This article offers an examination of the internal nature of hiring fairs in the East Riding of Yorkshire in the mid Victorian years and, in doing so, considers both the market and festive dimensions of these popular gatherings. Both elements are here heuristically regarded as a form of what Erving Goffman has termed an ‘interaction order’, a social domain in which two or more individuals are physically in one another's response presence.Footnote ¹ Goffman has suggested that interaction orders are best analysed alone through microanalysis and then correlated to external factors.Footnote ² Such an approach, he suggests, diminishes the risk of disregarding their inherent qualities as effects of external ‘macrostructures’ and thereby undervaluing their intrinsic dynamism. This case study will draw on these insights and focus on hiring fairs as substantive domains in their own right, whilst also intermittently correlating their internal relations with potentially influential external contexts. In analytically foregrounding the hiring fair's interior market and festive dynamics, it is hoped that a just evaluation of their nature can be realised and then compared to salient social changes occurring within rural England, and English society more generally, from the middle of the nineteenth century.

There are three interrelated aspects of this broader external context that are particularly important here and are firmly established as significant in the historical interpretation of change in the Victorian countryside. The first is the nature and direction of cultural change in English rural society after 1850. It has been suggested that these years have a ‘certain unity’ marked by the penetration of the countryside by urban influences, such as the railway network, the ethos of capitalist individualism, more civilised behavioural patterns, and their propensity to combine and erode the vitality of ‘traditional rural culture’.Footnote ³ These processes are also related to a broader shift in the cultural balance of power between the urban and the rural, as the former appropriated and then increasingly shaped the latter.Footnote ⁴ The second is the changing character of popular recreations during the mid nineteenth century. This time has been identified as a ‘turning point’ in the history of recreations, towards greater sophistication and order. This apparently included fairs, as the combined effects of the railway and the leisure entrepreneur effected their incorporation into an increasingly disciplined and urban centred world of commercialised leisure.Footnote ⁵ The third aspect is the advance of High Farming in the English countryside as English agriculture responded to urban demand and adopted the intensive forms of agrarian production associated with a mid Victorian ‘golden age’ of agricultural progress and social equipoise.Footnote ⁶ In considering the connections between these potentially expressive social domains and such reputedly potent and conditioning forces, this article draws on prior work by this author and relates it to these analytical and interpretative paradigms. In doing so, it offers a contribution to key discussions about the nature of rural society and culture in nineteenth-century England, and particularly the idea of the passivity and impoverishment of the rural compared with supposedly more dynamic urban forms.Footnote ⁷

Towards the end of the mid Victorian years, a local newspaper still regarded the hiring fair's function as a labour market as the ‘real business part of the fair, the object for which it is established, namely the hiring of servants’.Footnote ⁸ This involved servants and masters gathering in the market places and streets of towns and villages and engaging in a process of observation and negotiation that resulted in a verbally agreed yearly contract. The maintenance of this market ritual at the heart of most East Riding hiring fairs ensured that they did not share the fate of some of their counterparts in the south of England, where a decline in the practice of engaging farm servants saw many hiring fairs transformed into ‘pure fun fairs’.Footnote ⁹ This meant that their market functions could no longer form a defence against predators and many were consequently suppressed.Footnote ¹⁰ In the north of England, where farm servants continued to be hired in substantial numbers, hiring fairs were less vulnerable. The East Riding offers a prime example of this sustainability. Here, a dynamic and advanced form of capitalist agriculture was heavily, and increasingly, dependent on farm servant labour and this underpinned the viability of the hiring fairs as functional market places.Footnote ¹¹ When a Church-led crusade threatened the East Riding's fairs, for example, it was rebuffed by local farmers who declared that the hirings ‘were in full vigour in this part of the country’ and ‘more necessary than ever’.Footnote ¹² Yet although the survival of this customary function was fundamental, the sustained vitality of these events was comprised of a more complex meld of established and developing interactions.

Goffman's discussion of interaction orders suggests that they are social situations pervaded by shared assumptions based on prior experiences that inform ground rules for the structure and course of events.Footnote ¹³ Hiring fairs had analogous facets. By the nineteenth century their participants had established a relatively formulaic pattern that divided the day into separate spheres of business and recreation.Footnote ¹⁴ The day's proceedings were initiated by the arrival and occupation of the town or village environs by farm servants either on foot or in vehicles. At Driffield hirings in 1871, for instance, servants were observed ‘pressing into town’ from the ‘early hours’ in ‘carrier carts, omnibuses and all kinds of vehicle from cabs down to hand carts’.Footnote ¹⁵ Later in the day, those arriving on trains enlarged this already substantial gathering and the streets became ‘a dense surging tide’ of farm servants.Footnote ¹⁶ On their arrival, the servants’ main concern appears to have been to find a public house and it was only ‘after refreshing themselves’ that they would ‘take their stand in the market place’.Footnote ¹⁷ By the ‘middle of the forenoon’ on this occasion, and quite typically at these events, the market place and the adjacent streets at Driffield were ‘completely filled with a dense mass of servants’ and it was at only at this moment that employers began to make their entrance on the situational stage, an entrance that shifted the pattern of interactions towards observation, enquiry and negotiation:

The prominence of the master's gaze in this act ensured that the slave-market analogy was ubiquitous amongst nineteenth-century observers of hiring fairs. The agricultural commentator T. E. Kebbel, for example, complained that employers observed farm servants ‘as the slave merchant would have scanned a Negro, and naturally regard them as in no other light than that of animals’.Footnote ¹⁹ The Hull Advertiser provided a local example of this discourse in 1854:

