The long running to and fro over the closure of the High Street for Marlborough’s two annual Mop Fairs has taken a new twist. It is now ruled that if Marlborough is to continue holding so-called Mop Fairs in the High Street, the annual Marlborough Sheep Fairs will have to return to the High Street.
A high-powered constitutional Committee of lawyers sitting in London was considering a much used defence of Marlborough’s Mop Fairs: “You would have to pass an Act of Parliament to move them or stop them.” In their just released report they say that no Act of Parliament has been located that allowed or ordered the Sheep Fair to move from the High Street to the Common in the nineteenth century.
Seizing on this illegal and unconstitutional alteration to the established order of charter-permitted fairs, the Committee, with the logic of legal rather than political minds, have ruled that the Mop Fairs can only stay where they are if Marlborough re-introduces the annual sheep fairs in the High Street.
In addition, their report makes it clear that there is no reference in any surviving (‘extant’ is the word they use) Royal Charter to large trucks and whirlygigs and electricity generators being required by law to form a barricade across the main London to Bath highway. Indeed they point out that for very many years barricading roads with assorted vehicles has been a device confined to both continental Europe and to its farmers.
In a brief history of the town’s fairs, the Committee revealed that in the Middle Ages, royal grants of fairs to the various parishes and priories totalled 18 days. Experts advising the committee thought that closing a major highway on 18 days each year was “probably not proportionate to modern day transport needs” – by which they mean cars and lorries serving a town without a railway.
The Committee established that the Marlborough Fairs (aka Sheep Fairs or Great Sheep Fairs) that took place each year in August and November and that finally ran out of sheep in the 1960s, were moved from the High Street to the Common in 1893.
In passing, the Committee pours a bucket full of wet bran of the whole notion that true Mop Fairs can exist in the 21st century as part of the ‘jobs market’.
Seeking evidence from nearby towns, the committee explain that the second day of the famous Weyhill Fair was known as “… Mop Fair, or Molls and Johns Day: otherwise the statute or hiring fair. This has suffered much change from those times when at twelve midday, as a matter of course, farm-servants, men and women, the ‘Molls and Johns’ aforesaid, left their employ and, drawing their wages, offered themselves to be hired for the coming twelvemonth.”
“They stood in long lines, the carters with a piece of plaited whipcord in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool, and the maids after their sort; and waited while the farmers came and bargained with them.”
Quite how the maids distinguished themselves “after their sort” is not revealed in the report. But the Committee rules that with the prevalence of zero hours contracts, such goings on in the labour market as appeared to take place at a traditional Mop Fair are contrary to Magna Carta. They even wonder whether in traditional English usage ‘zero’ can be followed by the plural word ‘hours’.
The return of the sheep fair will please many of Marlborough’s councillors. The Fair’s sheep pens will be made of local wood (from sustainable woodland) and its signage will all be in traditional materials and include – where applicable – apostrophes. And straw will be spread on the town’s venerable paving stones and ancient cobbles to protect them from sharp sheep feet.
The Committee will meet on 1 April 2016 to fix a date for the ‘inaugural resumption’ of the Sheep Fair. It is understood the committee have been at great pains to separate the date for the winter Sheep Fair (traditionally 23 November) from the town’s Christmas Lights Day – although it is acknowledged that sheep do play a part in the Christmas story, it is thought unwise to mix sheep with stalls selling burgers and jars of artisan mint sauce.
The report advises one innovation. Only one side of the High Street should be closed for the Sheep Fair – and the High Street and George Lane made one way only. Turning the town into a giant roundabout.
There will be a nine month consultation on whether the south or north side of the High Street should be closed or whether the two sides should take it in turn. The consultation will also, of course, have to consider whether George Lane traffic should run eat-west or west-east – and, come to that, whether these directions should change each year.
And you thought herding sheep was difficult.
| A little bit of history:
At Marlborough Sheep Fair in November 1842 “…a great number of very fine sheep and lambs were penned, but comparatively little business was transacted until the middle of the day, the farmers being unwilling to submit to the reduced rates offered, and a general depression seemed to prevail; towards the end of the day, however, the fair became rather brisk, and many sales were effected but at a very great reduction from last year’s prices…” It should, of course, be noted that the score and more pubs then standing close to the High Street would have been open in the morning. Perhaps many of Marlborough’s citizenry would rather have been at that year’s Chester Cheese fair where 400 tons were piled up for sale. But they would have been disappointed: “It went off very flatly, and at least one half was taken home unsold by the dairymen…It becomes a matter for serious consideration with both landlords and landholders where the depression will rest. Such is the influx of cheap foreign provisions from the effect of the new tariff that very moderate prices for all sorts of English provisions will doubtless be the result.” And that no doubt included milk prices…plus ça change… |
Queen of Blues Elkie Brooks to headline Marlborough Jazz Festival
