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Traditions don’t fall from the sky, they are created by people, and sometimes by good-hearted people whose simple acts of generosity become enshrined over time and bestow on their originators a place in history. The Fairlop Oak Festival (or Fairlop Fair) is a good example.

Long ago in England – the early- to mid-18^th Century – on the first Friday in July, the Fairlop Oak Festival was held. The Fairlop Oak, a large tree, in Hainault Forest, Essex was said to have a whopping diameter of 6.7 metres (22 feet) and a girth of 20 metres (66 feet). These estimates are no doubt exaggerated; however, one Peter Kalm, a student of the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778), measured the tree at 9.1 metres (30 feet) in 1748.

In about 1720 a prosperous pump-maker named Daniel Day (1673 - 1767), known to his friends as Good Day (perhaps he had an Australian cousin called Gid Day), started the practice of sharing a meal with his friends (and tenants, for Day had inherited some property and this was his annual rent-collecting day) under the oak on the first Friday in July. Day was quite particular as to the meal served each year: they always ate just beans and bacon beneath the 91-metre (300-feet) circumference canopy. 

Pedlars' stalls with glitt'ring toys are laid,
The various fairings of the country-maid.
Long silken laces hang upon the twine,
And rows of pins and amber bracelets shine.
Here the tight lass, knives, combs, and scissors spies, 
And looks on thimbles with desiring eyes.
The mountebank now treads the stage, and sells 
His pills, his balsams, and his ague-spells:
Now o'er and o'er the nimble tumbler springs, 
And on the rope the vent'rous maiden swings; 
Jack Pudding, in his party-coloured jacket, 
Tosses the glove, and jokes at ev'ry packet: 
Here raree-shows are seen, and Punch's feats, 
And pockets picked in crowds and various cheats.

Good Day’s friends in the pump-and-block trade, about 40 of them, used to come, accompanied by a band, from Wapping town via the hamlets of Bow, Stratford and Ilford in a huge six-horse-drawn float which was a brightly decorated boat mounted on a carriage – not just any boat, but a fully rigged frigate created by Good Day who was a keen sailor.

A circus atmosphere

Day’s day developed into a major festival, complete with stalls and amusements, as more and more people became interested in the tradition. In the 1750s more than 100,000 people attended the Fair from all over London. Stalls sold gingerbread men, toys, ribbons, and there were entertainments such as puppet shows, musicians, circus acrobats and even wild beasts. Fairlop Fair enjoyed a reputation of being a very well conducted day, but as early as 1736 certain stallholders were prosecuted for gaming and illegal sales of liquor. In 1793 the Fair was banned for its bacchanalian reputation, but it emerged again the following year.

Come lunchtime, Mr Day would serve up the beans and bacon from the tree trunk, and his guests ate in booths under the shelter of the great oak. When he was old and the oak lost a limb, he took it as an omen of death and had a coffin made out of the limb, and when he died in 1767, aged 84, Good Day was buried in it. He had served his guests on this day every year for several decades. Locals continued the fair in Daniel’s absence, and it actually lasted for about another century, but nothing on this earth lasts forever.

Perhaps the great tree mourned its Good Day, for it went into rapid decline. By 1791, a sign on the oak read "All good foresters are requested not to hurt this old tree, a plaster having lately been applied to its wounds".  By the early 19^th Century many branches had fallen and its interior was a hollow in which several horses or cattle could shelter, with people picnicking inside the tree as much as beneath its grand canopy. They would sometimes light a fire for cooking and in June 1805 one such fire ignited ‘Fairlop’, as the tree was called, and it burnt for more than a day.  

By the time Fair Day came around in 1813, the tree was almost expired and a gentleman paid a boy two shillings and sixpence to climb Fairlop and bring down the very last green sprig. Sadly, in February, 1820, the 500-year-old Fairlop Oak went the way of all Good Days and was blown over in a storm; however, in 1951, during the Festival of Britain, a new Fairlop Oak was ceremonially planted by the citizens of Essex in memory of Good Days past. The generous businessman has been remembered, too, in a play, Between Two Shores, written by Brian Kearney.

As a sad footnote, the entire Hainault Forest did not fare any better than the great Fairlop Oak. The forests of Essex had, since the times of the 11^th-Century king, Edward the Confessor, been the property of the monarch with some rights accorded to the commoners.

During the mid-18^th Century, around the time of our Good Daniel Day and his wonderful fair, many people struggling to make a living began making enclosures in the forest, there as in many parts of Britain, resulting in the forest officials tearing down their fences and prosecuting the small farmers. In 1817, on application from the monarch’s Commission of Woods, an Act of Parliament enclosed much of the forest for the Crown, doing away with ancient commoners’ rights in the woods. In 1851 the whole 1,215 hectares (3,000 acres) of Hainault Forest was cut down, apart from some small wooded areas on the lands of the richest farmers.

Make a good day.

"One of the earliest pictures of the Fair is by S H Grimm 1774, and another by Thomas Rowlandson 1815 are to be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Other accounts and pictures are to be found in editions of the Illustrated London News, and in local newspapers. A scrapbook of Fairlop Fair can be seen at Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow. In 1829 Constables Dorwood and Fox from Woodford gave a lad sixpence to mind two police horses, returning to discover that the boy and the horses had disappeared. In the same year 17 persons were fined at Lambeth St. £5 with 8s 6d (43p) costs for taking passengers to Fairlop Fair without numbers and plates on their vehicles. This year and the following the Fair was a washout due to heavy rains and flooding. In 1839 The Religious Tract Society counted 108 drinking booths and 72 gaming tables. Over 200,000 were attending, and Pea and Thimble riggers operated together with pickpockets and horse stealers ...

"The Fair continued to 1900 being held in various venues in the area. In 1865 a Mr. Hemmingway, a ballad singer arrived at the fair in a boat on wheels which was decked in flags and bunting. Song sheets were handed out with songs of the Fair.

"Some of these songs have been recorded on a CD by the "Essex Man" Tony Kendall."
Fairlop Fair at Hainault Forest website

"Fairlop Fair – which has not yet died out, though beginning to show satisfactory signs of decay – commenced its existence, innocently enough, about a century ago ...

"These ship and boat cars attract immense multitudes along the Mile End, Bow, and Whitechapel Roads, down as far as Aldgate; the crowd assemble in the morning to see the holiday people start on their expedition. The most remarkable sight, however, is at night, when the "boats" return lighted with coloured lanterns, red and green fires, &c.; and at every public-house along the road similar fires are burnt, and brass bands stationed to strike up as the cars pass, and stop at certain favoured establishments 'for the good of the house.'"
Charles Maurice Davies; Mystic London, 1875; Chapter XV, 'Fairlop Friday'

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

Celebrations of the world, in the Book of Days

Umbrella Days
St Swithin's Day (July 15) and other days of rain prognostication

The Celtic month of Duir  (Oak)  Jun 10 - Jul 7

External links

The Fairlop Oak

Daniel Day's grave

The Fairlop Fair from Robert Chambers, (Ed.), The Book of Days: A miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar, etc, W & R Chambers, London, 1881 (1879 Edition is online and 1869 edition here with CD-ROM available; See also The English Year: A Personal Selection from Chambers's Book of Days)