The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1865-03-07 00:00:00

Agriculture.

OUR AGRICULTURAL FAIRS AND
MARKE CS.

We continue one extraota from " Fyfe on Agri-
cultural Fairs and Marketa," in the Journal of the
Bath and Weat of England Society, just delivered
gratis to members.

PUZZLES OF THE FAIR LIM%
We do not so much object to many of the fairs being
held and named in relation to saints' days and holydays,
beeftwe these days are for the most part sufficiently
familiar. Dorchester S. Valentine's fair, for exam ple,
being set down as February 14th, is best remembera. as
" St. Valentine's fair," a day of which no one is igno-
rant. But we have already had occasion to remark in
regard to Crewkerne St. Il.rtholomew's fair, that it is
not held on the mod.•rn St. Bartholoraew's-day (24th
August) at all, but on the 40 Seotember, being old
style. Again, a good many of the Dot-set and, Somerset
fairs data from Roy Thursday: Bridport has a fair on
that day, Cs.stleton one on the Wednesday before,
Emmergreen another on the Tuesday before, Sherborne
on the Wednesday befote. And what is Holy Thurs-
. _ . . . . . . . .

rant,

day? One at first. suspects it to be Thursday in Holy
Week ; and he looks in vain in his almanac, for he sees
there nothing but" Aacen,ion Day" (28t1i of May next
Hine). Yet that is the day in question. Easter, he
knows, although a moveable feast, and he can easily
enough hit upon Palm Saturday; bat where and how
is he to find Mid-Lent Monday, the day for holding the
fair at Cerise Abbas, unless his family happen to keep
up the good old custom of assembling together around
a "mothering cake" on Mid-Lent Sunday? Then,
again, the contusion of styles, old and new, breaks in
when we find the fair of Chardstock set down for old
Michaelmss-day. Every man who can afford to pluck
• goose au that great high festival holds well to the
29th of September; but when he has eleven days more
to check off upon his fingers from the fag end of
September, one of the 30-day months,—and some people,
dubious whether the difference of styles makes 11 or
12 days in the compntation,—it would puzzle a fair
arithmetician to do the sum and fix the date ! Indeed

it is hazardous to attempt to fix it under such circum-
stances, and many instances oocur of its resulting in
the unpleasant predicament of being either "a day
behind" or "a day before" the fair I If, as in the ease
of Milton Abbot fair, the Tuesday after Jay 25th (a
definite date) is at ited, that is explicit • but suppose we
take now the first fixture in the list for Somerset, viz.
Aehbrittle, the Monday before the last Tuesday in
February, what do we make of that? Similarly
objectionable, perplexing, and uncertain are those days
set down thus: 'Ashill (Somerset), September 12th,
or. if a Wednesday, than the Wednesday after !"
The very Wednesday oorresponding to the
date itself will not do! It must be another
Wednesday altogether I The crowning caprice,
however, is where those business meetings which stand
for a fixed date are postponed to Monday, for instance,
should the actual date fall either on a Friday or a Satur-
day. Thus " Banwell (Somerset), July 18th" fair,
comes off on Monday if the 18th be a Saturday. This
course is usually adopted to avoid collision with the
Saturday's corn-market, which, on the whole, is the
most prevalent corn-market day of the week—the
Friday's probably coming next; and for this cause
Dorchester Valentine's fair, which last year happened
to fall upon a Sunday, instead of being held on the
Saturday previous, was duly advertised to take place on
the Monday following. In Herefordshire and other
parts of the country, however, where improved arrange-
ments have been attempted, the endeavour has rather
been to make the fairs fall upon market-days. Dorchester
St. Valentine's fair, it must however be understood,
was a hiring fair—a great nuisance—for farm servants;
who although resorting to it in vest numbers for that
ostensible purpose, do not in reality hire there. The
men give notice, it is true, but it is for the mere sake
of spending the day at the fair; and probably they may
change places in consequence; but the real bu-mess of
hiring is far more extensively effected in private than
in public at the fair, the business of which has com-
pletely fallen off. So rooted, however, is the practice
of deferring Friday's and Saturday's fair appointments
till Monday, that in recent instances of their actually
having come off on the appointed day, numbers have
been found to complain that they had naturally
attended on the Monday, assuming that the fair must
have been deferred as a matter of course,whereas it had
perhaps been held, and was all over! This would seem
to have occasioned the precaution of advertising the
Dorchester fair just referred to for the Monday in place
of the market-day, Saturday. But Mr. Duckham,
whose exertions in regulating the great fairs of
Herefordshire have been already noticed, writes :
" The great object I had in view in the alteration of
the days for holding the old established fairs at Here-
ford was, that they should take place on market-days in
place of the days of the month as heretofore. By the latter
arrangement the fair has frequently come between the
alai ket.days, and stall times spoiled those immediately
preceding and following it; whereas business in the
ather case, to a certain extent, riiiits itself by the
expiration of the week. But where no old•eltablished and
well-regulated fairs exist, I should advocate monthly
I markets, say the first or last market day in each
month. For the past few years there have been such
markets established at Cirencester with very consider-
I able advantage. 1 think it highly desirable that
markets and fairs within a given radius should be so
I arranged as to clash as little as poredble. In altering
old-established fairs, or is establishing new ones, great
care should be taken to make them thoroughly known
by advertisement, by placards, by handbills, and by
notices in the different periodicals giving lists of fairs,
km The latter should be sent to publishers in July or
the beginning of August in the year preceding altera-
tion." The lists we fear, bear abundant evidence of
how little this last suggestion is attended to.
OLD AND IsTew STYLE IN THE MARKET CALENDAR.

