Reviewing the fair as it had existed during the four centuries passed since its origin—but many of the details of which I have necessarily passed over in the preceding outline—we may adopt the picture thus freely drawn by Mr. Morley: Thus we have in the most ancient times of the Fair a church full of worshippers, among whom were the sick and maimed, praying for health about its altar; a graveyard full of traders, and a place of jesting and edification, where women and men caroused in the midst of the throng; where the minstrel and the story-teller and the tumbler gathered knots about them; where the sheriff caused new laws to be published by loud proclamation in the gathering places of the people; where the young men bowled at nine pins, while the clerks and friars peeped at the young maids; where mounted knights and ladies curvetted and ambled, pedlars loudly magnified their wares, the scholars met for public wrangle, oxen lowed, horses neighed, and sheep bleated among their buyers; where great shouts of laughter answered to the Ho! Ho! of the devil on the stage, above which flags were flying, and below which a band of pipers and guitar beaters added music to the din. That stage also—if ever there was presented on it the story of the Creation—was the first wild-beast show in the fair: for one of the dramatic effects connected with this play, as we read in an ancient stage direction, was to represent the creation of beasts by unloosing and sending among the excited crowd as great a variety of strange animals as could be brought together; and to create the birds by sending up a flight of pigeons. Under foot was mud and filth, but the wall that pent the city in shone sunlit among the trees; a fresh breeze came over the surrounding fields and brooks, whispering among the elms that overhung the moor glittering with pools, or from the Fair’s neighbour, the gallows! Shaven heads looked down on the scene from the adjacent windows of the buildings bordering the Priory enclosure; and the poor people whom the friars cherished in their hospital, made holiday among the rest. The curfew bell of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the religious house to which William the Conqueror had given with its charter the adjacent moorland, and within whose walls there was a sanctuary for loose people, stilled the hum of the crowd at nightfall, and the Fair lay dark under the starlight.