Regional aspects of English hiring fairs 1780-1860

English hiring fairs were a distinct work placement mechanism, which operated throughout the country for over five hundred years. There were about five hundred of them, attended by half a million people annually. The period from 1780 to 1850 was one of profound social and economic transformation in Britain. Surprisingly, however, despite the fact that they were such a major economic institution, the role of the hiring fairs in these changes has not hitherto been systematically assessed. The objective of my project is to address this major gap in the literature.
My study will approach this task from three historiographical perspectives. The first is to see hiring fairs as a traditional form of labour exchange. This puts them in a broad category of pre-modern British institutions, and the main event involving the latter was the industrial revolution. At the same time, there is no agreement on the role of the traditional institutions in socio-economic changes. To move further within this perspective, one needs to develop a better idea of the scale of the hiring fairs. Therefore, my first research question is: how many servants were hired, in absolute terms and in relation to the agricultural labour market? The second approach is to consider hiring fairs a special case of fairs in general. Fairs were founded for trade, but by the late eighteenth century, the original commercial function of many fairs became less important than the recreational opportunities they provided. There is a consensus view also that fairs were subject to the general trend towards more refined public manners. I want to explore if this holds true for hiring fairs, and my research question is: how was the hiring process structured, and what other activities were going on at hiring fairs? The starting point for the third approach is that hiring fairs served a distinct market. Most servants were 'productive', farmworkers, and most masters were farmers. Hiring fairs, therefore, were closely linked to the institution of farm service. It has been suggested that hiring fairs contributed to economic efficiency by moving servants over greater distances. In this respect, the research question is: how far did servants, hired at the fairs, move between successive jobs, and how these distances compare with those resulting from less formal recruitment methods?
The most important source of data will be registers of the engagements of servants at hiring fairs. These are rare, as most fairs (sometimes called 'sessions') were run without registers, and of those produced not many have survived. However, due to my preliminary research, by the start of my PhD I have references to records at Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre and Lincolnshire Archives, and their availability was confirmed by these institutions. The records cover two hiring fairs in Wilshire, held at Wootton Bassett and Chippenham, and 'sessions' in Lincolnshire, run for hiring servants in wapentakes of Elloe, Kirton and Lower Boothby Graffo. Analysis of these records will show if a further search is required.