̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - social history

Early foster care gave poor women power, 17th-century records reveal

ta385 — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 05:45:00 +0000

A rare collection of 300-year-old petitions gives voice to the forgotten women who cared for England’s most vulnerable children while battling their local authorities.

Cambridge experts bust myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history

ta385 — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 23:01:00 +0000

Sex before marriage was unusual in the past – Myth! In some periods, over half of all brides were already pregnant when they got married.

̽��ֱ��rich have always outlived the poor –Myth! Before the 20th century the evidence for a survival advantage of wealth is mixed. In England, babies of agricultural labourers (the poorest workers) had a better chance of reaching their first birthday than infants in wealthy families, and life expectancy was no higher for aristocrats than for the rest of the population. These patterns contrast strongly with national and international patterns today, where wealth confers a clear survival advantage everywhere and at all ages.

In the past people (particularly women) married in their teens – Myth! In reality, women married in their mid-20s, men around 2.5 years older. Apart from a few decades in the early 1800s, the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below 24 was during the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

These are just some of the stubborn myths busted by researchers from ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop). Their Top of the CamPops blog (www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog) went live on 11 July 2024, with new posts being added every week. ̽��ֱ��blog will reveal ‘60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages’.

̽��ֱ��initiative marks the influential research group’s 60th anniversary. Founded in 1964 by Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley to conduct data-driven research into family and demographic history, Campop has contributed to hundreds of research articles and books, and made the history of England’s population the best understood in the world.

Earlier this year, the group made headlines when Professor Leigh Shaw-Taylor revealed that the Industrial Revolution in Britain started 100 years earlier than traditionally assumed.

Professor Alice Reid, Director of Campop and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, said: “Assumptions about lives, families and work in the past continue to influence attitudes today. But many of these are myths. Over the last 60 years, our researchers have gone through huge amounts of data to set the record straight. This blog shares some of our most surprising and important discoveries for a broad audience.”

Myth: Until the 20th century, few people lived beyond the age of 40. Reality: Actually, people who survived the first year or two of life had a reasonable chance of living until 70.

Myth: Childbirth was really dangerous for women in the past, and carried a high chance of death. Reality: ̽��ֱ��risk of death during or following childbirth was certainly higher than it is now, but was far lower than many people suppose.

Myth: Families in the past generally lived in extended, multigenerational households. Reality: Young couples generally formed a new household on marriage, reducing the prevalence of multi-generational households. As today, the living circumstances of old people varied. Many continued to live as couples or on their own, some lived with their children, whilst very few lived in institutions.

Myth: Marital titles for women arose from men’s desire to distinguish available women from those who were already ‘owned’. Reality: Both ‘miss’ and ‘mrs’ are shortened forms of ‘mistress’, which was a status designation indicating a gentlewoman or employer. Mrs had no necessary connection to marriage until circa 1900 (and even then, there was an exception for upper servants).

Myth: Famine and starvation were common in the past. Reality: Not in England! Here, the poor laws and a ‘low pressure’ demographic system provided a safety net. This helps to explain why hunger and famine are absent from English fairy tales but common in the folklore of most European societies.

Myth: Women working (outside the home) is a late 20th century phenomenon. Reality: Most women in the past engaged in gainful employment, both before and after marriage

Myth: Women take their husbands’ surnames because of patriarchal norms. Reality: ̽��ֱ��practice of taking a husband’s surname developed in England from the peculiarly restrictive rule of ‘coverture’ in marital property. Elsewhere in Europe, where the husband managed the wife’s property but did not own it, women retained their birth names until circa 1900.

Myth: People rarely moved far from their place of birth in the past. Reality: Migration was actually quite common – a village population could change more than half its members from one decade to the next. Rural to urban migration enabled the growth of cities, and since people migrated almost exclusively to find work, the sex ratio of cities can indicate what kind of work was available.