Employers undoubtedly seriously considered servants’ physical attributes. Servants were aware that they were on public display and consequently would strive to enhance their bodily appearance. Male servants in the East Riding dressed in a manner that emphasised their physical capability, for example ‘the local fashion of fastening a jacket with a piece of chain instead of buttoning . . . was intended to enhance the size of a lad's chest and hence by implication, his strength and carrying ability’.Footnote ²¹ Female servants also sought to make a positive visual impression on masters and mistresses.Footnote ²²

However, the Victorian observers who so negatively described this aspect of the hiring day derived a superficial view of the proceedings which failed fully to understand the interactive sophistication of this bodily display and observation. Farmers did not consider physiological attributes alone in the servants that they hired; experience, skill, character and demeanour were also vital.Footnote ²³ A farmer's reliance upon visual clues and perceptions was not an indication of indifference towards the servant's inner nature. It was part of a ‘semantic system’ in which clothes, emblems and deportment were regarded as external clues of the origins, availability, skills, and personality of those offering themselves for hire.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, the verbal exchanges that might follow the initial visual encounters could be exhaustive and dialectical; as one former farm servant evidenced when he recalled of such occasions that ‘there was no end of questioning from both sides’.Footnote ²⁵

This reference to questioning from both sides raises another caveat to the representation of hiring fairs offered by their Victorian detractors. The slave market metaphor implied that the role of the farm servant in the hiring was submissive. In fact, farm servants could be assertive and influential at the hirings. They brought a sense of self-determination to the event being ‘for the time their own masters, having left, or being about to leave their own places’.Footnote ²⁶ This assertiveness was especially true in northern England where, for most of the mid Victorian years, a relatively tight labour market ensured that farm servants enjoyed parity in their bargaining with employers:

There was also a facet of combination in these interactions since hiring fairs gathered the usually scattered servants together and they could now face their employers as a group.Footnote ²⁸ This helps to explain why, to the consternation of public moralists, servants so often resisted attempts to abolish or reform outdoor hiring practices: as Ann Kussmaul has observed ‘Servants preferred hiring in the open market. It was there, removed from obscurity of the household, that they could be powerful collectively’.Footnote ²⁹

Interactive social situations of this kind provide a theatrical space in which creative assertiveness might be generated by its participants. The social and spatial conventions of the hiring appear to have offered a stage characterised at times by ‘coercive exchange’ in the interactions between servants and farmers.Footnote ³⁰ The influx of hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of farm servants transformed the towns and villages into places of exceptional verve and animation. The occupation of the fair's environment by ‘the unmistakeable farm servant’ instilled the environment of the fairs with a sense of their potential power and purpose.Footnote ³¹ When they bargained with employers, for example, they stood together. This, and the stiffening effects of drink, lent a theatrical belligerence to their negotiations:

Servants also used this gathering in public space to collaborate in garnering and circulating information about prospective employers and the wages that might be realised that day.Footnote ³³ In these discussions of farmers’ reputations and in their refusals to hire into a ‘bad meat house’, the servants asserted themselves as critical consumers of the farmer's board, lodging and wages and, in doing so, made the farmer's reputation subject to as much scrutiny as their own.Footnote ³⁴ In addition, because this bargaining occurred in public and was witnessed by other farm servants, those tempted to accept a poor barter might find their negotiations subject to remark and intrusion by others who, through this intervention, articulated individual negotiations to a broader collective purpose.Footnote ³⁵

The means by which servants circulated information about farmers and wage levels also illustrates the collective dimension of the hiring fair as a setting for interaction. The badinage and songs of the marketplace provided amusement and raised spirits on cold November days, but they also offered a means of shaping the course of events by, for example, emphasising that farmers and servants had potentially divergent interests. Stories and songs offered pejorative views of farmers and lionised servants who had stood firm against them.Footnote ³⁶ A couple of verses from that popular classic ‘Cowd Stringy Pie’ illustrate both the entertaining and didactic nature of this expressive culture:

Songs were also used to disseminate opinion of the wages that might be achieved at a fair and to encourage servant solidarity on the issue:

These observations suggest that whereas each negotiation at the hiring fair was reliant on the bargaining skills, both visual and verbal, deployed by individuals in face to face interactions, they were also part of a broader process of collective bargaining. Both dimensions illustrate aspects of ‘that broad class of arrangements in which persons come together . . . in a consciously shared, clearly interdependent undertaking, bracketed with rituals of some kind’. The interactions were robust but they were also modulated by the ritualistic nature of the gathering and the theatrical character of the exchanges which served to control the level of animosity.Footnote ³⁹

Although the dynamic and creative dimensions of these internal interactivities deserve to be emphasised and analysed, significant influences external to these interactive domains often conditioned the course of events within it. Most important of these were the short term seasonal situation of agriculture at the time of hiring and longer term movements in the market position of the agricultural servant.Footnote ⁴⁰ The short term seasonal situation usually favoured the employer because hiring fairs occurred during the slack ‘back-end’ of the agricultural year and farmers usually felt under less pressure to accede to servants’ wage demands, particularly if the weather had recently been fine.Footnote ⁴¹ This structural disadvantage for the servants is illustrated by the example of the hirings in the autumn of 1849 when ‘the great progress which had been made in the season’ meant that farmers were easily able to resist servants’ demands for wage increases at the early hirings.Footnote ⁴² Farmers continued to defy demands for higher wages throughout that year's hiring campaign and the reports of the final hirings at Beverley and Driffield predicted that numerous servants would remain jobless throughout the winter of 1849–50, although many were now accepting the lower wages being offered.Footnote ⁴³ Although the short term situation was working against the farm servant in 1849, in that year, as in all years, it was the longer term movement in the agricultural labour market that was most significant in shaping the outcome of the bargaining interactions. The 1849–50 hiring round was at the nadir of an agricultural downturn that lasted from 1848 to 1853. The farm servants at the hirings of 1849 were disadvantaged, therefore, by a thorny combination of adverse short term seasonal factors and a significant longer-term shift in the agricultural labour market. As a newspaper review of this hiring season put it: ‘The present depressed state of the agricultural interest and the great progress already made in field labour, owing to the favourable season’ had enabled farmers ‘to be in a position to expect a decrease in wages and to dispense, for a time, with their usual number of hands’.Footnote ⁴⁴

