Booth

Booth (from a Scandinavian word, seen in Danish bod, Icelandic búa, 'to dwell,' and perhaps in German bude), a covered stall or hut at a market or fair, from which goods are sold, still much used in the east of Europe and in Asia, and in England at Weyhill Fair, near Andover. As towns sprang up, the yearly fair was more or less supplanted by the weekly market. The slight booth which was set up in the same spot every week, had an irresistible tendency to become substantial and permanent; and the records of the twelfth and some following centuries are full of unavailing complaints against the encroachments which were in this way made upon the market-places and streets. Thus, Joceline of Brakelond chronicles the ineffectual efforts of his great and wealthy abbey, in 1192, to dislodge the burgesses of Bury St Edmunds from the shops, sheds, and stalls which they had erected on the market-place without leave of the monks. Stow relates that the houses in Old Fish Street, in London, 'were at the first but movable boards set out on market-days to show their fish there to be sold; but procuring license to set up sheds, they grew to shops, and by little and little, to tall houses.' The same chronicler tells us that 'in Cheapside, from the great conduit west, were many fair and large houses, which houses in former times were but sheds or shops, with solars (i.e. lofts or upper chambers) over them.' So in Edinburgh the range called at first 'the Boothrow,' and afterwards 'the Lucken-booths,' arose in the very centre of the High Street. The trader who for years had spread his stall under the shelter of the same buttress of the church or town-hall, began to rest a fixed wooden booth against it, gradually transforming the timber beams into lath and plaster, or even into brick or stone, until at length the basement of the stately cathedral or hôtel de ville was incrustated all over with unseemly little booths (or krames, as they were called in Scotland), like limpets on a rock. The booth which thus arose had often but one apartment, opening on the street by a narrow door, and a broad unglazed window, closed at night by a wooden shutter, dividing in the middle, and hinged at top and bottom, so that the upper half formed a sort of awning, while the lower half served as a table for the display of the trader's wares. It was at this window that business was conducted, the trader standing within, the buyer without. Traces of the middle-age booth still remain in this country, and in France there are many perfect examples, some believed to be of the 12th century.