As, of all the counties under review, none is more
important than Devon as respects the dispoeal of live
stock, so none is involved in more hopeless confusion
by almanac makers as regards these business appoint-
ments. Adducing these discrepancies as we do for the
purpose of urging each as undertake to supply accurate
information of this kind to the public into Both°
strenuous endeavour to have these errors rectified, we
would remind them that, like the publishers of railway
time-tables, they ought to watch and report the minutest
alterations of time in holding fairs and markets. In
scanning the Devon list, it will be noticed that betwixt
the different lists, discrepancies of one day, and often
Indeed of two or more days, occur in each of the cases
of Ashburton, Axminster, Barnstaple, Creditors,
Exmouth, Kingebridge, as many as 5 days in that of
Milton Abbot, 3 days in that of Newton Abbot, whilst
In that of Oakharepton, a whole series of different
menthe are actually stated; and the same is very mach
the case in reference to Tavistook. This is really too
bad: yet we have anteceded in tracing out, we believe,
bow it may have arisen. It has sprung, no doubt,
from an endeavour, which tbe compilers believed to be
laudable, to calculate definitely in some one year or
other, the exact day on which "the first Monday"
or "last Wednesday" might fall; or they have, in
their bewilderment, sent on perhaps to the spot, saying,
"Tell us not 'on' or 'after' what holyday or weekday
your fair or market falls, bet tell us distinctly the
precise day of the month?' For one year this would
be all very well, but next yosr it would put everything
ttecismarily wrong; and when the emendator found that
he had to return to the old mode of calculation after
all, he would naturally enough set down the Wednesday
after 18th of September at Barnstaple, for example, as
the Wednesday. after 19th September, or vice versd ; or
a lesp-year might have intervened, and so have driven
the diserepaney two days out, in place of one. Where
the difference in the statements makes exactly I.i days,
we then know that one "authority" has been reckoning
by new and another by old style. This certainly proves
the difficulty of attempting to render the dates of these
appointments plainer, or more perspicuous, but it by
no means excuses the manufacture and perpetration of
the wholesale errors in which they obviously abound.
Of Cornwall we do not speak; the fairs and markets
there, like the hiring-fairs which occupy so consider-
able a portion of the other county lids, are well under-
stood by those by whom they are frequented, and are of
comparatively minor importance to the distant public,
who are the most likely to be misled by the consultation
of list.; besides, they are mostly left to the old mode
of reckoning, and a great deal of the existing contagion
doubtless proceeds from the effort to extricate old and
new. Altogether, however, the present state of these
Important lists is one of hopeless and mischievous un-
certainty; and we believe that nothing short of an
Act of Parliament (if indeed any Act could be popu-
larly enforced in opposition to the folk-lore and
traditions of the country with which these things are
inseparably linked) would suffice to introduce a general
adjustment. A "Reform Bill" is in fact required for
the fair and market calendar; but, if it were possible,
to arrange a suitable and reliable scheme of fair and
market appointments, another thing would still be
requisite, and that would be—instead of crowding the
results into the form of the present lists—to do as Mr.
Shirley Hibberd has lately done in his Garden Oracle,
where he has substituted for entries of historical and
biographical events, the days of flowering of some 365
different plants I Thus we might have the entries of at
least 313 weekday fairs standing in our almanacs over
against their exact dates, and no mistakes on the sub-
ject could occur. Accidentally turning up Morton's
New Farmer? Alrnanac for 1859, we find this very
suggestion literally anticipated; and in that year's
(probably also in previous years) almanioe, the leading
fairs and trysts of the United Kingdom appear entered
opposite the days of the month. But, alas! this may
have been one of the very causes that operated to throw
the general lists of fairs into disorder. At all events,
the plan has been for some years abandoned; although
we cannot help thinking that an almanac upon this
plan, carefully and annually checked and corrected, is
not even in the present state of confusion an impossi-
bility, and would amply reward the undertaker, whilst
It would prove an inconceivable boon to the bewildered
public. —To be continued..

A LITILT SUBJECT FOB A STORY. There need to
be a story current of a perplexing incident in the life of
John Hunter, the celebrated surgeon, which has a
certain grim drollery about it. One night on reesiving
from Jack Ketch a "subject" who had been hanged
that morning at Newgate—such hangings and such
settings were very common in those days—he perceived
that somehow or other the vital spark was not quite
extinct. His professional zeal was instantly aroused ;
he applied all his skill to the task; and in a short time
succeeded, to his scientific satisfaction, in restoring the ,
law's victim to his full faculties again. But his sally.
faction was somewhat short-lived, for the resuscitated '
felon insisted upon looking to his benefactor for his
future subsistence I He argued that as he had striven
to bring him, as it were, a second time into the world,
he must be regarded in loco parentis Hunter, always
a nervous man, and by no means convinced that he had
not offended grevionaly against the laws in his little ex-
periment, had no alternative but to comply with the
demands of his ungrateful patient, who wag by no means
modest in his visits. After a time, however, they
ceased; but even that brought no comfort to poor
Hunter, who lived in • perpetual tremour of his tor-
mentor unexpectedly popping about him. At last he
re-appeared before him again. One fine evening another
Newgate importation was brought to the private door
of the dissecting room, and to his intense satisfaction
he once more recognised the well-remembered features!
Hunter used to say, with a grim smile, that "be took
speedy care not to give him a second chance."