My little local town really is the sleepiest of places. Yet, once a year, it lets its hair down in spectacular style when the Michaelmas Fair comes along, taking over the marketplace and streets with rides and stalls galore.
Wandering round on Friday night, it occured to me to wonder about the history of the event, given that it seems to be such a fixture in the local calendar. I hadn’t expected it to be as old as it is – the 300th anniversary of it receiving a formal Charter being only a few years off.
It gets even more interesting when one learns that in days gone by, alongside the Pleasure Fair was a Statute Fair – dealing with the hiring of servants. Reports note that:
in the mid 1850s there was clear indication of a growing scarcity of servants and an increasing tendency for their ranks to be dominated by girls in their teens.
The local paper went so far as to condemn the hiring practice as having ‘the character of an Alexandrian slave market’.
Gulp! Oh my goodness, what scene potential that creates. The story of a girl brought to market to be sold; a gentleman making a purchase for his household. And then either him training up his new domestic servant, and punishing her severely for any errors, or… well, surely there were no checks on why he might actually have wanted to purchase her, and what he might do to her now she was his?
All sorts of things went on during the Victorian period. After all, this is where all our best gothic literature was written or is set. And traditional gothic literature is all about sex, death and terror.
In many cases it’s female terror of the unseen which threatens rape and in being defiled in this way brings about a social death as no man would marry a women who was no longer ‘pure.