As the mid Victorian period advanced, however, the relationship between the hiring fairs’ internal practices and this important external context altered as there was a significant shift in the market position of the farm servant. East Riding agriculture recovered from depression in the early 1850s and entered a period of general prosperity that lasted well into the 1870s.Footnote ⁴⁵ This encouraged a resurgence of High Farming with its heavy utilisation of male and female farm servant labour. Emigration overseas, migration to urban employments, the Crimean War and a rise in the number of non farming occupations in the East Riding reinforced this more favourable position for those seeking to be employed at the hirings.Footnote ⁴⁶ Evidence of a shift in the labour market for servants can be found from the early 1850s and a palpable movement in the balance of power at the hirings had occurred by the mid 1850s. In 1849, attempts by servants to raise wages at the early hirings had been dramatically snubbed but, five years later, at the first hirings of 1854, the plot had changed and farmers had to accede to the increases demanded.Footnote ⁴⁷

In 1855 employers even attended hirings earlier in the day than was customary because ‘a scarcity of servants was anticipated, and there is great complaint that most of the best servants have either emigrated or gone to be soldiers’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Higher wages were the general rule at hiring fairs across the region up to 1857 and after a brief downturn at the end of the 1850s the market for farm servant labour revived from the early 1860s.Footnote ⁴⁹ By the middle of that decade, farmers were once again complaining of the wage demands of servants and of the fact that wages were increasing ‘every year’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The labour market was at its tightest during the 1870s with servants of both sexes being repeatedly successful in overcoming the short term seasonal disadvantage of autumn hiring and secured higher wages at even the earliest and most crowded hiring fairs. In the autumn of 1872, for example, servants encouraged by ‘agitators singing “Strike boys, strike”’ demanded substantial wage increases.Footnote ⁵¹ These demands, which the press related to the ‘recent agitation for higher wages’ were ‘stoutly resisted’ by farmers.Footnote ⁵² Nonetheless, the majority of farm servants eventually obtained the higher wages they demanded.Footnote ⁵³ This was the prevailing pattern to the end of the Mid Victorian years. At early hirings in 1876, for example, ‘Very high wages were asked which for a time checked engagements, but the demand being general and unabating, the rise was generally obtained’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Later hirings that year at Bridlington, Market Weighton, Hunmanby, and Malton also saw servants obtaining advances in wages. Footnote ⁵⁵

This brief survey of the changing course of bargaining has illustrated that the interior interaction order of the East Riding hiring fairs was informed by external contextual forces such as the return of agricultural prosperity from the early 1850s, the expansion of the farm service labour system connected with it, and the proletarian social relations associated with both; the course of the relations within this example is a reminder also of Goffman's observation that relations within interaction orders can in turn lead to enduring shifts in social relations beyond the interactive domain itself.Footnote ⁵⁶ In order to contextualise this more fully, and reach a firmer evaluation of the relationship between the interactions within the hiring fairs and macrostructures beyond, this article will now turn to an examination of the internal festive and recreational interactions of these fairs and their possible correlations with external contextual forces. This will involve looking at the hiring day within the framework of what Goffman identifies as the ‘largest interactional unit’ the ‘celebrative social occasion . . . the foregathering of individuals . . . the whole occurring under the auspices of . . . some jointly appreciated circumstances [within which] A common mood is likely to develop’.Footnote ⁵⁷ According to Goffman, this aspect of the interaction order is potentially the richest in terms of its capacity for dynamic social expression and a capability for impacting on the world beyond.Footnote ⁵⁸

Hiring fairs had always been about more than simply wages and employment. They constituted a major juncture in the cultural calendar of rural society and the urban centres that hosted them. At Driffield, ‘the metropolis of the Wolds’, for example, the hiring fair was ‘unquestionably the most remarkable event witnessed in the town during the year. . . . the point of attraction, at which are collected all the rustic youth of both sexes, within a circle extending from 10 to 12 miles around’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The pleasure seeking of the young servants was perceived as being fundamental to the carnivalesque ambience of these events. In the words of a prominent local detractor, the Reverend John Eddowes, the hiring day was ‘a day of unfettered liberty and unrestrained enjoyment . . . the signal for the suspension of every law of virtue and morality: every restraint seems loosened, and every feeling of shame forgotten’.Footnote ⁶⁰ All hiring fairs had these elements but those that occurred during Martinmas Week, the farm servants’ annual holiday, were probably imbued with the greatest determination to indulge. This week, and the hirings fairs within it, combined to form the ‘Martinmas holidays’, a time described by one critical observer as ‘a sort of yearly festival ending too frequently in the worst excesses’.Footnote ⁶¹ This excess stemmed, in part, from the fact that Martinmas Week marked the end of the agricultural year and served, therefore, as the occasion for both a late harvest festival and a winter threshold feast; but its salience was a reflection also of the predicament of the farm servants at this time.Footnote ⁶² Martinmas might herald a release from a year of duress and drudgery and, as a mid Victorian farm servant recalled, the hiring fair could provide some recompense: ‘If any of the lads had been at a “bad living spot” they made up for it during Martinmas week’.Footnote ⁶³ For those not yet hired, there was uncertainty about their prospects and for those that had secured a place, doubt about what that might bring. Indulgence was a means of coping with the double edged nature of Martinmas.