Campop’s Professor Amy Erickson said: “People, not least politicians, often refer to history to nudge us to do something, or stop doing something. Not all of this history is accurate, and repeating myths about sex, marriage, family and work can be quite harmful. They can put unfair pressure on people, create guilt and raise false expectations, while also misrepresenting the lives of our ancestors.”

On World Population Day, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers bust some of the biggest myths about life in England since the Middle Ages, challenging assumptions about everything from sex before marriage to migration and the health/wealth gap.

Assumptions about lives, families and work in the past continue to influence attitudes today. But many of these are myths.

Alice Reid

Black and white photograph of a family lined up against a wall in E W Hope, Report on the physical welfare of mothers and children (Liverpool, ̽��ֱ��Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1917), volume 1

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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French love letters confiscated by Britain finally read after 265 years

ta385 — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Over 100 letters sent to French sailors, but never delivered, have been read for the first time since they were written in 1757-8. ̽��ֱ��letters include heart-breaking love letters and evidence of family quarrels. ̽��ֱ��letters were seized by Britain’s Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War and forgotten about until historian Renaud Morieux studied them.

Growing old in Georgian England

fpjl2 — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 08:45:08 +0000

A new study examines the words and behaviour of older people who went on to take their own lives in 18th-century England.

Discarded History exhibition lifts the lid on 1,000 years of medieval history

sjr81 — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 06:07:10 +0000

Discarded History: ̽��ֱ��Genizah of Medieval Cairo opens to the public on April 27 and provides a unique and unparalleled window into the daily life of men, women and children at the centre of a thriving city over the course of a millennium.

From the 9th to the 19th century, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo) deposited more than 200,000 unwanted writings in a purpose-built storeroom in the Ben Ezra synagogue. This sacred storeroom was called the Genizah. A Genizah was a safe place to store away any old or unusable text that, because it contained the name of God, was considered too holy to simply throw out.

But when the room was opened in the late 19th century, alongside the expected Bibles, prayer books and works of Jewish law – scholars discovered the documents and detritus of everyday life: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, a 1,000-year-old page of child’s doodles and alphabets, Arabic fables, works of Muslim philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts. Practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East throughout the Middle Ages had been preserved in that sacred storeroom.

Dr Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit and co-curator of the exhibition, said: “This colossal haul of writings reveals an intimate portrait of life in a Jewish community that was international in outlook, multicultural in make-up and devout to its core; a community concerned with the very things to which humanity has looked for much of its existence: love, sex and marriage, money and business, and ultimately death.

“ ̽��ֱ��Genizah collection is undeniably one of the greatest treasures among the world-class collections at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library. We have translated most of these texts into English for the first time – and most are also going on display for the first time, too. With Discarded History we hope to make this medieval society accessible and recognisable to a modern audience.”

Among the highlights going on display in Cambridge are the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (Shtar Shiddukhin, from 1119), showing the complex legal relations that existed around marriage, the oldest-dated medieval Hebrew manuscript (a Bible from 9th century Iran) and an 11th century pre-nuptial agreement where the groom, Toviyya – who clearly had a bad reputation – was forced to make a series of promises about his future behaviour.

In the presence of witnesses, he declares that he will avoid mixing with the wrong sort, for the purposes of ‘eating, drinking or anything else’. He also states that he will not spend one night away from Faiza, unless she wants him to, and that he will not buy himself a slave girl, unless Faiza agrees.

̽��ֱ��existence of the Cairo Genizah was first brought to the attention of Western scholars by the fearless and intrepid travellers Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson in 1896. ̽��ֱ��twin sisters, devout Presbyterians who had inherited a great fortune, returned to Cambridge from a research trip to Egypt and Palestine. They brought with them a treasure lost for a thousand years: a page from the original Hebrew book of Ben Sira, accumulated along with thousands of other documents in the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Cambridge lecturer Solomon Schechter was so excited by the sisters’ remarkable discovery that he raised the money to travel to Old Cairo to see for himself what the Genizah held – although not before swearing the twins to secrecy about the nature of their discovery, lest a rival scholar from Oxford be alerted to their existence.

