User:Ruskinmonkey/Fairlop oak

The Fairlop Oak was an ancient oak tree that stood in Hainault Forest, in the parish of Barking , in Essex, until 1825. An annual fair was held beneath it each July.

Description

Daniel Lysons, writing in 1796 said that the trunk was, at about a yard above the ground, 36 feet in girth, and that the spread of the branches was about 300 feet in circumference. A fair was held beneath its branches each on the first Friday of July. This tradition was started, Lysons says, “from a man of singular character going there annually to dine with his friends“.

The fair continued until 1856.

Daniel Day

The “man of singular character” is identified in a publication of 1847, entitled Fairlop and its Founder, or Facts and Fun for the Forest Frolickers as Daniel Day, a successful engine, pump and block maker from Wapping, who owned a small estate near the oak, and took a party of friends with him on his annual visits to collect rent. This gathering became something of a social event, and increasing numbers of the local "gentry, farmers and yeomanry" started to attend it. By 1725, the event had begun to take on the form of a regular country fair, with "puppet shows, wild-beasts, fruits, gingerbread, ribbons and toys of all descriptions" being offered by booths set up around the oak. Day provided bacon and beans for the visitors.

A few years before his death in 1767, at the age of 83, Day had a coffin made for himself from a fallen branch of the tree.

Decline

Some time before 1800, a fence about five feet high was put around the tree, the extremities of the branches were sawn off and "Mr Forsyth’s composition" was applied to their ends to preserve them from decay. A sign was fixed to one of the branches, reading “All good Foresters are requested not to hurt this old Tree, a plaster having been applied to its wounds”. However the fence was soon broken down, and visitors resumed the practice of lighting fires in its hollow trunk. One fire in particular, in June 1805, lit by “a party of sixty persons who came from London during the morning, and amused themselves through the day with playing at cricket and other sports” caused especially severe damage. The tree was finally brought down by a storm in February 1820.

The remains of the tree were bought by Isaac Seabrook, who was then building the new church at St Pancras; he used the wood to make the church’s pulpit and reading desk. According to a note to a poem called "Apostrophe to the Fairlop Oak" published in the ’’Monthly Repository’’ in 1834, however, "It was not destroyed by the elements or by age. A parcel of fellows, with the souls of toymen, cut it down to make waggon loads of snuff boxes""

The Hainault Foresters, an archery society, held their meetings near the tree.