More prosaically, the fact that farm servants received the greater part of their annual wage at the termination of their contract meant that they had the means of enjoyment at their disposal.Footnote ⁶⁴ The token payment which sealed the verbal agreement, the ‘fest’, was also traditionally spent at the hiring fair and, although it was still referred to as a ‘hiring penny’, by the 1840s only a ‘near’ farmer offered as little as a shilling; the standard being half a crown for a man or a maidservant.Footnote ⁶⁵ The farm servants’ wages and ‘fests’ furnished, therefore, an important source of income for retailers and publicans. Hiring fairs might seem an unlikely location for the Victorian retailing revolution but there was a connection between the continued vitality of the hiring fair and the health of the burgeoning ‘shopocracy’ of local market towns. At Driffield, for instance, it was claimed that after the ending of the fairs’ official regulation in the early nineteenth century, ‘the holding of statutes . . . has been a matter in which the shopkeepers and publicans have been chiefly interested, and who have been the prime-movers in procuring their being held’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Although this is an incomplete explanation of the hirings’ survival, the income from servants at this time was undoubtedly very significant. Servants purchased their essential needs for the coming twelve months and as Martinmas approached ‘clothiers and footwear dealers made sure they had good stocks of good strong suits and boots ready for the demand that would certainly be intensified’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Writing of the mid nineteenth century, a former farm servant recalled that:

Testimony of the importance of farm servants as consumers can be found in the newspaper advertisements of the mid Victorian years which, with their bold ‘Martinmas Martinmas!’ headlines, are clearly aimed at their wallets. These not only advertised the essentials traditionally purchased by servants, such work-clothes and footwear, but steadily more ‘luxury’ goods such as tailored suits, concertinas, melodeons, violins and silver lever watches.Footnote ⁶⁹ To own the latter was reputedly the ambition of every male farm servant; they would sometimes pay half the cost one Martinmas and half the next.Footnote ⁷⁰

Although the poverty of the rural worker should not be underplayed, rising money wages and diminishing prices after 1850 did gradually increase the affordability of better clothing for the northern farm labourer and the ‘improved’, ‘well dressed’ and ‘warmly clad’ appearance of all farm servants and especially the ‘gaily dressed’ females increasingly drew comment in newspaper reports of the fairs.Footnote ⁷¹ At Bridlington hirings in 1854, for example, it was noted that in their ‘outward appearance in dress &c.’, farm servants appeared to be ‘in comfortable and thriving circumstances especially compared with their costumes and general demeanour a few years since’.Footnote ⁷² The fairs were arenas of courtship and festivity and wearing fine clothes was a means of impressing in these interactions. At Beverley in 1871, for example, the streets were reportedly filled with ‘rustics with neatly combed hair and gaudy tie . . . accompanied by the softer but by no means weaker sex . . . arrayed in all the glory of coloured ribbons and fiery plaids’.Footnote ⁷³ Wearing what others might regard as brazenly opulent dress on a day they considered their own contributed to the holiday mood dimension of the occasion. The York Herald's reporter observed the ‘well dressed’ servants at a hiring fair and recognised the importance of this when he commented that: ‘Most of them had evidently dressed themselves for the occasion . . . not so much to get hired as to have what is termed in common parlance “a day out”’.Footnote ⁷⁴

The mid Victorian period has been identified as a turning point in the history of leisure, and fairs have been regarded as an important in this.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hugh Cunningham's work, which remains the most stimulating discussion of the development of mid nineteenth-century fairs, has suggested, for example, that, from the late 1840s, they were rescued from impending oblivion by the rapid expansion of the railway network. The railways made short and long distance travel more feasible and fairs, at a time when their market functions were supposedly outmoded, received a massive boost from pleasure-seeking excursionists: ‘Precisely at the time when they had become established in the middle-class consciousness as “relics of a barbarous age”, fairs received a new lease of life from that symbol of progress, the railway’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Cunningham has also argued that this ‘rebirth’ of English fairs after 1850 brought about a transformation in their internal character as they became sites for the growth of a leisure entrepreneurship that instigated changes in the nature of the attractions. The outstanding examples of this were the mechanically powered rides that offered amusement derived from the experience of movement and speed.Footnote ⁷⁷ Consequently, he suggests, fairs progressively came to offer a less intense and less participative experience as showmen serviced people as passive consumers of technology.Footnote ⁷⁸ In order to ensure a decent return for their investment in these more sophisticated attractions, showmen also travelled only to those fairs offering large concentrations of consumers.Footnote ⁷⁹ His thesis suggests, therefore, that the combined influence of the railway and the new leisure entrepreneurship had the effect of revitalising the larger fairs whilst hastening the decline of smaller ones. It also advances the view that the surviving fairs were now less likely to be sites of expressive and dynamic social interactions. Like many other forms of recreation at this time, fairs and fair going became less contentious as they formed ‘a relatively routine ingredient in an accepted world of leisure’.Footnote ⁸⁰

