Brough March fair

Brough held a cattle fair on the second Thursday in March, when beasts and drovers filled the town so that people shut up their windows. Yorkshire clothiers’ carts arrived the evening before, and before anything could be sold two men, Matthew Horn and John Deighton, walked the fair three times with a fiddle and a clarinet playing God Save the King and then said verses that allowed the selling to begin. Horn also kept the best cake booth, rivalling the spice wives who sold gingerbread. The husbandmen had a holiday, and from six o’clock there was dancing of jigs and reels in nearly every public house through the night.