Passage
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL FAIRS
[1] For nineteenth-century historians, the story of the medieval trade fair, 1 such as everything else in the commerce of that age, seemed orderly and predictable. [2] In their neat retellings, the life of a great fair 2 displayed itself as a familiar succession of stages. [3] Typically an ambitious town, favored by a river crossing, 3 draws merchants away from the older markets that had served the region. [4] Its founders may show real vision; but within a generation comfort and complacency 4 does its work, and the fair that once bustled is overtaken by a brisker rival, destined in turn to 5 bequeath the same slow decline to the town that 6 succeeds it. Thus prosperity and neglect were the alternating tides of medieval commerce, and a return, at regular intervals, of vigorous new fairs by way of ordinary rivalry and gradual decay 7 was occurring.
[6] It was this confidence in a predictable cycle that allowed the town councils 8 to lie claim to sweeping authority over their fairs. [7] This claim justified strict regulation and shaped how the councils courted the merchants on whom every fair depended. [8] The rationale offered to the townspeople was that firm oversight, by preventing gluts and disputes, would keep the fair prosperous. [9] The councils claimed to be interested in sparing merchants the chaos of an unregulated market. 9
[10] The greatest fairs 10 were able to insinuate their influence over regional trade by two principal means. [11] The first of these was the 11 outright control of a fair's calendar and the subsequent direct oversight of its stalls subsequently. [12] The second means relied on charters by which a lord granted a town the right to hold a fair in return for 12 modest annual fees.
[13] The most important such protection came from the "peace of the fair," a set of privileges granted to visiting traders. 13 [14] Organizers secured it by guaranteeing traders a swift and impartial hearing. [15] Their rules drew on older customs of safe conduct, borrowing what was already practiced along the pilgrimage roads. [16] Under the peace of the fair, a quarrel among the traders went not to the town court but to a special 14 tribunal i.e. a court that met on the spot. [17] By ruling for one trader or another, both of 15 whom might have had an equal claim to the goods, the court kept the fair's business moving.
