On the day that he was twelve years old Barty was to have a treat which all the boys envied him. He was to go to Bartlemy Fair at Smithfield by London. David Saumond, the stone-mason who had built their orchard-wall, was going beyond London to Canterbury to work at the cathedral. Farmer Appleby had a sister living in London, whom he had not seen for many years, and by this and by that he decided to go with David as far as London Bridge. The Fairs held on one and another holiday during the year were great markets for Old England. Nearly all of them were called after some Saint. It might be because the saint was a patron of the guild or industry which made the fair prosperous; Saint Blaize was the patron of the wool-combers, Saint Eloy of the goldsmiths, and so on. It was often simply a means of making known the date. People might not know when the twenty-ninth of September came, if they could not read; but they were very likely to know how long it was to Saint Michael's Day, or Michaelmas, because the quarter's rent was due at that time. June 24, the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, was Midsummer Quarter Day, and in every month there were several saints' days which one or another person in any neighborhood had good cause for remembering. St. Bartholomew's Fair at London was one of the greatest of all, and its name came about in an interesting way. Barty knew the story by heart. The founder was Rahere, the jester of Henry I. While on pilgrimage to Rome he had fallen ill in a little town outside the city, and being near death had prayed to Saint Bartholomew, who was said to have been a physician, for help. The saint, so the legend goes, appeared to him in a vision and told him to found a church and a hospital. He was to have no misgiving, but go forward with the work and the way would be made clear. Coming back to England he told the story to the King, who gave him land in a waste marshy place called Smoothfield, outside London, where the wall turned inward in a great angle. He got the foundations laid by gathering beggars, children and half-witted wanderers about him and making a jest of the hard work. The fields were like the kind of place where a circus-tent is pitched now. Horses and cattle were brought there to market, as it was convenient both to the roads outside and the gates of the city. The church walls rose little by little, as the King and others became interested in the work, and in course of time Rahere gathered a company of Augustines there and became prior of the monastery. The hospital built and tended by these monks was the first in London. In 1133 Rahere persuaded the King to give him a charter for a three days' Fair of Saint Bartholomew in the last week of August, and tradition says that he used sometimes to go out and entertain the crowds with jests and songs. Rahere's Norman arches are still to be seen in Saint Bartholomew's Church in London, close by the street that is called the Cloth Fair.