Medieval Fair

5 Key excerpts on "Medieval Fair"

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  eBook - ePub

  Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present

  From Ancient Times to the Present

  • Cynthia Clark Northrup, Jerry H. Bentley, Alfred E. Eckes, Jr, Patrick Manning, Kenneth Pomeranz, Steven Topik(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Fairs have always been one of people’s most enjoyable experiences, a universal part of cultural life around the world. In Eltville, Germany, the locals have celebrated the Festival of Sparkling Wine since 1811, which focuses on their most precious local product. This not only boosts the local economy, but creates an artificial demand for the product. No fewer than 200,000 join the community for the celebration every June. Another enduring example is the Hochheim Market, which began as a cattle and horse trading fair in the fifteenth century and now attracts some 300,000 visitors every November with its arts and crafts displays, livestock shows, auctions, food and wine stands, and other features.

  Fairs have adapted to many changes throughout the centuries, including changes in consumer demand for what is bought and sold. However, three major factors concerning the success of fairs have not changed: concept, location, and date. To this day, fairs continue to display many different kinds of products in specific commodity or industrial groupings. The fairs also support the local economies.

  See also: Fairs, International Trade.

  Bibliography

  • Augur, Helen. The Book of Fairs . Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1992.
  • Walford, Cornelius. Fairs, Past and Present: A Chapter in the History of Commerce . New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968.

  Feudalism

  An economic, political, and social system of medieval Europe.

  Historians in the eighteenth century coined the term “feudalism” to describe the political, social, and economic system of much of western Europe during the Middle Ages. The name derives from a grant of land known as a fief (feudum) that a lord gave to his vassal in exchange for performing military duties. The origins of the feudal system can be traced to practices of the late Roman empire and to the customs of the Germanic tribes. Roman aristocrats who lived in the provinces granted a tenure (precaria) of land to retainers in exchange for a variety of services. Roman law called the relationship commendatio since the retainers commended themselves to their aristocratic patrons. The Germanic tribes had a similar practice that the Romans called comitatus, whereby a group of followers attached themselves through deep bonds of loyalty to a powerful leader. The Anglo-Saxons called such a leader a hlaford, from which the English word “lord” is derived. The Carolingians used the term “vassal” (vassus

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  All Things Medieval

  An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World [2 volumes]

  • Ruth A. Johnston(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  F F Fairs 227 Fairs A fair was different from a town market. The market was a local, frequent event; it took place in a town center, often under a cross erected by the local church. The fair was an infrequent event; it was held once a year for a limited time, though some towns had more than one fair during the year. Some vendors made a living traveling from fair to fair, selling animals or wares they had made. Fairs were particularly important in outlying regions where traders did not often come. In Scandinavia, fairs were always in the summer, when travel was possible. Traders from as far away as the Mediterranean Sea made regular stops at the large northern fairs to buy furs. In these far-off regions, towns that hosted even an annual fair became the business hubs that grew into cities. International trade at fairs brought many foreign words into the host lan- guages, even in the Middle Ages. Arab traders gave Arabic words to Italian merchants, whose contact with the large northern fairs brought words like orange, bazaar, and sugar into French and English. Since large animals took time to grow, many local farmers waited for the nearest annual fair and took their horses, cows, or sheep there. Vendors could be local or from far away, even from overseas. Fairs drew entertainers and gypsies as well as thieves. Fairs meant large meadows filled with animals brought from far away and the town square fenced off with animal pens. Fairs were not always held at towns. They were often held at crossroads where two main highways met. The fair’s sponsor had to own the land and might put up temporary buildings. A charter to hold a fair meant the sponsor had the right to collect fees from participants. Tollbooths outlined the fair grounds, and porters col- lected fees. The charter to hold a fair could be very lucrative, and it cost the king nothing to grant.

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  Medievalism and Orientalism

  • J. Ganim(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Over the past two decades an enormous scholarly literature has developed on what would have seemed an unlikely subject, that of world’s fairs and international exhibitions, especially in the nineteenth century. A new interest in the symbolic and theatrical aspects of social history and of simulated environments, reflecting the state of our own cultural moment, has vitalized this previously 84 MEDIEVALISM AND ORIENTALISM understudied aspect of how the nineteenth century viewed itself. During the same two decades, literary and intellectual historians have turned their attention to another aspect of the same period—its obsession with the Middle Ages. 2 This new scholarly concern with medievalism also has a contemporary source, as the Middle Ages increasingly is pictured in both popular culture and academic discourse as an absolute historical opposite, as the last pre-modern moment in Western Civilization.Yet surprisingly these two distinct turns in recent scholarship turn out to have a link. As it turns out, world’s fairs in the nineteenth century not only celebrated the triumph of European modernity, they also displayed aspects of Europe’s own medieval past. From the Great Exhibition of 1851 onward, medieval reconstructions were among the most popular exhibits at world’s fairs, and often the most difficult to assimilate to the fairs’ modernizing agenda. A nearly complete collection of the official records of most of these fairs is available from the Smithsonian Institute on microfilm, and most of the descriptions that follow are based on materials from these reels. 3 For most of us today, for instance, the idea of the relation of these world’s fairs to the Middle Ages is learned from Henry Adams (1838–1918), who in The Autobiography of Henry Adams extols the futurist power of the great hall of turbines, and contrasts these dynamos to the accepting grace of the cathe- dral, as developed in his dichotomy of “The Virgin and the Dynamo”.