Upon arrival in Cairo, the Chief Rabbi of Egypt gave Schechter permission to take whatever he liked. Schechter declared that he ‘liked all’, and shipped almost 200,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��material that arrived in Cambridge, packed in wooden crates, dates from a period when 90 per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Islamic lands. ̽��ֱ��broadly tolerant regime under which they lived contrasted with the usually harsher treatment meted out to Jews in Western Europe. ̽��ֱ��documents paint a picture of economic stability and social growth. Cheques for goods ranging from wax candles to lemon sherbet pay testament to the variety and richness of the 200,000 documents in Cambridge’s possession – almost all of which have been conserved to avoid any further damage to the priceless collection.

“Women and children are invisible in most archives – especially those from medieval times,” added Outhwaite. “But through our collections, myriad individual voices can be heard through children’s copy books, prenuptial agreements and books of magic spells.

“A broad brush picture of the medieval Middle East as a crucible of cruel oppression or, conversely, an interfaith utopia does not do justice to the eye-level history recorded in these sources. Life, for the culturally rich and socially conscious citizens of the medieval Middle East, was more complicated, sophisticated and interesting than that.

“ ̽��ֱ��Cairo Genizah speaks vividly of the community’s links to other lands and other faiths. Its fragile contents, brown with age when Schechter acquired them, give us a picture of life that includes piracy and human trafficking to the intimate drama of domestic life. We can read about ancient cures for headaches and see school teachers complain bitterly about children’s unruly behaviour, just as they do today. It’s this richness that makes the Genizah unique.”

Discarded History: ̽��ֱ��Genizah of Medieval Cairo opens to the public on April 27, 2017 and runs until October 28, 2017. Entry is free.

Treasures from the world’s largest and most important collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts – chronicling 1,000 years of history in Old Cairo – have gone on display in Cambridge today for a six-month-long exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Myriad individual voices can be heard through children’s copy books, prenuptial agreements and books of magic spells.

Ben Outhwaite

A Brush With History

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Cambridge lecturer Solomon Schechter among thousands of Genizah fragments in his office after their transportation from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Candid camera

bjb42 — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:00:54 +0000

̽��ֱ��first ever international network dedicated to the study of amateur cinema has been set up, reflecting the growing importance of home movies in academic research.

̽��ֱ��Amateur Cinema Studies Network (ACSN), https://amateurcinemastudies.org/, aims to be a virtual space for the growing number of people around the world who use home movies and amateur films for teaching and research in social sciences. Users will be able to share ideas, find new resources and get information about projects and different archives around the world. ̽��ֱ��Network will also run conferences and touring exhibitions.

To mark the launch, a clip from one such amateur film, which features rare and important footage of Gurkhas being recruited by the British Army in the 1950s, is being released on the Network’s new website, https://amateurcinemastudies.org/editors-choice/

Dr Annamaria Motrescu, the researcher at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge who set the ACSN up, said that there was a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists and other researchers that amateur cinema can be a valuable tool for people trying to understand more about their heritage, or different places and cultures.

“ ̽��ֱ��inspiration for the project comes from the thesis I wrote for my PhD, in which I argued that amateur cinema should be considered a film genre in its own right,” Motrescu said. “People used to say I was wrong, and that one couldn’t study amateur films the same way that you might look at the Western or the Film Noir genres. But that hasn’t stopped amateur films from existing, and it hasn’t stopped a huge amount of scholarship on the subject coming out.”

̽��ֱ��Gurkha film is taken from nearly 30 hours of newly digitised footage held by the Centre of South Asian Studies in Cambridge, where Motrescu is a research associate. It was donated to the ̽��ֱ�� by Mrs. Frankie Williams, the niece of a tea planter who stayed on in India after independence and who made the original footage. ̽��ֱ��Centre houses a large archive of amateur films made in India and other South Asian countries, some of which pre-date World War II.

