From Feudal Fair to Victoria Sponge
The Surprisingly Modern History of the British Village Fête
Part of The Picnic Icons Series — the history behind the objects, drinks, and traditions that make the British outdoor gathering what it is. We’ve done Pimm’s. Next we’re coming for the scotch egg, the Thermos, and the picnic basket itself.
Paula Sutton of Hill House Vintage wrote something in Country Living recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. She was describing her Norfolk village fête — the bunting politics, the cake table, the judge who once borrowed a hedge trimmer from a competitor and will never fully escape that fact — and she ended with this:
“Everyone leaves slightly sunburnt or mildly damp and carrying a plant they hadn’t planned on buying.”
I read it twice. Sent it to my mum. And then spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about how something that feels so ancient, so bone-deep British, is actually far newer — and far more extraordinary — than most people realise.
Before the Fête — A Thousand Years of Gathering Outdoors
To understand the fête, you have to go back much further. Not to the 1920s, not to the Victorians, but all the way to medieval England, where gathering outdoors wasn’t a quaint leisure activity.
It was survival.
From as early as the 11th century, British towns and villages operated under royal charter fairs — enormous, multi-day commercial events where livestock was traded, fabric sold, labourers hired, and disputes settled in their own pop-up legal courts, rather marvellously called Courts of Piepowder (from the Norman French pied poudréux — dusty foot — a reference to the travelling merchants who arrived on the road). Towns including Winchester, Boston, Stamford, and Bury St Edmunds ran fairs that drew merchants from Flanders, Norway, Germany, and France. These weren’t gentle community afternoons. They were the Amazon warehouses of their age.
The most famous was Bartholomew Fair in London, established in 1133 when Henry I granted a charter to his former courtier — known by tradition as his jester or minstrel, though the historical records describe Rahere variously as a cleric, a minstrel, and a court favourite — to raise money for the Priory of St Bartholomew, which Rahere had founded in Smithfield after a spiritual conversion during a pilgrimage to Rome. Samuel Pepys saw the Ben Jonson play named after it performed in 1661 and called it “a most admirable play.” The fair itself ran every year, on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24th August, for over 700 years — until the Victorian authorities finally closed it down in 1855, citing unruly behaviour and what they deemed inappropriate entertainment.
The Victorians. They cannot be trusted with a good fair.
But here is the crucial point: these ancient fairs were commercial first and communal second. They were about buying, selling, and surviving the winter. The joy was secondary. The pie was a transaction.
The gentle version — the one with the tombola and the cream teas — came much later, and from a completely different place.
The French Connection — Where the Word Actually Came From
Before the village fête became British, it was French. And before it was French, it was something rather more elegant.
The word fête comes from the medieval Latin festus via Old French — the same root as feast, festive, festival, and the Spanish fiesta. But the specific outdoor gathering we now associate with the word has a rather more glittering origin.
In 18th-century France, the fête champêtre — literally “party in the fields” — was the aristocracy’s escape from court formality. Held in the gardens of grand estates, sometimes with whole orchestras hidden in the trees, and guests in elaborate fancy dress. The painter Antoine Watteau — who invented the closely related genre of the fête galante — made these pastoral scenes his signature subject from around 1710 onwards, capturing their particular mixture of elegance and melancholy: well-dressed figures in idealised parkland, suspended between pleasure and the quiet knowledge that it couldn’t last. He was so closely associated with the genre that the French Academy invented a new category — fêtes galantes — specifically to classify his work when they received his painting The Embarkation for Cythera in 1717.
Meanwhile in Paris, the pique-nique was taking shape. The word itself first appeared in print in French in 1649, in a burlesque satirical pamphlet about the Fronde — an insurrection against the French court during the minority of Louis XIV. The main character, “Pique-Nique,” was a glutton whose excess was played for irony against the food shortages caused by the very siege he was part of. By the 1690s, the word had evolved to mean a fashionable dinner where everyone contributed a dish or paid their share. By 1748 the word had entered English. By 1801, a group of wealthy Francophiles in London had launched the Pic-Nic Society, meeting in hired rooms on Tottenham Street, where entry required a dish (chosen by lot from a hat) and six bottles of wine, and an evening of amateur theatricals followed. The playwright and Drury Lane theatre owner Richard Brinsley Sheridan saw it as a financial threat to his professional theatre — and attacked it in the press, calling it a danger to public morality. The satirist James Gillray drew wicked cartoons about it.
