We can imagine, or try to imagine, the roads and streets leading to
the market-place thronged with traders and chapmen, the sellers of
ribbons and cakes, minstrels and morris-dancers, smock-frocked
peasants and sombre-clad monks and friars. Then a horn was sounded,
and the lord of the manor, or the bishop's bailiff, or the mayor of
the town proclaimed the fair; and then the cries of the traders, the
music of the minstrels, the jingling of the bells of the
morris-dancers, filled the air and added animation to the spectacle.

There is a curious old gateway, opposite the fair-ground at
Smithfield, which has just recently narrowly escaped destruction, and
very nearly became part of the vanished glories of England. Happily
the donations of the public poured in so well that the building was
saved. This Smithfield gateway dates back to the middle of the
thirteenth century, the entrance to the Priory of St. Bartholomew,
founded by Rahere, the court jester of Henry I, a century earlier.
Every one knows the story of the building of this Priory, and has
followed its extraordinary vicissitudes, the destruction of its nave
at the dissolution of monasteries, the establishment of a fringe
factory in the Lady Chapel, and the splendid and continuous work of
restoration which has been going on during the last forty years. We
are thankful that this choir of St. Bartholomew's Church should have
been preserved for future generations as an example of the earliest
and most important ecclesiastical buildings in London. But we are
concerned now with this gateway, the beauty of which is partially
concealed by the neighbouring shops and dwellings that surround it, as
a poor and vulgar frame may disfigure some matchless gem of artistic
painting. Its old stones know more about fairs than do most things. It
shall tell its own history. You can still admire the work of the Early