There is some evidence of similar developments affecting the East Riding's hiring fairs. By the late 1840s, the major towns of the Riding were linked and by the 1860s an extensive railway network covered the East Riding.Footnote ⁸¹ This made all the significant hirings accessible by train and there is little doubt that this gave the larger urban hirings a mid Victorian advance. From the late 1840s, the newspaper reports of York, Driffield, Beverley, Hull and Malton hiring fairs record that people now arrived en masse by train. At York in 1847, for instance, it was reported that the Martinmas Fair and hirings had enjoyed ‘a more numerous attendance by parties from a distance than in any former year’. The report emphasised also that ‘the number of persons who arrived by railway was immense’.Footnote ⁸² By the 1860s, railway companies ran special trains to these larger hiring fairs.Footnote ⁸³ The railways also facilitated the easier attendance of less welcome visitors. Driffield hirings, for example, was said to be ‘the resort of pick pockets, prostitutes, thieves, and the most depraved characters, - making their prey on the unsuspecting young people, who become their easy victims’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Similarly, it was affirmed that prostitutes and pickpockets were drawn to York's Martinmas Fair by the presence of farm servants who, it was declared, were ‘dupes . . . wantonly plundered’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Although various types of excursionists had become significant, for the most part, the reports suggest that it was farm servants who made the greatest use of rail travel and it was their arrival by train that made the greatest impact on these days. At Driffield first hirings in 1848, for example, it was estimated that one thousand farm servants arrived by rail.Footnote ⁸⁶ At the second hirings, the station became so crowded with ‘ungovernable and boisterous agricultural servants’ that the railway company was compelled to introduce a ‘strong force’ to ‘marshall the crowds and prevent the avoidance of fairs’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Similarly at Malton, in the 1870s, the railway brought ‘an immense influx’ of men and women servants from the North and East Ridings; it was estimated that 2,000 servants arrived by train here in 1870.Footnote ⁸⁸ By enabling farmers, servants and excursionists to attend more and more distant hirings, railway development appears to have encouraged the expansion of the larger urban fairs at the partial, if not yet total, expense of the smaller village hirings. Stephen Caunce identified this pattern in his pioneering article on East Riding hiring fairs.Footnote ⁸⁹ A survey by the East Riding Constabulary in the early 1860s indicates that this concentration of hirings at larger settlements was well underway by then. Driffield, an expanding market town, recorded the largest attendance of 2,590 farm servants, whereas those at smaller settlements such as Keyingham, Holme on Spalding Moor, Fridaythorpe, Huggate, Patrington and Hornsea mustered a combined attendance of only 406.Footnote ⁹⁰ The decline of these smaller hirings was such that it was believed that, only ‘a little exertion and trouble’ was required to secure their elimination.Footnote ⁹¹

The burgeoning vitality of the East Riding's larger urban hiring fairs also meant that they most readily interacted with the advances in capitalist leisure provision associated with the mid Victorian years. The pursuit of pleasure was a noted aspect of the hiring fair prior to this. In 1827, for example, the busy Martinmas Fair at York was explained by the numbers ‘drawn thither more by pleasure than by business’.Footnote ⁹² There is evidence, however, that the pleasure aspect of York's fair expanded in scale and influence during the mid Victorian years and that this pattern was a feature of the fairs held at the other larger centres.Footnote ⁹³ In 1853, for instance, The Yorkshire Gazette reported that the ‘bustle and animation’ at the Martinmas Fair was ‘greater’ than for many years, due in part to an increase in the ‘temptations of a low and disgraceful character’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The following year saw ‘another Martinmas Fair with all its attendant din’ and ‘a tithe of . . . powerful enticements and seductive temptations . . . offered to the light hearted youths and simple minded country girls’ which included ‘low priced balls in different parts of the town’. The ‘usual living curiosities’, as well as the ‘continual screaming and turmoil among the rival showmen’, all contributed to ‘the pleasures of the day’.Footnote ⁹⁵

At York and elsewhere publicans endeavoured to attract the farm servants by providing opportunities for drinking, dancing and courtship. At Driffield, for instance:

The increased scale of the attractions offered, including the growth of mechanised rides, became a regular feature of the newspaper reports of the larger hirings at Beverley, York, Driffield, Bridlington and Hull. By the 1870s the entertainment at a hiring fair included:

The often critical gaze of newspaper reporters and moral reformers suggests that the mid Victorian years formed a watershed in the character of the attractions. In the 1830s and 1840s, fairs tended to be dominated by games, stalls, entertainers, curiosities and ‘freaks of nature’. By the end of the mid Victorian period there had been a marked expansion of larger scale exhibitions, music hall entertainments, and hand and steam powered rides. Some observers claimed to recognise in this shift some evidence of social progress. At Driffield in 1852, for example, the correspondent of the Hull Advertiser observed that:

Similarly, the report of the introduction of a steam powered ride at York connected this to an ‘absence of those exhibitions of an objectionable kind which used so much to characterise our fairs’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The presence of ‘Manders Mammoth Menagerie of wild beasts birds and reptiles’, a ‘phantoscope’, ‘Marionettes’ and ‘automaton pole-balancers’ at York's Martinmas fair and hirings in 1870 drew approving comment and the observation that attractions ‘calculated only to pander to vicious and depraved minds’ no longer featured there.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Ten years later, the reportedly sophisticated attractions at York included ‘Mr Chadwick's . . . patent luxographic process’, Mr Randall William's ‘Hobgoblinscope’, Edmond's menagerie and Baylis's Royal Italian Marionettes.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By this time, the scale of the attractions offered at these fairs was so extensive that a correspondent sent to observe a local statute fair concluded that ‘anyone who had no idea of the immediate cause of this would have probably been of the opinion that it was simply and solely what is generally termed a pleasure fair’.Footnote ¹⁰² At some of the smaller hirings, the pleasure provision had usurped the hiring dimension. At the village of Beeford in 1871, for example, it was recorded that ‘there were more attractions than usual’ including ‘Maunder's Waxworks . . . several other shows, including giants dwarfs, circus, etc, . . . Delhi the fire-eater . . . shooting galleries and stalls, in fact all the attractions of a country fair’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Although described as ‘the best hirings held for some time’ there was in fact no hiring of servants and it was suggested that: ‘These hirings, . . . so far as their original function is concerned are fast waning away, . . . and were it not that the inhabitants make the day a holiday, and their great festive day of the year, Beeford Sittings would soon sink into oblivion’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The East Riding hiring fair was, therefore, subject to the kinds of influences that have been identified as shifting the social character of fairs during the mid Victorian years. The continued importance of the farm service labour system in the East Riding ensured that its hiring fairs were not generally moribund as labour markets, but the advent of the railway and the advances in leisure entrepreneurship accelerated their concentration at the more sizeable urban centres. There is also some evidence that more technologically sophisticated and ‘improved’ types of provision were becoming more prominent. What remains uncertain, however, is the extent to which these developments marked a significant dulling of this social domain's function as a rural festival and its capacity for interactive intensity, and whether hiring fairs, like fairs in general, had become part of ‘a culture of leisure which was more remote from and less controlled by its participants’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This article will now further consider these issues through a reflection on the roles of alcohol consumption, interpersonal violence, and public disorder at mid Victorian hiring fairs.