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  Finance Masters: A Brief History Of International Financial Centers In The Last Millennium

  A Brief History of International Financial Centers in the Last Millennium

  • Olivier Coispeau(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • WSPC

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  FROM THE ANNUAL FAIRS OF THE 11th CENTURY TO EARLY INTERNATIONAL BANKING

  The decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. meant the gradual disappearance of most of its trade and the feudalisation of economic and social relationships. In the Roman dominated Europe, the Latin “feria” was synonymous with holy or free day, and is the origin of the word “fair.” Each feria was a day when a large number of people would take time to gather, worship and trade. This explains that in the Middle Ages the Church was so active in sponsoring such events as it was not only an opportunity to worship and state its importance in society by ruling and customs, but also a significant source of income. Sunday grew to be a popular day for markets and fairs. Folks could attend church and then stroll in the market to trade, entertain themselves and socialise. The fair represented for the people a break from regular life and hence from regular purchase. Until Copernicus (1473–1543), most merchants took for granted that the Earth was flat, but their main problem with that theory was the fact that explorers had yet to reach the edge of the world and avoid being swallowed by the Great Abyss. Plato and Pythagoras had earlier mentioned the possibility of a spherical shape, but it was not until the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the world in the 16th century, funded by the Spanish Crown, that the matter was really settled for good. This changed the world and it changed international trade.

  The Merry Fair of St Giles as An Early Model of a Multinational Trading Centre

  It seems reasonable to assume that International Financial Centres started an early primitive life in the 11th century at an annual “free fair” most likely in Winchester (Wessex, England) in a peaceful place only half a kilometer from the North Oxford city walls. Winchester began as a Roman town: Venta Belgarum was built about 70 A.D., and was made a civitas or regional capital, the fifth largest city in Roman Britain, but when the last Roman soldier left Britain in 407, Winchester seemed to have been abandoned and deserted, until the Saxons arrived in the 6th century to revive it, and renamed it Venta Caester, then Wintanceaster. The earliest official reference to the fair comes from The Session Rolls of James I where it is recorded that a gentleman named Thomas Cantyn was fined six shillings for swearing six insufferable oaths at the parish wake, but unlike the annual fairs of Nottingham and Hull, its ancestry cannot be traced back to a Charter fixing in the Medieval calendar. This southern English place was an important wool trade center at the time of William the Conqueror. It was really after the Norman conquests that fairs became of capital importance in England. As markets grew bigger, fairs attracted even more people from greater distances and more importantly foreign merchants. There were many opportunities to trade and equally large opportunities to have a merry time as “strange beasts and birds, apes, bears and ferrets were also brought for sale to St. Giles’ Down”. When the fair was nearing a close, the much awaited entertainment appeared: freak shows, parading giants, dwarves and faeries, menageries of unseen animals, magicians, musicians, farces and puppet shows, pigs solving amazing questions of fortune or arithmetic, astronomical clocks fascinated the audience. The rapid and ephemeral assembly of the fair created a unique and extraordinary economic momentum requiring the services of every carpenter of the county, and the participation of builders, agents, bailiffs, auctioneers, accountants, surveyors and cooks among many others. There was certainly a darker side to the fair as thieves, crooks, beggars and prostitutes also congregated. Hygiene was generally poor during this time and the incredible reports from autopsies performed by practitioners showed the prevalence of parasites, infections and wounds of all types with direct consequences on life expectancy of the population at large.

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  Medieval Market Morality

  Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200–1500

  • James Davis(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Trade was often regarded as counter to the Christian ideal of an agrarian subsis- tence lifestyle, as well as providing unavoidable temptations to sin. Yet, many medieval writers also recognised that commerce was economi- cally necessary and even beneficial for the common good. In the context of growing commercialisation and a developing market society, some 1 For an in-depth discussion of scholarly works, see Langholm, Economics; Langholm, Legacy of Scholasticism; Langholm, The Merchant; Baldwin, ‘Medieval theories’; Baldwin, Masters; Gilchrist, Church and Economic Activity; Wood, Medieval Economic Thought; Kaye, Economy and Nature. 34 Images of market trade 35 writers demonstrated certain anxieties as they discussed the role of mar- ket trade within medieval society. They often reacted to the contemporary economic environment by emphasising the potential sinfulness of com- mercial pursuits and the constant clash between private motivations and public duty, between personal interest and the common good. Not all writers agreed on the relationship of trade to society, or what market activities were justified; nor did they approach the subject in the same manner, particularly those writing within different genres. 2 This chapter examines prevailing moralistic attitudes towards petty traders through a range of cultural sources, such as poems, sermons, pas- toral works, drama and art. These texts and images cannot be divorced from the social and economic worlds in which they were created and are therefore valuable residues of contemporary beliefs and assumptions. This chapter concentrates mostly on texts and images that circulated in late medieval England, but examples will be drawn from further afield where appropriate, such as the formative scholastic debates concerning just price.

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