we learn from one of the doggerel broadsides of the day:
Like Babel, this fair’s not built with brick or stone,
Though here, I believe, is a great confusion.
Now blankets are forced a double duty to pay,
As beds all the night, and for houses all day.
The booths supplied every conceivable kind of commodity, such as goldsmiths’ work, books, toys, cutlery, ornaments, and refreshments, for which they charged exorbitant prices, a fact the rhyming historians of the scene have not failed duly to chronicle:
And such a fair I never yet came near,
Where shop-rents were so cheap and goods so dear.
Coals and wood, which even on land were nearly up to famine prices, brought enormous gains to the purveyors, and were conveyed over the ice on sledges, or on men’s backs. Provisions were daily cooked in the booths, one of which, by way of speciality, took the title of “the Roast-beef Booth;” and a whole ox (of which the king and queen are said to have partaken) was roasted on the ice, in an enclosed space, to which the public were admitted on payment. Carts and horses, and horsemen, moved to and fro as upon a high road; and private coaches crossed and re-crossed, amongst them the coach of Mr. Evelyn, which passed over from Lambeth to the horse-ferry at Millbank, and a coach and six which was driven from Whitehall nearly to London Bridge, the day before the ice broke up. Hackneys also plied for hire up and down the available extent of the river, supplying the place of the watermen, who, driven from their legitimate occupation, endeavoured to find employment by dragging boats on the ice, or setting up what the poet just quoted calls “fuddling tents:”
And those that used to ask where shall I land ye?
Now cry, what lack ye, sir, beer, ale, or brandy?
Several lines or stands of hackneys were established at the different stairs, and the familiar sounds of “Westward, ho!” and “Eastward, ho!” might be heard along the banks, without the professional addition of “Sculler, sir?” “Oars, sir?” The watermen were very sensitive to this usurpation of their calling, and in a ballad in which they afterwards celebrated the “melting of the Thames,” they dwelt with particular satisfaction upon the resumption of those turbulent cries which formed a characteristic feature of the life of the river:
Let’s tune our throats
To our usual notes,
Of Twitnam, Richmond, hey!
Sir, sculler, sir? oars, sir?
Loudly roar, sir,
Here’s Dick, sir, you won’t pass him by?
Bartholomew at its prime was inferior in variety of humours to this “Freezland Fair or Icy Bear Garden,” as it is designated in one of the ballads. There was some humour even in the signs and announcements of the tents. One was the “Horns Tavern,” indicated by the antlers of a stag hoisted over the entrance; another was the “Phœnix, insured against fire as long as the foundation lasted.” The diversions were endless, not the least extraordinary of them being horse and coach races. There were show-booths for rope-dancing, conjuring, and puppet-plays; music booths and lottery booths, a miniature bear-garden, a ring for bull-baiting, close under the Temple Gardens, and not far off might be enjoyed the singular pastime of hunting a fox on the ice, an incident selected for particular admiration by one of the river poets:
There was fox-hunting on this frozen river,
Which may a memorandum be for ever,
For I do think, since Adam drew his breath,
No fox was hunted on the ice to death.