The consumption of intoxicating beverages was a major nineteenth-century activity but it was especially important at events that, like the hiring fair, combined economic transactions and recreational activities.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A public house was often the first port of call when servants arrived and an intermittent but intimate relationship was thereafter continued. The exchange of a drink between bargainers signified good intentions and farmers often sealed the hiring contract with the offer of a drink.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Tradesmen and shopkeepers would also ‘treat’ farm servants when they purchased goods and settled their debts.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the Victorian period, as today, liquid intoxicants were also used to moderate fear, promote exuberance and provide energy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Farm servants certainly used drink to hearten their attitude when bargaining and this was sometimes taken to surfeit; at least according to the farmers who complained of having to barter with servants who were ‘in a beastly state of drunkenness’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is not surprising to find, therefore, that religious critics of the fairs sternly complained that ‘invariably drunkenness becomes the order of the day’ and described ‘lads of twelve and fourteen . . . reeling about the streets in a state of beastly drunkenness’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The police frequently concurred, describing Driffield's hirings in 1858, for example, as ‘a surging sea of drunkenness’.Footnote ¹¹² Although such observations were part of the clamorous panic deployed by moral entrepreneurs, there seems little doubt that drink made a fundamental contribution to the carnivalesque ambience of these fairs.

Accounts sometimes suggest that drunkenness caused the violence that was a feature of assemblies of farm servants. The following description from the mid 1850s, for instance, associates drunkenness with gratuitous aggression:

Another description, this time from the early 1870s, presents a similar view of farm servant congregations and drink:

These ‘external’ views of drink and brutality at the hirings also find support in the recollections of farm servants who participated in the proceedings:

Evidence also comes from the several cases handled by Malton magistrates in November 1880, involving a number of farm servants charged with violent assaults at Sherburn hirings. The York Herald suggested that these ‘shockingly illustrated the brutality of the agricultural servants of the East Riding’,Footnote ¹¹⁶ amongst whom were Thomas and John Megson, who were known as the ‘Flixton Champions’ and went about local statute fairs ‘challenging anybody to fight who dared’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Some of this violent intercourse stemmed from the inclination of farm servants to use hiring fairs for the resolution of enmities that had arisen during the past year. Fighting in service might bring dismissal so it was common for farm servants to defer the settling of a dispute until the Martinmas hiring.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The fairs also offered the opportunity for young servants to take revenge collectively against a foreman who had made their lives miserable over the past year; a practice known as ‘smallganging’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While such functional explanations have their merits, the more primordial and stimulating dimensions of public violence should not be lost. Although women were occasionally involved in brawls these violence acts seem more generally to be expressions of the aggressive masculinity associated with male farm servant culture. Local clergymen complained of the ‘proud and awkward independence’ of the East Riding farm servant and argued that the experience of farm service made boys ‘rough and hard’.Footnote ¹²⁰ The hierarchical work regime of farm service could be cruel and brutal. One former farm servant likened it to life in the armed forces and it encouraged an expressive culture that emphasised the values of strength, endurance, toughness and aggression.Footnote ¹²¹ Such qualities were tested and affirmed by male servants in their violent altercations at statute hirings before crowds of their peers. These ‘platform performances’ were a keenly relished and self-organising part of the farm servants’ ‘celebrative social occasion’. ‘Several hundred’ servants witnessed a brawl of this kind at Driffield in 1875.Footnote ¹²² Thus, interpersonal aggression at the hirings can be regarded as a socially situated safety valve and as an entertaining and visceral ‘bodily display’ celebrating the male farm servant's ‘hardness’.

Public violence was also a means through which the servants asserted governance over the territory of the hiring fair. This became most apparent on the occasions when the scale of violence rose to a more menacing level which saw the hiring fair become the occasion for collective farm servant aggression against outsiders and authority. It is at this point that the exchanges of the hiring domain threatened to go beyond the recognised constraints to the belligerence identified by Goffman and present, in part, in all the interactions so far discussed. This higher aggression developed violations of order that might be regarded as part of an ‘interaction disorder’, or, at least, a domain shaped by behaviours that conflict.Footnote ¹²³ An account of events at Driffield hirings in 1875 in the Driffield Times illustrates what this higher level of disorder might involve:

This episode exhibited a sequence of proceedings common to many of the more turbulent disturbances at hirings. It had begun with a disagreement at the door of a show owned by Mary Bland, a show woman from Salford who travelled with her two ‘children’, a dwarf and a giant. A young farm servant, William Smith, had begun to ‘abuse and call the show’ and the ensuing altercation between Smith and a doorman became a fist fight. This rapidly drew in a number of farm servants who, ‘taking it for granted that that their agricultural brother had been swindled, at once commenced an attack’.Footnote ¹²⁵ According to the doorman, ‘ten or a dozen’ farm servants seized him, knocked him down and ‘would have killed’ him if he had not struggled free.Footnote ¹²⁶ The dwarf and the giant also fled the scene, leaving Mary Bland to the futile defence of her show which was ‘pulled down, broken up and strewn about the Market place’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The deposition of a police sergeant against one of those involved in the fracas, Johnson Colley, a farm servant from the Wolds’ parish of Weaverthorpe, offers further insight into the character of this melee:

Turmoil of a similar kind and scale also occurred at Driffield in 1858 and at Bridlington in 1875 and significant outbreaks of violence involving farm servants and the police took place at Beverley, Sherburn and Pocklington hirings during the mid Victorian years. These conformed to a similar pattern: a disagreement between a farm servant and a publican or showman precipitated a brawl that then drew in more farm servants and escalated into a major disorder that the police tried to quell.

