Weyhill Fair: The Greatest Fair in the Kingdom

One of a limited edition, this being No. 330.  112pp, with black and white illustrations throughout.  In cream cloth-covered boards with gilt stamped lettering on spine.  Maps on endpapers.  4to.  Cloth very gently rubbed on edges else neat, clean, bright and tight throughout.  In its original illustrated and laminated dust jacket.  Jacket is a little rubbed on extreme edges, slightly crushed at the tips of a sunned spine.  Weyhill Fair was once the largest and most important livestock fair in the country, referred to in a letter by the then Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth I) as being over 400 years old.  Writer Daniel Defoe described Weyhill as “…where the greatest fair for sheep is kept that this nation can show” and novelist Thomas Hardy used it as the backdrop for the wife-selling incident in his book, The Mayor of Casterbridge, renaming it as Weydon Priors.