User:Aboudreau71/Foire du Lendit

The fair of Lendit (or Landit), opened for two weeks every June 11, the feast of Saint Barnabas, until June 24, the feast of Saint John, on the Plaine Saint-Denis, between Paris and Saint-Denis. From the 9th to the 16th century, it was one of the most important fairs in France and the most important in the Ile-de-France region. It attracted a thousand merchants from all over Europe and Byzantium. One of the things sold there was the parchment used by the University of Paris and its students.

The fair gave its name to the rue du Landy, the main east-west road of the Plaine Saint-Denis, linking the Seine at Saint-Ouen to Aubervilliers through Saint-Denis.

Origin of the name
The name Endit, then by agglutination with the article, Lendit, was given to the field or plain located between La Chapelle and Saint-Denis. According to Anne Lombard-Jourdan, the Gallic assemblies mentioned by Julius Caesar continued to meet under Roman rule; they met north of Lutetia in the Plaine Saint-Denis. It became customary to hold an assembly at a certain time and place to deal with religious, judicial, military, and commercial matters. The word Indicere and its Roman derivatives remained in use throughout the Middle Ages and kept their meaning of convoking or enacting: in the 16th century, we find the expressions indire an assembly, a war, a punishment, a fast, a fair. The places bearing this name are grouped north of the Loire; according to Anne Lombard-Jourdan, the bois du Landy or field of Landy correspond in the countryside or in the forest to very ancient assembly sites; these are old Gallic meetings that are both religious and commercial, sometimes going back to locations marked before the Roman conquest. The name would have remained attached to the sites of the fairs which were also named after this word.

History
The fair of Lendit (or Landit) is documented under this name in the 11th century. However, according to a foundation diploma dated to 629, it is reputed to have been created in the 7th century by Dagobert I. It is moreover likely that, situated on a Roman road, the Via Agrippa, which went towards the North Sea and constituted the route of tin, it has its roots in Gallic antiquity.

Chronicles of the 19th century attribute to Charlemagne a fair established in Aix-la-Chapelle which was later transferred by Charles the Bald to Saint-Denis.


 * In 710, Childebert III ordered that the abbey receive all the rights collected on the merchants who came to the fair, in Saint-Denis, in Paris, or in the surroundings.
 * In 1215, Philip Augustus regulated its establishment. For the duration of the fair, the merchants had to stop selling their goods at Les Halles in Paris.
 * In 1274, the Miracle of Lendit took place.
 * In 1319, the fair was burned and rebuilt.
 * In 1411, the last mention of the Perron appears in a "Liste du prix des loges à la foire du Lendit" written under the abbacy of Philippe de Villette. The Perron was a prominent stone on which one could stand or sit, located near Montjoie, a tumulus located on the road to Estrée. Montjoie and its Perron were used as a tribune and pulpit during the fairs: every year, the bishop of Paris came to bless the fair of Lendit in June. It is Montjoie and the Perron that one must recognize under the veiled terms that the Pontifical of the Church of Paris uses about the ceremony of the blessing of the fairs: the most eminent place where the bishop settled with the procession, which required a rather vast platform, was Montjoie, while the highest place, a kind of platform where one placed oneself for the sermon was the Perron . A place in the land register, a street, a dead end, testify to the intensity of the memory of the Perron.
 * The fair regained its importance under the reign of Louis XI who renewed the tax exemption for merchants of horses, mares, donkeys, and mules.
 * In 1556, because of bad weather, but especially because of the troubles of the French Wars of Religion, by a decree of Henry II the fair was moved inside the walls of Saint-Denis, on the site of the current place Jean-Jaurès, where new wooden lodges were built to accommodate it.
 * In 1793, the fair disappeared and in 1840, the wooden lodges, which had become dilapidated, were demolished. The site is still used as a market by the city of Saint-Denis.
 * Around 1880, Dr. Philippe Tissié, president of the Ligue girondine d'éducation physique (Girondin League of Physical Education), took up the word "lendit" and applied it to school games in which teams from the high schools and colleges of the Bordeaux academy competed.