usually provided additional amenities in the form of display rooms and housing for
visiting merchants. Taxation was an important element in internal fair organization.
Displays and shops were taxed, as were actual sales. Tolls might be charged on
merchandise making its way to a fair. French kings conceded fairs as privileges to some
locales by regalian right, uncontested except in the case of the most rebellious of lords,
such as the duke of Burgundy under Louis XI.
While the Champagne fairs are the most celebrated of all medieval fairs, they were by
no means the only such gatherings in France. Mention of fairs and markets in
Merovingian France is infrequent, although such venerable fairs as the October Fair at
Saint-Denis (founded ca. 635), just north of Paris, are duly famous. Market quarters,
often called portus, are noted at such Merovingian sites as Champtoceaux on the Loire.
The Carolingian period witnessed many markets, often of agricultural dimension,
scheduled to coincide with local feast days and sometimes favored by royal privileges. A
February fair was added at Saint-Denis in the late 8th century.
One must await the commercial revolution of the 11th century for a flourishing of
markets and fairs in medieval France. The Lendit fair in June at Saint-Denis emerged at
this time, and by 1070 Italian merchants were frequenting the Saint-Denis fairs. Fairs in
Flanders appear in this era. Indeed, small fairs grew up in many regions, Normandy,
Brittany, the Touraine, and Anjou being the most important.
Languedoc, with its proximity to the Mediterranean and outlets to international trade,
was the site of considerable growth in fairs. Noted from the early 12th century were fairs
at such towns as Moissac, Nîmes, Carcassonne, Aniane, Villemagne (Villeveyrac),
Montagnac, and Pézénas. Saint-Gilles, where the feast of September 1 took on the
dimensions of a fair, was the ongoing focus of southern French commerce, thanks to its
connections with Genoa and Pisa in the 12th century. By the 13th century, many fairs
were concentrated in small towns of the Hérault and Orb valleys, where connections
between the Mediterranean coast and mountainous routes leading to northern France
could be made. In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a cycle of six fairs developed at
Pézénas and Montagnac. These fairs became important sites for the repayment of debts in
international commerce, particularly for the cloth trade, much in the clearinghouse
tradition of the Champagne fairs.
The late Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of new fairs. The fair of Chalon-sur-
Saône, the cloth halls of which can be noted in 1244, picked up some of the cloth
business between Flanders, northern France, and the papacy at Avignon in the 14th
century. The fair of Beaucaire in Languedoc was founded in 1464. The fairs of Geneva
took up some further slack from the declining merchandise fairs in Champagne in the
14th century. To counter the shift of north-south trade to routes lying east of royal
territory, Louis XI reestablished the fairs of Lyon in 1463, as an alternative to Geneva.
The Lyon fairs successfully offered a market in spices and silks until Antwerp came to
dominate European commercial and financial markets in the 16th century. While the fair
as an economic phenomenon persisted beyond the Middle Ages in France, the heyday of
the fair economy had long passed by the late 15th century.
Kathryn L.Reyerson
[See also: CHAMPAGNE; TRADE ROUTES]
Bresard, Marc. Les foires de Lyon aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Paris: Picard, 1914.
Combes, Jean. “Les foires en Languedoc au moyen âge.” Annales: Économies, Sociétés,
Civilisations 13(1958):231–59.
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