Such courts were as ancient as the fairs themselves, and they ensured a speedy administration of justice in accordance with what was recognised as merchants' law long before any common law was established. Supposed to have been introduced by the Romans, the "court of pie powder" was, according to Jacob, known by them under the name of "curia pedis pulverisati," while the Saxons called it the "ceapunggemot," or "the court of merchandise or handling matters of buying and selling." It was, of course, the Normans who introduced the later term of "pied poudré," which the English converted into "pie powder." One of the most ancient, and certainly the most important, of all the English fairs was the Sturbridge fair, at Cambridge, so called from a little river known as the Stere, or the Sture, which flowed into the Cam.[4] Early records of this particular fair, according to Cornelius Walford, in "Fairs Past and Present," are to be found in a grant by King John in or about the year 1211. The fair is believed to have been originally founded by the Romans; but it may have acquired greater importance at the date of this particular charter by reason of what Cunningham, in his "Growth of English Industry and Commerce in the Early and Middle Ages," describes as the "extraordinary increase" of commerce in every part of the Mediterranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, coupled with the "improvements in navigation and in mercantile practice" which "went hand in hand with this development. Englishmen," he further tells us, "had but little direct part in all this maritime activity. Their time was not come; but the Italian merchants who bought English wool, or visited English fairs, brought them within range of the rapid progress that was taking place in South Europe." From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the {24}thirteenth century the export of wool, leather, lead, tin and other English commodities was in the hands almost exclusively of foreign merchants, who came here both to purchase these raw materials and to dispose of the products of their own or other countries; and Sturbridge Fair, as it happened, formed a convenient trading centre alike for foreign and for English traders, the question of inland communication being, in fact, once more the dominating factor in the situation.