This film captured the recruitment of men from Himalayan villages, some of them as young as 16. ̽��ֱ��silent, colour movie shows them standing and shivering as they are inspected by British Army officers. Researchers believe that it was made in or around the year 1950.

“What’s interesting about this film as an historical document is that a very similar, official film, was made by the British Government at around the same time,” Motrescu said. “ ̽��ֱ��contrast with this in the Williams film is fascinating. None of the Gurkhas has been told to perform for the camera, they’re not happy or smiling and there is no sense that they are somehow willing agents involved in the recruitment process. Against the mass-produced, Government version of similar events, this is a rare visual record of what actually happened when these young boys were drafted, and before they were sent to risk their lives on behalf of the United Kingdom.”

As with many amateur films, the significance of the Williams footage is, Motrescu says, not what it says about the British recruitment process itself, but the insight it offers into the experiences of ordinary people - the Gurkhas themselves. While many professional filmmakers have dedicated themselves to recording social history for as long as documentary cinema has existed, most do so with a particular narrative in mind.

This is rarely the case with amateur filmmaking, which means that often it offers a more candid and dispassionate view of what was actually happening. Like Motrescu’s argument in her PhD, large numbers of researchers increasingly argue that such films deserve their place as documents meriting academic study.

That recognition has been a long time coming, however. Building on work by social scientists and humanities scholars during the 1980s, Patricia Zimmerman’s ground-breaking book, Reel Families: A Social History Of Amateur Film, was the first significant analysis of the subject and was published in 1995.

By 2010, conferences on the subject of amateur film were attracting up to 200 scholars, including historians, anthropologists, psychologists and gender studies specialists, among others. Despite this interest, no formal international network acknowledging that amateur cinema is the subject of a wide range of cross-disciplinary concerns has ever existed, until now.

Unlike other amateur film associations, the ACSN will attempt to serve this community of researchers, by creating a forum online where they can discuss, debate, and share information. ̽��ֱ��Network will develop templates for teaching students about amateur cinema and promote the inclusion of such films in film and media studies courses. It will also provide users with information about archives and collections, and organise conferences and events for both the academic community and the public.

̽��ֱ��ACSN has also recently agreed to be one of the partner organisations supporting the first international web-documentary project dedicated to the Super 8 practice and film culture, a project currently developed by Spring Films (www.springfilms.tv), a London based production company developing international co-productions and high-end documentaries.

“Amateur film can play an important role in rewriting personal as well as national histories, and making them available to us now - not in a voyeuristic manner, but one which tells us more about what people felt like at the time,” Motrescu added. “They provide us with a window on to history which is both public and private at the same time.”

After years of being overlooked as a film genre, amateur cinema is finally being recognised by academics as a form that merits serious study in its own right, offering a surprisingly candid eye on people and the past. Now a new research network will, for the first time, bring their work together in one place.

People used to say that one couldn’t study amateur films the same way that you might look at the Western or the Film Noir genres. But that hasn’t stopped amateur films from existing, or scholarship on the subject coming out.

Annamaria Motrescu

Frankie WIlliams Collection © CSAS

Gurkha recruits awaiting inspection c.1950. ̽��ֱ��never-before-seen footage has been released to mark the launch of the Amateur Cinema Studies Network, http://amateurcinemastudies.org.

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Rage against the machine

ns480 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:58:24 +0000

New research marking the bicentenary of Luddism – a workers’ uprising which swept through parts of England in 1812 – has thrown into question whether it really was the moment at which working class Britain found its political voice.

April 11 will mark the 200^th anniversary of what was arguably the high-point of the Luddite rebellion; an assault by some 150 armed labourers on a Huddersfield mill, in which soldiers opened fire on the mob to stop them breaking into the premises, fatally wounding two attackers.