Picnicking, from the very beginning, was causing trouble. Some things don’t change.The Picnic Goes Outside — and Becomes British
The shift from indoor feast to outdoor idyll happened gradually through the early 19th century, as industrialisation, railways, and the rise of the middle classes opened the British countryside to people who'd never had access to it before.
The Romantics helped. Suddenly, nature wasn't just somewhere you lived — it was somewhere you went on purpose, for the good of your soul. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about outdoor picnics in her journals. Jane Austen put a famously fractious picnic on Box Hill in Surrey at the centre of Emma in 1815. By 1861, Mrs Beeton was publishing a "Bill of Fare for a Picnic for Forty Persons" that included cold joints of lamb, veal-and-ham pies, lobster, a gallon of strawberries, and enough champagne to ensure no one cared what they were eating.
Simplicity was not the Victorians' strong point, as food historian Annie Gray has noted.
But as trains and bicycles and eventually motor cars made the countryside genuinely accessible, the picnic democratised. By the early 20th century, Wind in the Willows had immortalised the wicker basket and cold chicken on the riverbank. The picnic was British, beloved, and — crucially — starting to mean something beyond class.
It meant freedom. Getting out. Sitting down together, away from the house and the hierarchy and the rules.
That spirit was about to become very important indeed.
Jean-Baptiste Pater's Fête Champêtre is in the V&A collection and available via their online catalogue
The Picnic Goes Outside — and Becomes British
The shift from indoor feast to outdoor idyll happened gradually through the early 19th century, as industrialisation, railways, and the rise of the middle classes opened the British countryside to people who’d never had access to it before.
The Romantics helped. Suddenly, nature wasn’t just somewhere you lived — it was somewhere you went on purpose, for the good of your soul. Jane Austen put a famously fractious picnic on Box Hill in Surrey at the centre of Emma in 1816. By 1861, Mrs Beeton was publishing a “Bill of Fare for a Picnic for Forty Persons” that included cold joints of lamb, veal-and-ham pies, lobster, a gallon of strawberries, and enough champagne to ensure no one cared what they were eating.
Simplicity was not, it is fair to say, the Victorians’ strong point.
But as trains and bicycles and eventually motor cars made the countryside genuinely accessible, the picnic democratised. By the early 20th century, The Wind in the Willows had immortalised the wicker basket and cold chicken on the riverbank. The picnic was British, beloved, and — crucially — starting to mean something beyond class.
It meant freedom. Getting out. Sitting down together, away from the house and the hierarchy and the rules. That spirit was about to become very important indeed.
The Fête Is Born — Out of Grief, Not Bunting
Here is the part of the story that stops people mid-bite of Victoria sponge.
The British village fête as we know it today — the tombola, the coconut shy, the cake competition, the slightly competitive jam judging — only dates back to the 1920s.
Not medieval. Not Victorian. Not even Edwardian. The 1920s.
And it didn’t begin with bunting.
It began in the aftermath of the First World War.
Communities shattered by grief and loss began to hold “sales of work” — gatherings where neighbours made things with their hands and sold them to raise money for veterans, widows, and orphans. The impulse was not to entertain; it was to survive, together, and to do something when there was nothing to be done. No committee yet. No coconut shy. Just people showing up for each other, bringing what they could.
The post-war Victory celebrations, marked on 19 July 1919 — known as Peace Day — spread across every city, town, and village in Britain: processions, communal feasts, dancing in the streets. The seeds of the summer fête were planted in that collective exhale of surviving something unsurvivable.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, the modern fête took shape. The church fête, raising money for repairs. The garden party on the local estate. The village fête, on the green. The WI took up their positions at the cake table.
They have not moved since.
The heyday came in the 1950s. Fêtes appeared in Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories. Every child knew what a tombola was. Every adult had a strong opinion about the judging.
Schoolgirls dance around the maypole at the spring fête in Dilwyn, Herefordshire.ROBERT CONVERY / ALAMY
The Dip — and Why It Matters That They Came Back
In the 1970s and 1980s, the village fête declined. Villages hollowed out. Communities fragmented. Fewer people had the time or the rootedness to organise something that needed months of volunteer effort and the quiet confidence that anyone would actually turn up.
