and dogs danced and women tumbled and the devil jeered in the miracle
play on the spot where martyrs died.

We should need a volume to describe all the sights of this wondrous
fair, the church crowded with worshippers, the halt and sick praying
for healing, the churchyard full of traders, the sheriff proclaiming
new laws, the young men bowling at ninepins, pedlars shouting their
wares, players performing the miracle play on a movable stage, bands
of pipers, lowing oxen, neighing horses, and bleating sheep. It was a
merry sight that medieval Bartholomew Fair.

[Illustration: An Old English Fair]

We still have Cloth Fair, a street so named, with a remarkable group
of timber houses with over-sailing storeys and picturesque gables. It
is a very dark and narrow thoroughfare, and in spite of many changes
it remains a veritable "bit" of old London, as it was in the
seventeenth century. These houses have sprung up where in olden days
the merchants' booths stood for the sale of cloth. It was one of the
great annual markets of the nation, the chief cloth fair in England
that had no rival. Hither came the officials of the Merchant Tailors'
Company bearing a silver yard measure, to try the measures of the
clothiers and drapers to see if they were correct. And so each year
the great fair went on, and priors and canons lived and died and were
buried in the church or beneath the grass of the churchyard. But at
length the days of the Priory were numbered, and it changed masters.
The old gateway wept to see the cowled Black Canons depart when Henry
VIII dissolved the monastery; its heart nearly broke when it heard the
sounds of axes and hammers, crowbars and saws, at work on the fabric
of the church pulling down the grand nave, and it scowled at the new