Annual High Ongar Fair

Members familiar with the Chipping Ongar annual hiring fair will remember that this event had been established by statute, and could only be suppressed by the Home Secretary after a petition from local residents via the justices of the peace. Having lost its original farm servant hiring function by the early nineteenth century, the fair had degenerated (in the view of some of Ongar’s killjoy citizens) into an occasion for drunkenness, general debauchery and noisy inconvenience to the more strait-laced inhabitants.

Another annual fair took place regularly at the end of May at Norton Heath and by the beginning of the twentieth century had led to confrontations between temporary van dwellers and some of the local residents who hitched up the horses and attempted to drag the travellers onto the public road. Ongar Rural District Council, which had assumed responsibility for this area of common land, applied to the Home Secretary for the abolition of the fair, and permission was granted in July 1908, though for a number of years afterwards vans continued to turn up to be confronted by the heavy-handed local blacksmith. The heath is now densely covered with young oak trees as well as being heavily scarred with gravel extraction pits, and today it is impossible to imagine it as the site of a fair!

Other annual fairs seem to have arisen spontaneously without statutory establishment, and one such was the short-lived example held at High Ongar in the middle years of the seventeenth century. This came to the attention of the Essex Quarter Sessions in July 1657 after a series of complaints that ‘divers disorderly persons about the beginning of September yearly meete together in the Streete of High Ongar aforesaid, and under pretence of keeping a Faire there divers Disorders of quarrelling and Drunkeness are committed, to the great Dishonor of God, Disturbance of the publique Peace and Disquiett of the Neighbors thereabouts’ – apart from the distinctly puritan claim that God was being disrespected, these were much the same grounds for abolition that the residents of Ongar were to put to the Home Secretary over two hundred years later.

It is interesting that the earl of Warwick (as the relevant lord of the manor) confirmed that this fair had no statutory backing. The court reached the decision that it was ‘of noe benefit to the County’, and that it was ‘only kept and attended by some few Pedlers and idle persons’. Free of any requirement to apply to the Home Secretary (or his seventeenth century equivalent), the court duly issued instructions to the local constables to apprehend anyone attempting to attend the next fair. It went further by requiring that public notice should be given in nearby towns (presumably via the town criers), that the minister of High Ongar should proclaim the court’s order from the pulpit, and that no inhabitant of the village should brew beer ‘under colour of a faire to be kept there, upon paine of being punished as unlicensed Alehousekeepers … and further as disturbers of the publique Peace.’

These somewhat draconian measures seem to have been effective, and nothing more is heard of the High Ongar fair.