elephant Man’ will have an idea of this sort of ‘entertainment’. Brothels were also common.
Little seems to have halted the Fair’s success, not even the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague, of which there were many (attempting to contain one such in 1592 Elizabeth I restricted its spread only to within the Priory walls). Further outbreaks in the 17th century and even the Great Fire of 1666 interrupted it only briefly.
From the beginning of the 17th century it was customary for the Lord Mayor to open the Fair. Following a visit to Newgate Prison to accept a ‘cool tankard’ of sack (fortified white wine) from the governor, he processed with the Merchant Taylors Company to Cloth Fair to test the measures for cloth. However, lest the current Lord Mayor get too carried away with enthusiasm he’d be wise to heed the sad story of Sir John Shorter, Lord Mayor in 1688. Having finished his sack he let the lid of his tankard close so noisily that his horse shied, throwing Sir John and causing injuries that led to his death.
By the end of the 17th century, Bartholomew Fair, now synonymous with debauchery and mayhem, was again curtailed to three days. By the mid 18th, it had returned to two weeks, and when the City attempted to restrict the time yet again, and to stripping from it the theatrical and entertainment booths, there was a major outcry. In the following years it became four days: entertainments and all. Thwarted, the Corporation concluded that the only way of abolishing it was by an Act of Parliament. But legislation proved unnecessary. After years of gradually relegating the Fair to a purely cloth trade event, it was by the mid 19th century no longer of value to anyone, the heart of the cloth industry having long since moved from the area. As one historian put it: ‘it died a natural death’, and in the words of another, ‘it passed away without much sign of public mourning’.
Although there’s little of the old Fair to pass any modern test for an entertainment licence in 2023 it’s important that this reincarnation retains much of a circus and fun feel. Above all, we trust it will, like its original purpose, support and promote local businesses and places of interest and be the first of a new era for Bartholomew Fair. Hopefully, by the time the merrymaking becomes too riotous it won’t be our problem.
So, enjoy. But remember, if you’re on horseback don’t slam your tankard top down!
Matthew Bell is a Common Councillor for the Ward of Farringdon Within
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The Play’s the Thing! by John Foley
Personal connections: I have three with this souvenir issue of The City Courant and the restoration of Bartholomew Fair. First, the puzzle on page xx. Second, my flat is but a stone’s throw from where the event began nearly nine centuries ago. As for the third, that takes me back to Swinging London in the summer of 1966 and my final year as a schoolboy actor with the National Youth Theatre.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the NYT (which had until then staged only Shakespeare’s plays) decided to present something different. While one of the productions chosen for that August season at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square was distinctly modern, the other was a Jacobean comedy by Ben Jonson.
Written in 1614, Bartholomew Fair premiered on 31 October on the south side of the Thames at the Hope Theatre. In the prologue Jonson ‘promiseth’ to present a ‘new sufficient play … merry, and as full of noise, as sport, made to delight all, and [my italics] to offend none provided they have either the wit or the honesty to think well of themselves.’
Using the Fair’s backdrop, Jonson offers through pedlars, pickpockets, pimps, prostitutes and puppets a satirical and vividly colourful taste of what the event had become by the early 17th century.
The play is by no means one of Jonson’s best. With its several plotlines and myriad characters with descriptively telling names such as Littlewit, Joan Trash, Trouble-All, Waspe, and the canting, hypocritical Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, it’s a challenge for any director, and in its original version possibly also for modern audiences. But worth a look? Certainly.
While reacquainting myself with what I presumed to be a neglected comedy I was surprised to find that it has in fact been staged numerous times since the 1950s in UK regional theatres – including twice by the RSC at Stratford – and here in London (again on the south side of the Thames) at the National Theatre, Young Vic and, more recently, the Globe.
Now that we’re reviving this historic Fair, what better opportunity for a new production of Jonson’s take on it – warts and all – in 2024. And for that, could there be a more appropriate venue than the City of London’s very own Barbican Theatre?
John Foley is a Common Councillor for the Ward of Farringdon Within
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