The regular and rigorous attendance of police forces was a recent development at many hirings. The East Riding Constabulary was not formed until 1857.Footnote ¹²⁹ Popular antipathy to the newly instigated police forces and their efforts at creating order in public places has been long recognised.Footnote ¹³⁰ East Riding hiring fairs show signs of this aversion, with police endeavours to assert control meeting determined opposition from farm servants. The course of events at Driffield Statutes in 1858, described as ‘a riotous commotion . . . such was never witnessed in Driffield before’, illustrate how a police presence could increase, rather than reduce, the scale of disorder:

Police attempts to intervene and appropriate control of the fair were themselves, therefore, a potential catalyst for heightened levels of disorder which, as this example from Bridlington hirings in 1875 illustrates, could result in a demoralising outcome for the constabulary:

Stephen Caunce has suggested that by the early twentieth century the policing of hiring fairs largely tolerated interpersonal violence so long as it kept to the pub yards and side streets.Footnote ¹³³ These earlier skirmishes for control of the hiring fair seem also to have resulted in a comparable detente. At Driffield in 1873, for example, there was considerable fighting and drunkenness but the police response was to ‘suppress as far as possible the disturbances which took place during the day, without putting the law in force, except in extreme cases’. The Driffield Times had ‘no doubt that this was the best way in which to act’ because ‘by being officious frequently more disturbances take place’.Footnote ¹³⁴

Another form of potential social control deployed at the mid Victorian hiring fair involved the exertions of the Church of England clergy and laity, who conducted a moral reform campaign against East Yorkshire hiring fairs from the early 1850s.Footnote ¹³⁵ Rather like Goffman, the Anglican critics of these events believed that participants in public gatherings tended to be ‘caught up in the occasion whatever their personal feelings’ and sought to counter what they regarded as the iniquitous practices and moral consequences of the hiring day.Footnote ¹³⁶ These efforts focussed on segregating male and female hiring and offering rational recreations designed to compete with the offerings of showmen and publicans. The character and impact of these will be discussed through a brief examination of the effort at Driffield hirings.

In 1860, Reverend James Skinner, curate of Driffield, issued an address that warned of the moral dangers of the public hirings and called upon employers to abandon the custom of using fairs to hire female servants.Footnote ¹³⁷ Until the hiring of females at fairs had been totally suppressed, however, employers were encouraged to make use of the newly established indoor register offices within the fairs.Footnote ¹³⁸ His address announced that at the forthcoming hirings at Driffield, the Corn Exchange would be available as a register office for female servants.Footnote ¹³⁹ Copies of this address were distributed to nearby farm houses by the clergy and reprinted in local newspapers.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ On the hiring day, large placards were posted on lamp posts at the corner of every road leading into Driffield and outside the Corn Exchange itself declaring ‘The best servants and the best places to be had at the Corn-Exchange’ and ‘Female servants to be had at the Corn-Exchange’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ ‘Male helpers’, assisted by the local police, directed girls to the hiring rooms where cheap refreshments were also provided.Footnote ¹⁴² In a letter to the Yorkshire Gazette Skinner gleefully claimed that the effort had been ‘crowned with complete success’:

He also claimed that the police had informed him that ‘there had never been such a quiet hiring’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This achievement led to the creation of a permanent register office in Driffield.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ By the end of the 1860s, this practice of providing indoor accommodation and refreshments for the female servants at the hirings was firmly established at Driffield.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Similar initiatives were established at most hirings in the region and, although there was sometimes considerable resistance, by the late nineteenth century the outdoor hiring of females had been eradicated from East Riding hiring fairs.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

From such platforms, the clergy were able to contest further the festive dynamics of the fairs by offering an array of ‘rational recreations’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ At Driffield, for instance, in an attempt to counter the appeal of the fair, the campaigners engaged ‘the Volunteer Band to play in the hiring rooms during the afternoon, for the amusement of the servants’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This attempt to maintain decorum amongst at least some servants after the actual hiring had taken place enjoyed a degree of success as ‘The music soon tempted those present to a hearty dance’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Efforts were also directed at raising the tone of the proceedings in the Market Place where ‘during the afternoon the Nafferton Sax Horn Band played a selection of music’. The effect, according to the Yorkshire Gazette, was ‘a much quieter and more rational aspect than a few years ago, when so much fighting and drunkenness took place’.Footnote ¹⁵¹

By 1870, the attractions offered by the Church of England at Driffield included ‘two balls’ which took place on the Monday and Thursday evenings of Martinmas Week with ‘the laudable object of attracting some of the country servants from the public houses’.Footnote ¹⁵² From 1877, Martinmas Week at Driffield saw the Temperance Hall become the venue for ‘a social tea and entertainment’.Footnote ¹⁵³ This was aimed at ‘farm servants and their friends’ and was designed to act as a ‘counter-attraction to other entertainments of a questionable character’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ By its second year, this event was said to be ‘highly appreciated by the servants’ who numbered ‘about 400’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In 1879 organ recitals and ‘a number of humorous songs, readings and recitations’ were added.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ A coffee house was also opened on each of Driffield's hiring days.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ By this time, the practice of sponsoring rational recreations at other East Riding hirings was firmly established.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Goffman's reflections on the interaction order and its relations with external factors suggests a ‘loose coupling’ or ‘membrane’, connecting the situated social interactions and the broader social structures and processes beyond the interaction domain. This is a relationship in which the latter informs, rather than determines, the course of the exchanges in the former.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The evidence considered here has identified some coupling of the domain of the mid Victorian hiring fair and some of the newer and potentially conditioning influences thought to have encouraged more controlled gatherings of Englishmen after 1850.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Some contemporary views lend support to the notion that the hiring fairs of East Yorkshire were internally reshaped through their contacts with this ‘civilizing process’. Both Thomas Clarvis and Reverend M. C. F. Morris, for example, regarded twentieth-century hiring fairs as more docile than their nineteenth-century antecedents and the latter felt that the moral reform interventions initiated in the mid Victorian years had played a principal role in instigating the change.Footnote ¹⁶¹

