But, for you have not furniture Beseeming such a guest, I bring his owne, and come myselfe, To see his lodging drest. With that two sumpters were discharged, In which were hangings brave, Silke coverings, curteins, carpets, plate, And all such turn should have. But useful as were all these various itinerants, it was at the great yearly wakes or fairs, held in commemoration of the church dedication, that the housekeepers round laid in their greatest store. The term ‘wake’ denotes ‘a watching,’ because of the vigil observed during the night preceding the festival itself. Indeed ‘wake’ and ‘watch’ were for centuries synonymous words.[298] Wicklyffe translates Mark xii. 37—‘Forsooth, that that I say to you, I say to all, Wake ye.’[299] Thus it is that our ‘Wakemans’ are but memorials of the old village guardian or night watchman, while our ‘Wakes’ can boast a title dating so far back as the time when ‘Hereward the Wake,’ or Watchful, was fighting the last battle of the down-trodden and oppressed Saxon.[300] These fairs were by no means for mere pleasure-seekers, as we might imagine from such a term as ‘church-ale,’ or judging by the aspect of such festivals in the present day. They had an end to answer, and an important end, and in early times they fulfilled it. It was here the farmers round brought their produce, ready to sell their wool for good sound money, or to exchange it for commodities of which they stood in need. It was here the foreign trader came to purchase sheep-fells and other skins, soon, by transmission abroad, to be worked up by Flemish hands into good broadcloth, and retransmitted again to London or provincial marts. Edward the Confessor obtained a sum of 70_l._, an immense amount at such a time as this, from the tollage at a fair held in Bedfordshire. Of many celebrated fairs, those of Smithfield on St. Bartholomew’s Day (which still exists as a kind of perpetual one), York, Winchester, and Ely seem to have been the most frequented. That in the Isle of Ely was kept up on and for some days after the feast of St. Awdrey, or Audrey, the corrupted name of St. Etheldreda, which as a surname our ‘Awdreys’ still preserve. This seems to have become specially noted for its sale of trinkets, toys, and cheap and gay laces—so much so that in course of time ‘tawdry,’ or St.-Awdry, ware became the colloquial and general term for such. Drayton we even find using the word substantively when he says:— Of which the Naiads and blue Nereids make Them tawdries for their neck.[301] Of the still greater one held at Winchester, we find Piers the Plowman speaking:—