Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1901-04-19
ENGLISH HIRING FAIRS,
An Old and Picturesque Custom That
is Dying Out.

From the Pail Mall Gazette.
Among the passing phases of country
life, as one is reminded by the advent OF
March, is the hiring that once throughout
all England was the ordinary means of en-
gaging farm servants. It's name and date
varied with the locality. In the Louth dis
trict of Lincolnshire it is customary to
hold stats or statute fair early in
the year as January, the servants entering
on their engagements on April 16. The
Cambridgeshire hirings take place at Wis
bech during September. The ''mops'' of
the midland and western counties were
held some in May, but most in the au-
tumn But in every one of them the sys-
tenn is dying out, and the hiring fair is
going the way of the horse and sheep and
general fairs-that is to say, it is ceasing
to exist. Like a great many other old in
Stitut:onS, 1t has been ruined by the cheap
press. Your rustic is well aware that for
s1xpenny advertisement he at any
time make known his wish for a change.
The ancient custom dies hardest among
the tenacious Mortimer, and I hear that
the first of the March hirings was very
well attended indeed. Plowmen naturally
enough, We're in high spirits, the wages
commanded being satisfactory to them.
Sixteen shllings a week was given in
cash, and Of course this was in addition to
the payments in kind which have always
bulked largely in the north, and include
such solid perQuisiteS, as a ren-free cot
yards of potatoes, and various measures
of corn. Payment in kind is always tend
ing toward disbuse and the feeling is that
hours of labor should be very definitely
fixed and remuneration be in money, the
bond between master and man being only
what Carlyle called the cash nexus.'' 1t
is quite new deal in agriculture.
If we remember that it was the loss OF
indirect advantages such as that of COM
mon grazing that ended the career of the
once famous British yeoman and compelled
SO many sales in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, We may well
look with suspicion upon this general crav-
ing for hard cash. One would not like to
see the northern rustic spoiled In an age
which shows SO many signs of decadence
it is good to see that his figure is as burly,
hear him at those hirings eXclaiming with
pleased surprise, the while energetically
shaking hands, It's 'ee?'' You will hear
it again and again with variations as you
been negotiating. rs that zee, johnny"
"Eh, Mary, hinny; surely that's no 'ee?"
Throughout the year they do not depend
SO much on cider (Which is nearly always
hard and of great alcoholic strength and
beer, the home-brewed four-ale varying
as the southern rustic. Cider is very good
drinking, but not the cider they drink
Her be rare good zider, muster, thick
but not the wayside home-brewed of the
eastern counties. The northerner is safer
with his milk all the year round, varied
by "a bit of burst at the hirings.
The northern peasant woman has very
greatly changed in recent years. 'Verdant
Green" can scarcely be called an ancient
work, and it seems to the writer that the
bondager remained up to quite recently
as she was described in that amusing vol
ume. I remember her as very buxom
woman, supported on legs like two stout
pillars, her frock very short, showing her
ieggings and wooden clogs. She wore a
bongrace, too; that from certain ballads
in the Roxburgh collection at one time
England. 1t was a funny shaped bon
net, with projection that resem-
bled the hood Of carriage, and
for short it was called ugly. But
the bondager Of today. who calls herself
an outworker, has departed sadly from
this model. Not even in the fields will she
wear an ugly, and she comes to the fair
with a genteel hat and veil to it, while
her hair is over her ears and curled round
her eyebrows quite in the manner of a
not the worst of it. One of my correspond
ents, who is most trustworthy observer
of peasant life, draws attention to silly
and pernicious habit of theirs in the fol-
lowing words: Il am certain only quar-
ter of the women looked healthy, and these
were nearly all the middle-aged ones. They
are in the most frightfully anaemic and
dyspeptic condition, and very few but had
most of their teeth out They looked more
delicate than the town girls Many of them
Unable, but not of the kind We associate
with good health. To get the extraordi-
nary pallor and the faint pink they eat
quantities of raw oatmeal. starch, rice,
ETC., till 1t is impossible for them to digest
a decent NEAL
Ant-Eating I'm the Northwest. n
From the New Orleans Times Democrat