Early Trading Conditions 23 



make oath that the contract, &c., was within the jurisdiction 

 and time of the fair. . . . The steward before whom the court 

 is held, is the judge, and the trial is by merchants and traders 

 in the fair." 



Such courts were as ancient as the fairs themselves, and 

 they ensured a speedy administration of justice in accordance 

 with what was recognised as merchants' law long before 

 any common law was established. Supposed to have been 

 introduced by the Romans, the " court of pie powder " was, 

 according to Jacob, known by them under the name of " curia 

 pedis pulverisati," while the Saxons called it the " ceapung- 

 gemot," or " the court of merchandise or handling matters 

 of buying and selling." It was, of course, the Normans who 

 introduced the later term of " pied poudre," which the 

 English converted into " pie powder." 



One of the most ancient, and certainly the most important, 

 of all the English fairs was the Sturbridge fair, at Cambridge, 

 so called from a little river known as the Stere, or the Sture, 

 which flowed into the Cam. 1 



Early records of this particular fair, according to Cornelius 

 Walford, in " Fairs Past and Present," are to be found in a 

 grant by King John in or about the year 1211. The fair 

 is believed to have been originally founded by the Romans ; 

 but it may have acquired greater importance at the date of 

 this particular charter by reason of what Cunningham, in his 

 " Growth of English Industry and Commerce in the Early 

 and Middle Ages," describes as the " extraordinary increase " 

 of commerce in every part of the Mediterranean in the twelfth 

 and thirteenth centuries, coupled with the " improvements in 

 navigation and in mercantile practice " which " went hand 

 in hand with this development. Englishmen," he further 

 tells us, " had but little direct part in all this maritime activity. 

 Their time was not come ; but the Italian merchants who 

 bought English wool, or visited English fairs, brought them 

 within range of the rapid progress that was taking place in 

 South Europe." 



From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thir- 



1 The fair has, also, been widely described as the " Stourbridge" fair, 

 a name which seems to associate it, quite wrongly, with the town of 

 Stourbridge, in Worcestershire. I have preferred to follow here the 

 spelling favoured by Defoe and other contemporary writers. 



