A short introduction to ‘The Hiring Fair’ in Ireland

extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.

An important feature of the fair was the twice-yearly hiring, when farmers looked for workers and workers looked for employment. The traditional dates for hiring were 12th May and 12th November, though in reality hiring took place on the fair day nearest these dates. Mostly the farmer and his wife respected their workers and would not have asked them to do anything they were not prepared to do themselves, but sometimes they were looked down upon, even despised, and treated worse than dogs.
The situation was made worse in that land-owners were in the main Protestant and servants Roman Catholic, and compounded in the west of the province by the fact that many of the young people for hire came from Donegal, having little education and speaking only Irish. For well over a century they sought ‘a place’ in hiring fairs which were held in almost every town and village throughout Ireland.
Hiring goes back a long way. Possibly the earliest reference has its origins in the pre- Christian, Greek or Roman feast in honour of Cybele, the mother of the Gods. This was the fore-runner of Mothers’ Day or Mothering Sunday, when daughters in service were allowed home to visit their mothers on a day during Lent. Then we read in Matthew 20 v.6 & 7:
And about the eleventh hour He went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them,
‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’
They say unto him, ‘Because no man hath hired us.’
The custom must have continued uninterrupted throughout the centuries for according to popular legend, St Patrick was hired to tend swine on Slemish in the fifth century. There is little doubt that hiring once took place in Belfast. A map of 1660 shows it to be a compact town of 150 dwellings at that time, cattle and cattle-related products being the mainstay of the people. The main market area was High Street, the central feature of which was the River Farset, now culverted but at that time open to the sky and spanned by several bridges, the most important of which was the Stone Bridge situated near the Market House. It was here that unemployed men assembled in the hope that someone would come along and offer them work, and employers got into the habit of sending ‘to the bridge’ for a man. No doubt there were similar systems operating in older towns like Carrickfergus and Downpatrick, but there are few records to confirm this.

[Hiring fairs] were common in England and Scotland for many years before they came to Ireland. They can be traced back to the fourteenth century when an Act of the English Parliament was passed, fixing the wages of farm labourers and declaring that they be made known to all concerned. This Act was called the Statute of Labourers and new wages were declared at Statute Sessions. Since both employers and labourers had an interest in what was said at these sessions, they were common ground on which to meet, and naturally enough some made their agreements there and then.

The earliest written reference to hiring here comes from an inventory made at Legecory in County Armagh in 1717, where a debt entry states: Due to Danaill McClellen for one quarter’s wages…6s 6d and Due to Elinor Stevenson for halfe a year’s wages…16s 6d. Whether Danaill and Elinor were hired in a fair is not stated. In the beginning fairs fell at the turning points in the pastoral year: spring horse fairs in February and March; cattle fairs in May when the grass started to grow; Lammas fairs for sheep and wool in July and August; cattle fairs again in October and November when rents fell due. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when farmers began to depend more on the land than the loom, the number of fairs increased to the extent that in many places they were held monthly. In the last quarter of the century farmers were paying fairer rents, and they began to take more interest in making the soil productive. This was largely due to land reform by Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and the Land Purchase Acts which enabled farmers to become owners of their farms.

Extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.