It was, perhaps, the most dramatic in a series of protests which had begun the year before in Nottinghamshire, then spread to Yorkshire, Lancashire and other regions. ̽��ֱ��Luddites were angered by new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry in place of the skilled work of artisans, threatening their livelihoods as a result.

Invoking a mythical leader, “Ned Ludd”, the insurgents broke into factories and wrecked the offending equipment. At its most incendiary, the rebellion saw exchange of fire between soldiers and workers as well as the notorious murder of a Yorkshire mill-owner, William Horsfall. It also led to the use of the word “Luddite” to describe technophobes.

For historians, the revolt has traditionally been seen as a watershed moment in which the industrial working classes made their presence felt as a political force for the first time. This supposedly laid the ground for later reform movements, such as Chartism, as well as the Trade Unions.

̽��ֱ��great social historian, EP Thompson, even saw Luddism as something close to the workers’ equivalent of the peasants’ revolt. His definitive study, ̽��ֱ��Making Of ̽��ֱ��English Working Class, linked the insurrection to the birth of a left-wing working class movement in Britain.

Now a study by Richard Jones, a research student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, suggests that Luddism may be celebrated for the wrong reasons. He argues that it was not a movement which represented the concerns of the working classes at all – rather those of privileged professionals with disparate, local concerns. In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.

“For historians, the Luddites have traditionally been seen as a phenomenon of social history,” Jones said. “They are viewed as workers dispossessed by economic advances, frozen out of existing structures and doing whatever they could to make their voices heard. But these were not downtrodden working class labourers – the Luddites were elite craftspeople.”

Focusing in particular on Yorkshire, Jones has examined oral testimonies, trial documents, Parliamentary papers and Home Office reports to establish who the Luddites were, how they operated, and what their chief motivation was.

His findings, some of which will be published in History Today next week, suggest that for a movement representing the birth-pains of a politicised working class, the numbers were peculiarly low. While as many as 150 may have stormed Rawfolds Mill in Huddersfield on April 11, 1812, most of the machine-breaking acts involved groups of four to 10.

Jones believes that this smallness of scale reflects the fact that Luddism was far from a genuinely pan-working class movement. Instead, Luddites were skilled workers – a relatively “elite” group, whose role had traditionally been protected by legislation regulating the supply and conduct of labour.

This centuries-old body of laws had also laid down rules for access to certain professional roles, such as the “croppers”, or cloth dressers, who led the rebellion in Yorkshire. These skilled workers had to spend seven years in apprenticeships before they could take up their chosen profession. At the end of it, they tended to feel that they were owed a living.

New machinery in the textile sector was starting to deny them this. For the real working classes, however, that was an old story – many unskilled jobs had long-since been displaced by technological advances and there was little reason for these groups to get involved in an uprising in 1811/12.

Critically, Jones also challenges the idea that the Luddites were organised into any sort of national movement – in fact, the form of rebellion varies considerably from place to place. In Nottinghamshire, for example, there was less violence, with workers simply removing the jack-wires from new knitting frames so that they collapsed. In Lancashire, however, handloom weavers plugged into radical movements in the densely-populated industrial areas around Manchester, leading to full-blown riots.

̽��ֱ��study of Yorkshire reveals that local grievances lay at the heart of the attack on William Cartwright’s Rawfold’s Mill, and the assassination of William Horsfall, near Huddersfield, on April 28^th. Both had made themselves deeply unpopular with the local workforce already, and the assaults appear to have been linked to this reputation.

Similarly, there is little indication that Yorkshire Luddism, in spite of its explosive high-points, was part of a hierarchical or organised criminal fringe linking up on a national scale. Its leaders met in local pubs, and their grievances similarly represented community concerns.

In spite of this, Luddism succeeded in becoming a cause célèbre in the region, not least because it was picked up in 19^th-Century fiction which presented it as the precursor to later, nationalised reform movements like the Chartists.

