1866, a few hours after conducting service in Vesterfts
Cathedral.Of the writings of no Swedish author so much as of those of Fahlcrantz can it be said facit indignatio versus. He writes ill, except at a white heat of scorn or anger. His early humoristic poem, Noah’s Ark, was once extremely popular; it was a satire upon the literary life of 1820, under the form of a parody of the world before the flood. It is still readable, which is more than can be said of A nsgarz'us, a very tedious production. Fahlcrantz will live, if he live at all, by the point and venom of his wit.
FAHRENHEIT, Gabriel Daniel (1686–1736), well known for the improvements made by him in the construction of the thermometer and barometer, was born at Dantzic, May 14, 1686. He early relinquished trade for the study of natural philosophy; and, after having travelled in Germany and England, he settled in Holland, where Gravesande and other men of science were his teachers and friends. In 1714 he conceived the idea of substituting mercury for spirits of wine in the construction of thermometers. He took as the zero of his thermometric scale the lowest temperature observed by him at Dantzic during the winter of 1709, which he found was that produced by mixing equal quantities of snow and sal-ammoniac. The space between this point and that to which the mercury rose at the temperature of boiling water he divided into 212 parts. At the time of his death, which took place on September 16, 1736, Fahrenheit was engaged in the contrivance of a machine for draining inundated land. See Thermometer and Meteorology.
FAIR. A fair is defined as a “ greater species of market recurring at more distant intervals ;” both have been distinguished by Lord Coke from “mart,” which he con- siders as a greater species of fair; and all three may com- prehensively be described as customary or legalized public places for the sale of commodities (including labour). Thus, in England, no fair can be held without a grant from the sovereign, 0r preScription which presupposes such grant. In France, the establishment and abolition of fairs— with the exception of cattle markets and the markets of the metropolis—are generally left to the discretion of the departmental prefects. The most commonly accepted deri- vation of the word fair is from fer-ice, a name which the church borrowed from Roman custom and applied to her own festivals. A fair was generally held during the period of a saint’s feast, and in the precincts of his church or abbey —the time and the place of the chief popular assemblages ; but in England this desecration of church and churchyard was first forbidden by the statutes of Henry III. and Edward II. Most of the famous fairs of medizeval England and Europe, with their tolls or other revenues, and, within certain limits of time and place, their monopoly of trade, were grants from the sovereign to abbots, bishops, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries. Their “ holy day ” associa- tions are preserved in the German word for fairs, messen; as also in the Irirmiss, “ church mass,” of the people of Brittany. So very intimate was the connexion between the fair and the feast of the saint that the former has very commonly been regarded as an off-shoot or development of the latter. Nevertheless, there are grounds for the supposi- tion that fairs were already existing national institutions, long before the church turned or was privileged to turn them to her own profit. The first charter of the great fair of Stourbridge, near Cambridge, was granted by King John, for the maintenance of a leper hospital; but the origin of the fair itself is ascribed to Carausius, the rebel emperor of Britain, 207 LD. At all events, it may be seen from the data given in Mr Herbert Spencer’s Descriptive ’5'uciologg/ that the country had then arrived at the stage of develop- ment where fairs might have been recognized as a necessity, The Romans also appear to have elaborated a market law similar to that in force throughout mediaeval Europe—— though it must be observed that the Roman mmrlime, which some have regarded as fairs, were weekly markets. It has also been supposed that the ancient fairs of Lyons were a special privilege granted by the Roman conquerors; and Sidonius Apollinaris, 427 A.D., alludes to the fairs of the district afterwards known as the county of Champagne, as if they were then familiarly known institutions. Fairs, in a word, would not only have arisen naturally, wherever the means of communication between individual centres of pro- duction and consumption were felt to be inadequate to the demand for an interchange of commodities ; but, from their very nature, they might be expected to show some essential resemblances, even in points of legislation, and where no international transmission of custom could have been possible. Thus, the fair courts of pre—Spanish Mexico corresponded very closely to those under whose supervision the Beaucaire fair is conducted in the present day. They resembled our own courts of piepowder. The Spaniards, when first they saw the Mexican fairs, were reminded of the like institutions in Salamanca and Granada. The great fair or market at the city of Mexico is said to have been attended by about 40,000 or 50,000 persons, and is thus described by Prescott :—
“ Officers patrolled the square, whose business it was to keep the peace, to collect the dues imposed on the various kinds of merchan- dise, to see that no false measures or fraud of any kind were used, and to bring offenders at once to justice. A court of twelve judges sat in one part of the tia'ngucz clothed with those ample and summary powers which, in despotic countries, are often delegated even to petty tribunals. The extreme severity with which they exercised those powers, in more than one instance, proves that they were not a dead letter."
charters are comparatively modern—the oldest known being that of St Denys, Paris, which Dagobert, king of the Franks, granted (642 A.D.) to the monks of the place “for the glory of God, and the honour of St Denys at his festiva .” The first recorded grant in England appears to be that of William the Conqueror to the bishop of Winchester, for leave to hold an annual “free fair ” at St Giles’s hill. The monk who had been the king's jester received his charter of Bartholomew fair, Smithfield, in the year 1133. And in 1248 Henry III. granted a like privilege to the abbot of Westminster, in honour of the “ translation ” of Edward the Confessor. Sometimes fairs were granted to towns as a means for enabling them to recover from the effects of war and other disasters. Thus, Edward III. granted a “free fair ” to the town of Burnley in Rutland, just as, in subse- quent times, Charles "II. favoured Bordeaux, after the English wars, and Louis XIV. gave fair charters to the towns of Dieppe and Toulon. The importance attached to these old fairs may be understood from the inducements which, in the 14th century, Charles IV. held out to traders visiting the great fair of Frankfort-on-the-Maine. The charter declared that both during the continuance of the fair, and for eighteen days before and after it, merchants would be exempt from imperial taxation, from arrest for debt, or civil process of any sort, except such as might arise from the transactions of the market itself and within its precincts. Philip of Valois’s regulations for the fairs of Troyes in Champagne might not only be accepted as a fair type of all subsequent fair-legislation of the kingdom, but even of the English and German laws on the subject. The fair had its staff of notaries for the attestation of bargains, its court of justice, its police officers, its sergeants for the execution of the market judges’ decrees, and its visitors— of whom we may mention the prud’ Izommes,—whose duty it was to examine the quality of goods exposed for sale, and
to confiscate those found unfit for consumption. The con-