Stourbridge fair belonged to the city and corporation of Cambridge, and was held in September, lasting three weeks. Tents and wooden booths were erected at that time on the open fields, so as to form streets; each trade had its own street as in real cities, and as may still be seen now in the bazaars of the East. Among the principal articles sold at this fair were: “ironmongery, cloth, {252} wool, leather, books.” The last article became in several fairs an important one when the art of printing spread; there was in the North Hundred of Oxford, in the sixteenth century, a fair at which an extensive sale of books took place, and this, as Professor Thorold Rogers has observed, is the only way to account for the rapid diffusion of books and pamphlets at a time when newspapers and advertisements were practically unknown. “I have more than once,” adds the same authority, “found entries of purchases for college libraries, with a statement that the book was bought at St. Giles’ fair.”[341] No reader of Boswell needs to be reminded how the father of Dr. Johnson had a booth for book selling on market days at Uttoxeter, in doing which he was merely keeping up, as we see, a mediæval tradition of long standing. How young Samuel refused once to accompany his father to the market, and, in after-time, repaired on a rainy day to the spot, and there did penance, has been alluded to before. Even at the present day books continue to be an article of sale at the fairs in many French villages, and sheets of printed matter are taken from thence to cottages, where, under the smoky light burning in winter by the fireside, people, not very dissimilar to their forefathers of five hundred years ago, look at the image of mediæval heroes and of the worthies of the world, by the side of whom now begins to appear that of the heroes of the Great War. To the fairs, along with mummers, jugglers, tumblers, beggars, and the whole of the catchpenny tribe, the pedlar was sure to resort, in the approved Autolycus fashion. “He haunts,” says the clown in “Winter’s Tale,” “wakes, fairs, and bear-baiting.” There he might exhibit “ribands of all the colours i’ the rainbow; points, more {253} than all the lawyers in Bohemia can learnedly handle, though they come to him by the gross; inkles, caddisses, cambricks, lawns. Why, he sings them over, as they were gods or goddesses; you would think a smock were a she-angel, he so chants to the sleeve hand, and the work about the square on’t.”[342] So that everybody might remark, as does the honest clown to fair Perdita, “You have of these pedlars that have more in them than you’d think, sister.” A favourable view, adopted, magnified, sublimated by another great poet whose Wanderer is a pedlar, but what a pedlar and what a part does he not play in the community!