Napoleon I. Of still greater importance for the history of Napoleon are Fain’s Mémoires, which were published posthumously in 1908; they relate more particularly to the last five years of the empire, and give a detailed picture of the emperor at work on his correspondence among his confidential secretaries. Immediately after the overthrow of Charles X., King Louis Philippe appointed Fain first secretary of his cabinet (August 1830). Fain was a member of the council of state and deputy from Montargis from 1834 until his death, which occurred in Paris on the 16th of September 1837.
FAIR, a commercial institution, defined as a “greater species
of market recurring at more distant intervals”: both “fair”
and “market” (q.v.) have been distinguished by Lord Coke
from “mart,” which he considers as a greater species of fair;
and all three may be defined as periodic gatherings of buyers and
sellers in an appointed place, subject to special regulation by
law or custom. Thus in England from a strictly legal point of
view there can be no fair or market without a franchise; and a
franchise of fair or market can only be exercised by right of a
grant from the crown, or by the authority of parliament or by
prescription presupposing a grant. In the earliest times periodical
trading in special localities was necessitated by the difficulties of
communication and the dangers of travel. Public gatherings,
whether religious, military or judicial, which brought together
widely scattered populations, were utilized as opportunities for
commerce. At the festivals of Delos and at the Olympic games
trade, it is said, found important outlets, while in Etruria the
annual general assembly at the temple of Voltumna served at
the same time as a fair and was regularly attended by Roman
traders. Instances of a similar nature might be multiplied;
but it was above all with religious festivals which recurred with
regularity and convoked large numbers of persons that fairs,
as distinguished from markets, are most intimately associated.
The most commonly accepted derivation of the word “fair” is from the Latin feria, a name which the church borrowed from Roman custom and applied to her own festivals. A fair was generally held during the period of a saint’s feast and in the precincts of his church or abbey, but in England this desecration of church or churchyard was first forbidden by the Statute of Winton (c. Edward I.). Most of the famous fairs of medieval England and Europe, with their tolls or other revenues, and, within certain limits of time and place, their monopoly of trade, were grants from the sovereign to abbots, bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries. Their “holy day” associations are preserved in the German word for fairs, Messen; as also in the kirmiss, “church mass,” of the people of Brittany. So very intimate was the connexion between the fair and the feast of the saint that the former has very commonly been regarded as an off-shoot or development of the latter. But there is every reason to suppose that fairs were already existing national institutions, long before the church turned or was privileged to turn them to her own profit.
The first charter of the great fair of Stourbridge, near Cambridge, was granted by King John for the maintenance of a leper hospital; but the origin of the fair itself is ascribed to Carausius, the rebel emperor of Britain, A.D. 207. At all events, it may be seen from the data given in Herbert Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology that the country had then arrived at the stage of development where fairs might have been recognized as a necessity. The Romans also appear to have elaborated a market-law similar to that in force throughout medieval Europe—though it must be observed that the Roman nundinae, which some have regarded as fairs, were weekly markets. It has also been supposed that the ancient fairs of Lyons were a special privilege granted by the Roman conquerors; and Sidonius Apollinaris, A.D. 427, alludes to the fairs of the district afterwards known as the county of Champagne, as if they were then familiarly known institutions. Fairs, in a word, would not only have arisen naturally, wherever the means of communication between individual centres of production and consumption were felt to be inadequate to the demand for an interchange of commodities; but, from their very nature, they might be expected to show some essential resemblances, even in points of legislation, and where no international transmission of custom could have been possible. Thus, the fair courts of pre-Spanish Mexico corresponded very closely to those of the Beaucaire fair. They resembled the English courts of piepowder. The Spaniards, when first they saw the Mexican fairs, were reminded of the like institutions in Salamanca and Granada. The great fair or market at the city of Mexico is said to have been attended by about 40,000 or 50,000 persons, and is thus described by Prescott:—
“Officers patrolled the square, whose business it was to keep the peace, to collect the dues imposed on the various kinds of merchandise, to see that no false measures or fraud of any kind were used, and to bring offenders at once to justice. A court of twelve judges sat in one part of the tianguez clothed with those ample and summary powers which, in despotic countries, are often delegated even to petty tribunals. The extreme severity with which they exercised those powers, in more than one instance, proves that they were not a dead letter.”
But notwithstanding the great antiquity of fairs, their charters are comparatively modern—the oldest known being that of St Denys, Paris, which Dagobert, king of the Franks, granted (A.D. 642) to the monks of the place “for the glory of God, and the honour of St Denys at his festival.”
In England it was only after the Norman conquest that fairs became of capital importance. Records exist of 2800 grants of franchise markets and fairs between the years 1199 and 1483. More than half of these were made during the reigns of John and Henry III., when the power of the church was in ascendancy. The first recorded grant, however, appears to be that of William the Conqueror to the bishop of Winchester, for leave to hold an annual “free fair” at St Giles’s hill. The monk who had been the king’s jester received his charter of Bartholomew fair, Smithfield, in the year 1133. And in 1248 Henry III. granted a like privilege to the abbot of Westminster, in honour of the “translation” of Edward the Confessor. Sometimes fairs were granted to towns as a means for enabling them to recover from the effects of war and other disasters. Thus, Edward III. granted a “free fair” to the town of Burnley in Rutland, just as, in subsequent times, Charles VII. favoured Bordeaux after the English wars, and Louis XIV. gave fair charters to the towns of Dieppe and Toulon. The importance attached to these old fairs may be understood from the inducements which, in the 14th century, Charles IV. held out to traders visiting the great fair of Frankfort-on-Main. The charter declared that both during the continuance of the fair, and for eighteen days before and after it, merchants would be exempt from imperial taxation, from arrest for debt, or civil process of any sort, except such as might arise from the transactions of the market itself and within its precincts. Philip of Valois’s regulations for the fairs of Troyes in Champagne might not only be accepted as typical of all subsequent fair-legislation of the kingdom, but even of the English and German laws on the subject. The fair had its staff of notaries for the attestation of bargains, its court of justice, its police officers, its sergeants for the execution of the market judges’ decrees, and its visitors—of whom we may mention the prud’hommes,—whose duty it was to examine the quality of goods exposed for sale, and to confiscate those found unfit for consumption. The confiscation required the consent of five or six representatives of the merchant community at the fair. The effect of these great “free fairs” of England and the continent on the development of society was indeed great. They helped to familiarize the western and northern countries with the banking and financial systems of the Lombards and Florentines, who resorted to them under the protection of the sovereign’s “firm peace,” and the ghostly terrors of the pope. They usually became the seat of foreign agencies. In the names of her streets Provins preserved the memory of her 12th-century intercourse with the agents and merchants of Germany and the Low Countries, and long before that time the Syrian traders at St Denys had established their powerful association in Paris. Like the church on the religious side, the free fairs on the commercial side evoked and cherished the international spirit. And during long ages, when commercial “protection” was regarded
