Fair Do

“Chartered Saturnalia,” tending toward “lecherie and songs, dances, harping, piping, and also to glotony and sin,” as may be found beautifully detailed by David Kerr Cameron in “The English Fair” (1998).

“It is a problem worthy of our deepest thinkers : "What shall we offer our huge populations in exchange for the silly pageant even now being enacted in the outskirts of the metropolis - which may well be taken to embody the pastime of the lower orders - Fairlop Fair?" …” Charles Maurice Davies, 1875.

During the 18th and 19th centuries around Epping Forest, Fairlop Fair flourished over the first long weekend in July, under the generous branches of the Fairlop Oak.

For William Morris the Forest was childhood home and formative influence. Esther Meynell, who married into the famous Meynell family of Greatham in Sussex, becoming the wife of printer Gerard Meynell, I believe, writes thus in her “Portrait of William Morris” (Chapman & Hall, 1947):

“In so many of the medieval romances and the older fairy tales, a forest is the setting or the background to the lives and adventures of the hero. The castle, the court, the woodcutter’s cottage, are so often surrounded by untrodden depths of forest …

When he was born in March 1834 Epping Forest had still a certain semblance to its medieval days, and therefore was the more suited to the needs and dreams of a romantic small boy. The very names of his first two homes had a forest flavour - he was born at Elm House, Walthamstow, and when he was six years old his parents moved to Woodford Hall, a large Georgian mansion set in fifty acres of park which ran into Epping Forest. Nothing save a wooden fence separated the Morris domain from the authentic forest - to a child there was no barrier between his home and the woods of faery. “Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare.”

The young William Morris, eldest son, though not eldest child, of a large family, naturally entered them on every possible occasion; the lure of the forest and the feel of it was part of his natural growth. “I was born and bred in its neighbourhood,” he said in later years, “and when I was a boy and a young man knew it yard by yard from Wanstead to the Theydons, and from Hale End to Fairlop Oak…. The special character of it was derived from the fact that by far the greater part was a wood of hornbeams, a tree not common save in Essex and Herts. It was certainly the biggest hornbeam wood in these islands, and I suppose in the world. The said hornbeams were all pollards, being shrouded every four or six years, and were interspaced in many places with holly thickets. Nothing could be more interesting and romantic than the effect of the long poles of the hornbeams rising from the trunks and seen against the mass of wood behind. It has a peculiar charm of its own not found in any other forest.”

The ancestors of these hornbeams are believed to have been first imported from France after Agincourt, and planted in Epping Forest.

In later years memories of the Forest of Epping constantly reappear in Morris’s poetry and prose tales. The forest had taken too deep a hold of his child imagination ever to depart from him. He had been born early enough to be a spectator and hearer of some of the old Forest customs which had their roots in a remote past. He knew, as he said, the Fairlop Oak, which was later so ruthlessly destroyed and pulled up by attaching a great anchor to its roots - the Fairlop Oak which so wide a spread of boughs that all the booths at the annual July Fair were covered by its green shade. The old Forest custom was still existent then, by which the commoners had the right of lopping for firewood from St. Martin’s Day - this right being conditional on the lopping being begun as midnight struck on the day, and the first load of timber being then drawn away by a sledge pulled by white horses. Even if the small William Morris never saw his ceremony taking place, he would hear it being talked about, and listen to the tales of old woodmen who had been there. Part of the Middle Ages was still in his actual world.”