“Luddism remains an important aspect of local identity in the regions where it was most active,” Jones added. “ ̽��ֱ��problem with this is that sometimes a fictional interpretation of events can slip into the historical analysis. We can only understand the lessons of history if we look at it properly. Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.”

Two articles by Richard Jones based on his current research on Luddism will be published in the next few weeks: “At War With ̽��ֱ��Future” (History Today, May 2012) and “Where History Happened: Luddites” (BBC History Magazine, May 2012).

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high-water mark of the Luddite rebellion – but new research suggests that the movement may be celebrated for the wrong reasons.

Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.

Richard Jones

Ned Ludd, the mythical Luddite leader, in an 1812 depiction at the height of the rebellion.

Ned Ludd

In brief...

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high point of the Luddite uprising. Two hundred years ago this month, two of the most notorious incidents in the rebellion occurred - the attack on Rawfold's Mill and the assassination of William Horsfall, a local mill-owner. Both happened near Huddersfield in Yorkshire.
̽��ֱ��Luddites were machine breakers, opposed to new automated looms that could be operated by unskilled workers, which meant that many of the skilled craftspeople who had done that work lost their jobs.
̽��ֱ��rebellion started in the Midlands in 1811, but spread to other counties - Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular.
Although they have been remembered as the first in a series of industrial working-class movements, the Luddites were probably just a handful of skilled workers with very specific concerns. It seems unlikely that they had a wider political agenda.
̽��ֱ��notion that the uprising was organised on a national scale is also probably misplaced. ̽��ֱ��concerns of Luddites in specific counties seem to be highly localised and the closest they got to uniting was on a community scale, by meeting in local pubs.

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̽��ֱ��800-year-old story of Stourbridge Fair

amb206 — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:37:12 +0000

In the month of September, Stourbridge Common on the outskirts of Cambridge is a lush and pleasant water meadow, frequented by dog walkers, morning joggers and nonchalantly masticating cattle. Scroll back to this very spot several hundred years ago and the air would have been rich with the sounds of tradesmen’s animated chatter, the sawing and hammering of timber, and travelling people tramping down the rough road. Barges and wherries laden with goods would have replaced the sleek college eights skimming the River Cam. Out on the field, carefully measured rows of wooden booths were multiplying, assembling the streets of the most renowned medieval hub of trade, entertainment and revelry: Stourbridge Fair.

For hundreds of years the area known as Stourbridge Common was home to possibly the largest fair of medieval Europe; now all that remains is just a scattering of street names in the east of Cambridge. Garlic row, Mercers Row and Oyster Row are tastes of the huge range of produce bought and sold at this momentous annual event.

̽��ֱ��Fair dates back 800 years to 1211, when King John issued a Royal Charter giving the Leper Chapel at Steresbrigge the right to hold a small fund-raising fete. Built on the boundary of Cambridge, the Chapel was part of an abbey that provided care for Cambridge town’s sick and contagious. Growing steadily, the Fair became immensely popular and enticed crowds from all over the country: craftsmen, tradesmen, travellers, nobility, intellectuals, and some of the most famous names in history. For a few weeks a year, it transformed this grazing common into a lively, industrious destination. In 18^th century writer Daniel Defoe’s words, Stourbridge Fair became “not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world”.

̽��ֱ��800^th anniversary of the Fair Charter will be celebrated by a re-enactment on Saturday 10^th September, 2011. A grand opening at 12 noon will bring the excitement of Stourbridge Fair back to life in the form of stalls, entertainment and storytelling, all in the grounds of the 12^th century Leper Chapel, miraculously still standing. ̽��ֱ��celebration is one of the many free public talks, tours and events taking place during Open Cambridge, a weekend of discovery for families, local residents and community groups, 9-11 September.

̽��ֱ��event will welcome Honor Ridout, Cambridge historian and author of Cambridge and Stourbridge Fair (Blue Ocean Publishing, 2011). Digging into county archives, charters, proclamations, household accounts, trading books and even police reports, Ridout’s book creates a vivid picture of the Fair, using detailed examples and illustrations of the visitors and their lifestyles. She will be giving a talk on the Saturday recounting stories behind the Fair from the 13^th to the 18^th century.

