To Wye and to Winchester I went to the fair, With many manner merchandise, As my master me hight: But it had been unsold These seven years, So God me help, Had there not gone The grace of guile Among my chaffer. The ‘Wife of Bath,’ too, has a word to say upon this subject. Says she:— I governed them so wel after my lawe, That eche of them ful blissful was and fawe To bringen me gay thinges fro the feyre. What a picture does all this present to our eye. We can see the circular stand of booths belting the rails of the quaint belfried edifice, sometimes, I am afraid, the sacred precincts within.[302] Behind these we may note how busy are our ‘le Stallers’ and ‘le Stallmans,’ now found also as ‘Stalman;’ not to say our ‘Stallards,’ that is, stall-wards, and obsolete ‘le Vendours.’ No infliction too severe can be made upon their readiness to please. Elbowing and chaffering and good-humoured haggling are the order of the day. Here the stupid, happy swain, with his be-ribboned sweetheart tucked under his arm, is buying their little stock wherewith to start life; here the child is made blissful with a trumpet, and the hoary-headed rustic gets a warmer cap for his crown. Here, too, it is that the chapman and other of his _confrères_, as I have already hinted, are buying in their varied commodities. All alike are well catered for. When we talk of ‘packing up our duds,’ few of us, I imagine, are aware that we are using a word of most familiar import in long generations gone by. A ‘dud’ then was a coarse, patched linen gown, gaudy in colour, made up in fact of variegated pieces of this material. Hence he who sold such cheap, flashy goods at a fair, any old fripperer in truth, was styled a ‘dudder’ up to comparatively recent times, and the booth itself a ‘duddery.’ ‘Duderman’ and ‘Dudder’ (now obsolete), ‘Dudman’ and ‘Dodman,’ are all, I doubt not, but interesting memorials of this once flourishing lower class trade. Such names as ‘Thomas Dudman’ or ‘Ralph Deuderman’ greet us occasionally in the olden rolls. ‘William Fairman,’[303] found in the Parliamentary Writs, would be, I suppose, a more general vendor. He has not a few descendants.