THE STORY OF MARTINSTOWN FAIR Second Edition 1 999 Dark mornings, heavy grey skies, evenings that begin before the afternoons have ended, rain, mud and increasing cold; late November has little to lift the spirit in the daily routine of village life, and this must have been even more so in the days before one could have instant light and heat by the flick of a switch. In one Dorset village, however, the end of November had a very different ring. For many hundreds of years November 23rd was the high spot of the year for the people of Martinstown, or Winterborne St-Martin - its other equally ancient name. Martinstown Fair, granted by charter from King Henry 111 in 1268, was the high spot of the year. The serious part of the fair was the selling and buying of sheep. Daniel Defoe, in 1720, described the hills of Dorset as covered with sheep, 600,000 of them. The exciting part of the fair was the presence of many gypsy families who showed off the paces of their ponies they would be hoping to sell after the sheep business was over. The fun part came in the evening with the funfair on the village green For the farmers and the auctioneers the Fair was an occasion for meetings, exchanging news, and discussing changes which beckoned or threatened. For the children it was a day off school, and a chance to earn a few pennies by helping pen the sheep or hold the ponies, and to watch the gypsy sales and stunts, and then an evening at the funfair. Martinstown Fair was a major event in the locality of South Dorset. November 23 provided the last chance in the year for sheep farmers to sell or buy, before the winter rains resulted in the mud that reduced travelling along the valleys' unmade roads to a minimum. There were bigger and much more important Fairs in the Wessex region such as that held in September at Woodbury Hill near Bere Regis, which attracted traders from all over the South and West of England. Earlier each year, at Whitsun, a huge number of sheep were bought and sold at Weyhill near Andover in Hampshire. Daniel Defoe described this occasion as "The greatest fair for sheep that this nation can show." The November fair in Martinstown was certainly not on this scale. It was, until the second half of the twentieth century, a most exciting event in the year for those who lived locally, as is shown by reminiscences of people who were there, at the last fair to be held in 1978. For the first edition of the history of the Fair, written twenty years ago, Mr Tucker recalled his memories of the Fair as it was in the days before the First World War. Mrs Dolly Bowering described the fairs held in the 1920s, and Major Oliver Duke provided professional details concerning the organisation of the fair in the last years of its history. Now, for this second edition twenty years later, a good many people still living in the villages have added their recall and recollections of the fair as they knew it as children before and after the Second World War. What the Martinstown Fair meant to people in the lgth century we can glean from accounts which appeared in the local newspapers, the Dorset and Sherborne Journal, and later the Dorset County Chronicle and Somersetshire Gazette. In 1829 the paper records that the fair was "the dullest known for a long series of years" yet that "the pleasure folks were very numerous, as were also the regular attendants to fairs, pickpockets and vagabonds of almost every class, but we have not heard that they