In 2025 and 2026, a new threat has emerged: volunteer shortages. Several long-running fêtes have been cancelled in recent years simply because there weren’t enough people to form a committee. The Victorian Street Fayre in Sutton Poyntz, Dorset — which had run every other year since 1994, raising nearly £20,000 for local charities at its peak — ended in 2024 after losing access to its venue and finding it increasingly impossible to recruit volunteers. By March 2025, the committee formally wound up, distributing its remaining funds to charity. Twenty-eight years of community effort, quietly closed.
That is a loss worth naming.
But here is what is also true: across Britain, the fête is coming back. Because the things that community gathering does for us — belonging, connection, the particular warmth of showing up — haven’t gone anywhere. And when life feels fragmented and screen-heavy, the impulse to go and stand on a bit of damp Somerset grass with your family and buy a plant you didn’t need becomes, somehow, quietly urgent.
Somerset — Where the Fête Lives Best
Somerset has its own particular version of this story. The gathering tradition here runs deep and strange and wonderful. The Kingsbury Episcopi May Festival — held every spring — draws thousands, with maypole dancing, over a hundred craft and food stalls, and the specific atmosphere of a community that genuinely means it. The Green Scythe Fair near Thorney Lakes sets scythers against each other in wildflower meadows with solar-powered music stages. Yes, really.
Morris dancing — which dipped dramatically after the First World War, losing most of its village sides — made its comeback across Somerset from the 1950s onwards and hasn’t stopped. This summer it will be on a village green near you, bells and all.
And Somerset Day, celebrated every May, now invites every community to hold a Big Somerset Day Picnic as its centrepiece. Because whoever organises Somerset Day understands what the fête organisers of 1919 understood: the point has never been the cake.
The point has always been the showing up.
The Fête and the Picnic — Older Cousins
Before we close eight hundred years of British gathering history, it’s worth noting that the picnic and the fête have always been cousins. Both have French roots — pique-nique and fête champêtre — that began with the aristocracy and were slowly, joyfully democratised. Both moved outdoors, into the British weather, and decided the rain was no deterrent. Both ask the same thing of us: leave the house, bring something, sit down, be present with other people.
The fête just has a committee.
And the committee — with its strong opinions and its deep commitment to the coconut shy — is, despite everything, the whole point. Because caring that much about something that ordinary isn’t ridiculous.
It is, in the deepest and most British sense of the word, joyful.
I think about this every time I stand on a piece of damp Somerset grass, holding something warm in a paper cup, watching a child attempt the tombola with the absolute conviction that this time, this time, they will win the giant teddy.
We came because someone cared enough to put up the bunting. Someone unstacked the folding tables at seven in the morning and debated, probably at length, about where the cake table should go. Someone made the Victoria sponge and secretly hoped it would win, and someone else made theirs and secretly hoped the same thing.
And we came. Because somewhere in us, under all the busy and the scrolling and the finding-it-hard-to-leave-the-house, we still know what this is for.
The showing up. The standing together on the grass. The being, briefly and imperfectly, a community.
Eight hundred years of it, and it still works.
That feels worth a slightly soggy scone, don’t you think?
Know a Somerset fête worth adding to the summer list? Drop it in the comments — I'm compiling one, very happily.
And if this sparked something — the musings piece, on nostalgia and the science of why these memories never really leave us is . . . .
With love (and a blanket),
Gemma xx
SOURCES
Wikipedia — Bartholomew Fair; British village fête; Peace Day 1919; Fête champêtre; Antoine Watteau; Rahere
History Today — Alexander Lee, The History of the Picnic, 2019
Word Histories / Etymonline — pique-nique etymology (first printed use 1649)
Smithsonian Magazine — Picnics Are Back, 2023 (Pic-Nic Society, 1801)
The Gazette — Peace Day 1919 primary records
British History Online — Bartholomew Fair records; Rahere historical sources
The Art Newspaper — A Medieval Tale of the Jester, the Priory and the Hospital, 2023
Frieze Magazine — The Village Fête
British Heritage — Examining the Quintessential British Fête
Paula Sutton, Country Living UK
