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Updated: June 8, 2025
Last year, during the vacation, I took a trip with Will Brinsmead, Mr Strelley's head drover, as far as Stourbridge, to the fair, and I never enjoyed any thing more in my life. I thought then, and I think now, that for a young man who likes being on horseback, and enjoys the free air of heaven, galloping across country, there is not a pleasanter sort of life.
Owing to its fairs, and particularly to the famous Stourbridge Fair, an annual mart of very great if uncertain antiquity, held near the town during September, Cambridge at an early date became a centre of commerce, and it had risen to be a fairly large town of some importance before the Conquest.
He added, that besides this, there were very few hops, if any worth naming, growing in all the counties even on this side Trent, which were above forty miles from London; those counties depending on Stourbridge fair for their supply, so the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Northampton, Lincoln, Leicester, Rutland, and even to Stafford, Warwick, and Worcestershire, bought most if not all of their hops at Stourbridge fair.
These are the wool and the hops; as for the hops, there is scarce any price fixed for hops in England, till they know how they sell at Stourbridge fair; the quantity that appears in the fair is indeed prodigious, and they, as it were, possess a large part of the field on which the fair is kept to themselves; they are brought directly from Chelmsford in Essex, from Canterbury and Maidstone in Kent, and from Farnham in Surrey, besides what are brought from London, the growth of those and other places.
After having resided for some time at the house of his uncle, Cornelius Ford, Johnson was, at the age of fifteen, removed to the school of Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, of which Mr. Wentworth was then master. At this school he did not receive so much benefit as was expected, and remaining there little more than a year, returned home, where he may be said to have loitered for two years.
He told me all about himself; and if he was not an honest man, he would not have done that. He is a Yorkshireman, a dealer in wool and drapery, and is on his way to Stourbridge Fair and Newmarket. If he had had any sinister motive, he would not have spoken as frankly as he did." "Then who stole your powder-flask, and drew the bullets out of your pistols?" asked Brinsmead.
I went to Stourbridge, got round the foreman of the glass-works and learnt that the stopper of this bottle had been hollowed out inside, in accordance with the instruction in the order, so as to leave a cavity, the existence of which would escape observation." Lupin nodded his head: "The thing tallies beyond a doubt.
I hope we may both do our duty, and fight bravely for our country. That's what I have come to sea for, with the hope of seeing a little more of the world than I should if I had remained at Nottingham, or continued to drive oxen between Scotland and Stourbridge."
The circuit of a fair sometimes was very great, and it would have been impossible in those days to carry on the trade of the country without them. The great Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge, I have described in my former book on English Villages. The booths were planted in a cornfield, and the circuit of the fair, which was one of the largest in Europe, was over three miles.
If the curious reader chooses to see a picture of Birmingham, in the time of the Britons, he will find one in the turnpike road, between Hales-owen and Stourbridge, called the Lie Waste, alias Mud City.
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