1700 Stourbridge Fair popularity

Stourbridge Fair was clearly a major national event, and worthy of comment, sometimes in very colourful terms, by a number of writers, including Samuel Pepys, John Bunyan, Edward Ward, and Daniel Defoe.

John Bunyan used Stourbridge Fair as the model for Vanity Fair in Pilgrim's Progress, which in turn prompted Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

An early eye-witness account is due to Edward Ward, in the 1700 pamphlet A Step to Stir-Bitch-Fair. According to Ward it was referred to as "Bawdy-Barnwel" as it had numerous brothels. He described the crowd, "an Abstract of all sorts of Mankind", the smells of fish, tar and soap, and the vast array of goods for sale in large semi-permanent booths: perfume, hats, toys, cabinets, books, hardware, leather, tobacco. Cloth and wool was sold in huge bags in the Duddery. And men from London came to the Fair not to do business, but to "drink, smoke and whore".

Daniel Defoe described the Fair in his Tour through the whole island of Great Britain, published in 1724. He noted that goods did not necessarily change hands at the Fair, many wholesalers coming to the Fair to take orders for goods that would be delivered at a future date - a more modern way of doing business that, together with improved communications, would eventually render such large fairs obsolete. Toward the last few days of the Fair the social events would dominate the trading. The gentry would arrive for the "puppet-shows, drolls, rope-dancers, and such like". On the last day there was a horse fair, and the gentry would leave the common folk to race with horses and on foot.

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