̽��ֱ��Fair’s popularity and development stemmed from its location – alongside both the River Cam which meanders through Cambridgeshire to the Wash at King’s Lynn, and the main road leading to Newmarket. Visitors flocked in their thousands, and its clientele ranged from the most humble peasant to the richest prince in the realm. Royal records show that King Henry III sent his officers to the Fair to buy cloth in 1250. In 1280, his son Edward I bought iron hinges, window bars, fetters and chains for rebuilding Cambridge castle. Author of ̽��ֱ��Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan is said to have modelled his fictional Vanity Fair on Stourbridge, which in turn, is where William Thackeray found the name for his well-known satirical novel.

Queen Elizabeth I stated in a 1589 charter that the Fair “far surpassed the greatest and most celebrated fairs of all England”. Even Isaac Newton visited the Fair during his time at the ̽��ֱ��, and bought an astronomy book and a pair of prisms, which he subsequently used to experiment with white light splitting into a spectrum of colours.

̽��ֱ��rapid assembly of Stourbridge Fair each September required the services of every carpenter in Cambridge, and the participation of builders, agents, auctioneers, bailiffs, accountants, and surveyors among many others. ̽��ֱ��Fair’s size and scale amounted to that of a small town, complete with housing and amenities. It resembled, as Daniel Defoe described in 1724, “a well-fortified city, and there is the least disorder and confusion I believe, that can be seen anywhere with so great a concourse of people”.

̽��ֱ��temporary streets were flanked by wooden booths, which doubled as accommodation; traders often slept on straw mattresses at the back of their stalls as the town was overrun with visitors. A quadrangle of the largest stalls formed a makeshift town square named the Duddery, with a maypole in the centre for music and dancing. Rails and posts were erected in an area assigned for the buying and selling of horses.

Offsetting the worldly concerns of the fair, a pulpit for Sunday sermons was built. Just as the sight of plastic portaloos fill today’s festival-goers with dread, calls of nature were answered with ‘little edifices of general convenience’.

Defoe’s famous journey took him the length and breadth of England. He found Cambridge a rather uninteresting destination, but dedicated several pages of his travel journal to describing his experience at Stourbridge Fair. Locals claimed that one could equip an entire house with the range and volume of produce available at the Fair. Defoe enthusiastically scribbles:

“Scarce any trades are omitted – goldsmiths, toyshops, brasiers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewterers, china-warehouses, and in a word all trades that can be named in London; with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops, and eating houses, innumerable, and all in tents, and booths…By these articles a stranger may make some guess at the immense trade carried on at this place; what prestigious quantities of goods are bought and sold here, and what a confluence of people are seen here from all parts of England…In this Duddery, as I have been informed, there have been sold one hundred thousand pounds worth of woolen manufactures in less than a week’s time”.

When the hard work of haggling, dealing and refunding was nearing a close at the end of September, the much-awaited entertainment appeared, and the atmosphere changed to one of indulgence and impishness. Freak shows parading ‘giants’ and ‘faeries’, menageries of wild animals, pigs and dogs solving amusing questions of fortune or arithmetic, waxwork and puppet shows, and astronomical clocks all amazed and enraptured audiences.

From the 13^th century onwards, Stourbridge Fair was the biggest trading event locally and beyond. Many of the tradesmen formed a strong community which returned each year, even giving each other silly nick-names such as Nimble-Heels and Stupid Stephen. Young people attended for the social opportunities, enjoying dances, concerts and theatres, mingling in the hope of either procuring a partner or else indulging in some innocent coquetry. Unknown and lovesick poet ‘Mr Travis’ wrote, “TO THE FAIR UNKNOWN, Upon seeing her in the Music Booth at Sturbrige fair”. However the Fair also attracted a darker underbelly – beggars, thieves and prostitutes all congregated, hoping to acquire a portion of the wealth beneath the eyeline of bustling traders and customers.

