At the old hiring fairs of Britain and Ireland, people looking for a year’s work stood in the street with a sign of their trade: a shepherd’s crook, a wisp of straw, a housemaid’s mop. Once hired, they took the sign off and wore bright ribbons.
Record, Folk and Modern are kept apart, and each one carries its source.
In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy describes the yearly ‘statute or hiring fair’ in the county town of Casterbridge. Two or three hundred labourers wait in the street: carters with whip-cord twisted round their hats, thatchers with a piece of woven straw, shepherds holding their crooks, ‘and thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance’.
Hiring fairs, also called statute or mop fairs, are traced to the Statute of Labourers of 1351. Shepherds held a crook or a tuft of wool, cowmen brought wisps of straw, dairymaids a pail and housemaids a broom or mop; this is one explanation given for the name ‘mop fair’. A shilling, the ‘fasten-penny’, sealed a year’s hire; then the sign came off and bright ribbons went on.
To verify: The 1351 date, the fasten-penny and the ribbons, checked in a printed source such as Simpson and Roud’s Dictionary of English Folklore (2000)
Traditional hiring fairs had ended by the middle of the 20th century, but Stratford upon Avon, Tewkesbury, Warwick and other towns still hold a ‘mop’ each year around Michaelmas, now a fair of rides and lights. Wishlore note: we tell the token as the sign of someone standing in the street, waiting to be chosen for a year’s work.