However, on reflection, the examples reviewed in this case study seem to indicate that no single factor, or even a combination of them, essentially dented the ruder and rustic aspects of these events. Neither the impact of the railway nor the expansion of commercialised leisure, for instance, brought a fundamental transformation of the fairs’ character. Indeed, both conceivably enhanced the expressive potential of the hiring fair because they encouraged a concentration of the farm servants’ propensity for immoderation at the larger fairs. It is true that there was an ersatz quality to aspects of the fairs’ expansion, as rides prospered at the gradual, but not total, expense of the shows, booths, and grotesques. But, overall, the offerings at fairs were not essentially more edifying at the end of the mid Victorian period than they had been at its outset. The celebrated attraction at York's Martinmas Fair in 1890, for example, was Wombwell's Menagerie. This, as well as offering its renowned and reputedly didactic ‘wild beasts’, promised the visitor ‘the biggest of giants, the smallest dwarf, tattooed ladies, hairy people, fat babies, Circassians, snake charmer, skeletons, tattooed pig, tattooed dog, bearded lady, largest women, smallest female, giant horse, Zulus, Arab, and Indians’.Footnote ¹⁶²

The civilising impact of the New Police and moral philanthropists was also partial at best. The expanded police presence at many hirings seems to have actually added to the volatility of the proceedings as it caused a struggle for control that the police did not win. Indeed they seem to have accepted that the interaction domain would effectively be self organised. The noteworthy success for moral philanthropists in the mid Victorian years was the segregation of male and female farm servants and the promotion of rational recreations. Segregated hirings and register offices gained a significant foothold and initiated a reshaping of gender interactions in the hiring sphere but, as one prominent campaigner conceded, they were ‘only a palliative, and at that a temporary one, for as soon as the servants have got hired they make their way back to the town, and to the company there of friends and strangers.’Footnote ¹⁶³ It was the fondness of the servants for the festivities and commercial amusements offered by leisure entrepreneurs which prompted the provision of competing rational entertainments.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The most vigorous effort was probably that at Driffield described above, but reports of the hirings there in the 1860s and 1870s point to streets, fairgrounds and public houses thronged with great numbers of female and male servants. They also offer considerable evidence of public disorder.

Ian Mitchell has described the north midland fair of the long eighteenth century as ‘resilient and adaptable’. The hiring fairs of the mid Victorian East Riding demonstrated a similar capacity to assimilate contemporary economic and social developments without losing their essential character.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ They exhibited a complex mixture of celebrative social dynamics and resolute commercial negotiations that exemplify the patterns of behaviour identified in Erving Goffman's discussions of interactive social occasions. They combine, for example, a felt release from normal obligations and constraints with the ritualised individual and collective negotiations of the marketplace. They are an ordered melange of the ‘unserious’, the ‘serious’ and the ‘regular’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In all of these significant aspects of social occasions identified by Goffman most East Riding fairs advanced their economic functionality whilst, in this period at least, the larger fairs became social occasions with an increased potential for carnivalesque festivity.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Interpretations of the implications and meanings of carnivalesque popular gatherings vary. A largely functionalist perspective regards these domains as sites of exceptional inversions which ultimately reinforced the social order.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This perspective has its merits. Hiring fairs did offer an environment in which social tensions could be explored and resolved. However, a Bakhtinian interpretation regards the carnivalesque vitality in such popular events as having the potential to realise enduring shifts of power and status. Both standpoints can find support in Goffman's analysis of the interaction order which suggests that interactions can be both reinforcing and trangressive, depending on the particular relations or combination of the internal and external forces at play.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Both standpoints find correlations with developments within the mid Victorian hiring fair. At times, in the early years of the period especially, the consequence of the temporary inversion of the everyday experienced by the farm servants at the hirings was limited to the functionalist effect of ‘coping with their lowly status on the other days’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ There were other times, however, when the servant's actions at the fairs went beyond this and they used ‘the carnivalesque potential . . . to bolster their confidence when bargaining.’Footnote ¹⁷¹ The brief examination of wage bargaining at East Riding hirings undertaken above suggests that farm servants successfully drew upon the carnivalesque ebullience of the fairs in their negotiations with employers. By the 1870s particularly, the fairs offered a milieu within which servants could translate the external context of a tightening labour market into interactions that realised a reshaping of their value and status.

This case study suggests, therefore, that this example of mid Victorian rural popular culture was far from passive in, or impoverished by, its interactions with the dynamic urban and commercial forces increasingly penetrating the countryside at this time. Indeed, it is arguable that an indigenous rural variable, albeit one responding to urban demand, the High Farming improvements of East Riding agriculture, was probably as essential in shaping the nature and the development of this popular form. The modernisation of agricultural practices was dependent on the revival of farm servant labour systems and this underpinned the traditional market functions of the hirings and provided a healthy foundation for the positive accommodation of developments such as the expanding railway network, burgeoning leisure entrepreneurship and even the attentions of policemen and moral philanthropists. It also informed the intensity of the carnivalesque explorations of social tensions within the fairs, through its influence over the bargaining position of the farm servants. This brief final reflection serves to reinforce the broader argument of this article: that mid Victorian rural popular culture was not only adaptive and accommodating to the important influences of an urbanising world, it was itself a generatively dynamic force.