However, there was one powerful institution dissatisfied with the customer service. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge was quick to recognise not only the disruption, but also the money-making opportunities generated by the Fair. Tensions heightened between ‘Town’ and ‘Gown’ as both parties struggled to assert their administrative rights.

Queen Elizabeth I intervened in 1589, to decree that the Cambridge Corporation (the Town council) should run the Fair, with the ̽��ֱ�� retaining the right to police weights and measures. A squad of ̽��ֱ�� Proctors gladly exploited this opportunity to interfere – they imposed a large number of regulations on tradesmen and violations resulted in large fines. Representing all that was sinful and distracting for students, the entertainment was specifically disapproved of. In 1740, the Vice-Chancellor ordered the Theatre Booth to be demolished, gambling ‘games’ such as Roly Poly and ̽��ֱ��Colour Board to be carefully monitored or banned altogether, and even entertainers to curb their acts.

As always, those who made rules often broke them; ̽��ֱ�� officials disregarded the prohibition of the Fair’s ‘idle games and diversions’ listed in James I’s charter. In the 1780s, Vice-Chancellors spared no expense in ordering the same menu each year: herrings, neck of pork, round of beef, goose, plum pudding and apple pie, and dined in a private, tiled booth. In the 1790s, the Master of Emmanuel College Dr Richard Farmer was regularly spotted guffawing in the front row of the Critic’s Row at the Playhouse of the Fair. Reports claim that Masters of Arts, Fellows and clergymen were often seen drunkenly singing and linking arms as they stumbled through the Duddery.

After several weeks of trade and festivities, this transient settlement was dismantled. Centuries before the mud-coated piles of cheap plastic tents and sticky aluminium cans which are left behind at Glastonbury, Defoe writes: “And in less than a week more, there is scarce any sign left that there has been such a thing there, except by the heaps of dung and straw and other rubbish which is left behind, trod into the earth, and which is good as a summer’s fallow for dunging the land.” ̽��ֱ��site was abandoned; tradesmen counted their cash, packed up their horses, and left by coach, wherry or foot, to return the following year.

By the 18^th century, the Fair had peaked and was in decline. As urban development spread, permanent town shops took over from markets as the most popular way to trade goods. Expanding railways and road bridges meant that Stourbridge Common – being next to the river – had lost its advantage of a convenient location. ̽��ֱ��last Fair was held in 1933 and consisted of just one lonely youth with an ice-cream barrow. It was formally abolished in 1934.

̽��ֱ��Open Cambridge event, Stourbridge Fair at the Leper Chapel will take place at Barnwell Leper Chapel, Barnwell Junction, Newmarket Road, Cambridge, CB5 8JJ on Saturday 10 September, 12noon to 4pm. It is a drop in event, suitable for all ages. Regrettably, due to its historic nature the Chapel is inaccessible to wheelchair users.

Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies will be displaying historical documents including the lease of a fair booth dating back to 1475, and information about various criminal activities which took place at the Fair which ranged from selling stolen horses to exhibiting a life-sized nude waxwork of a woman.

For more information about Open Cambridge, visit www.opencambridge.cam.ac.uk or call 01223 766766.

Cambridge and Stourbridge Fair by Honor Ridout is published by Blue Ocean Publishing, Cambridge, 2011.

In medieval times Stourbridge Common was the site of one of Europe’s largest fairs – a bustling centre for shopping, eating and revelry, offering temptations of every kind. An Open Cambridge event on Saturday 10 September will tell the fascinating 800-year-old story of Stourbridge Fair.

Scarce any trades are omitted – goldsmiths, toyshops, brasiers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewterers, china-warehouses, and in a word all trades that can be named in London; with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops, and eating houses, innumerable, and all in tents, and booths…

Daniel Defoe, 1724

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Fair Wagon

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