In _Read’s Weekly Journal_, September 8, 1716, we come upon this: ‘Sion Chapel at Hampstead, being a private and pleasure place, many persons of the best fashion have lately been married there. Now, as a minister is obliged to attend, “This is to give notice that all persons upon bringing a license, and who shall keep their wedding dinner in the gardens, only five shillings will be demanded of them for all fees.”’ Park adds that, from these advertisements, Sion Chapel would seem to have been the prototype of the Fleet and Mayfair marriages, but this is incorrect. Fleet marriages took place as early as 1704. The honour of primitive suggestion belongs rather to Gretna Green.[235] Amongst other popular attractions of Hampstead, though hardly to the taste of the more refined visitors, was a pleasure fair. In the _Spectator_ for July 29, 1712 (No. 443, original edition), a notice appears that Hampstead Fair will be held upon the Flask Walk on Friday, August 1, and will hold four days. As fairs were annual occurrences, we must conclude that for four days yearly the rural quiet and beauty of Hampstead were delivered over to ‘rude mirth and tipsy revelry,’ much as it is in these days at the holidays of Easter and Whitsuntide.[236] A triangular bit of waste ground, open in my time at the upper part of Flask Road, was pointed out to me by an archæological friend as the place where _anciently_ that earliest institution of social life, the village pound, and subsequently the stocks and cage, stood, as the after-site of the fair. The fair (continued for more than thirty years after this date)—a fair for the sale of gingerbread, toys, sweetmeats, chap-books, wares such as Autolycus the rogue sold, or affected to sell, the maids. But a pleasure-fair by no means precluded the presence of unpleasant company, and here, as at other fairs, to intoxication, rioting, and uproar, robberies were superadded. The fair, not being a chartered one, but simply permissive by license of the Lord or Lady of the Manor, or the Middlesex magistrates, had frequently been written about and complained of; but the nuisance was suffered to go on till, at length (as late as 1746), it became so great a drawback to the comfort of the respectable inhabitants and visitors, that it was forbidden by the authorities at Hicks’s Hall, a prohibition that did not prevent an impudent attempt, two years subsequently, to revive it, on the part of one Thomas Keate, probably the landlord of the Lower Flask Tavern, who made his purgation in a London newspaper as follows: ‘THE FLASK, HAMPSTEAD, ‘_August 2, 1748_.