Within the Fair itself, the _mise en scène_ and the humours of the crowd would have presented a subject fully worthy of Ben Jonson himself, and it is safe to say that no human concourse, not even Bartholomew Fair in its most palmy days, could have taxed his genius more than St. Giles’s Fair during the Edwardian régime would have done. Motley, indeed, was the crowd gathered here--Jews and Normans, Poles and Italians, strolling minstrels, quacks and jugglers, ballad-mongers and fortune-tellers, thieves and swaggerers, Corporal Nyms and Ancient Pistols, rogues and sharpers of every kind, cheating, swearing, dancing, quarrelling, drinking,--hawk-eyed chapmen and hard-visaged countrymen, each alike bent on cheapening the other’s demands, huckstering, gesticulating, and chaffering in strange dialects and all but unknown tongues--while here and there vigilant assizemen, wearing the Bishop’s livery, passed eager-eyed amidst them, keenly scenting out deficient weight or cozening ell-wand, for in spite of severe penalties imposed on all detected in such practices, the Fair was pre-eminently a place where nobody’s virtue was over nice, and all the ‘tricks of the trade’ flourished in a congenial soil. Thus Harvey, prentice to Symme atte Stile, who tells us in Langland’s “Piers Ploughman,” how at Wye and Wynchestre I went to the faire, lifts up some part of the veil for us, telling us that wikkedlych to weye (_wickedly to weigh_) was his first lesson. We have already spoken of the Bishop’s Court or _Pavilionis Aula_. Here the Bailiffs and Justiciaries of the Fair met, not merely to make regulations, but to dispense justice, for the _Pavilionis Aula_ was also a court of summary jurisdiction, a ‘piepowder court,’ _cour des pieds poudreux_ or dusty-foot justice, that is, where the wily Autolycus, or Artful Dodger of the day, or other picker up of unconsidered trifles, was awarded short shrift and well-earned punishment either in stocks or pillory, or in the Bishop’s dungeon under Wolvesey Palace. Such then for some three hundred years was the great Fair of the Festival of St. Egidius. For many years it survived, even though trade in Winchester was falling off and doomed, but it could not survive indefinitely. In Henry VI.’s time a distinct falling off was apparent; since then it has dwindled gradually bit by bit, till now the only tangible memorial remaining is the name of the Bishop’s court, the _Pavilionis Aula_, the ghostly footfall of which seems still to be re-echoed in the name “Palm Hall,” a well-known residence standing on the brow of the hill where ‘all the fun of the Fair’ sparkled and bubbled so many hundreds of years before.