HIRING (from O. Eng. hyrian, a word

See also:

• COMMON

common to many

See also:

• TEUTONIC
• TEUTONIC (GERMANIC) LANGUAGES

Teutonic

See also:

• LANGUAGES

languages cf. Ger. heuern, Dutch huren, &c.)  , in law, a contract by which one man grants the use of a thing to another in return for a certain price . It corresponds to the locatio-conductio of Roman law . That contract was either a letting of a thing (locatio-conductio rei) or of labour (locatio operarum) . The distinguishing feature of the contract was the price . Thus the contracts of mutuum, commodatum, depositum and mandatum, which are all gratuitous contracts, become, if a price is fixed, cases of locatio-conductio . In modern English law the term can scarcely be said to be used in a strictly technical sense . The contracts which the Roman law grouped together under the head of locatio-conductio—such as those of landlord and tenant, master and servant, &c.—are not in English law treated as cases of hiring but as independent varieties of contract . Neither in law books nor in ordinary discourse could a tenant farmer be said to hire his land . Hiring would generally be applied to contracts in which the services of a man or the use of a thing are engaged for a short time . Hiring Fairs, or Statute Fairs, still held in Wales and some parts of England, were formerly an annual fixture in every important country town . These fairs served to bring together masters and servants . The men and maids seeking work stood in rows, the males together and the females together, while masters and mistresses walked down the lines and selected those who suited them .

Originally these hiring-fairs were always held on Martinmas

Day (11th of November) . Now they are held on different dates in different towns, usually in October or November . In Cumberland the men seeking work stood with straws in their mouths . In Lincolnshire the bargain between employer and employed was closed by the giving of the " fasten-penny," the earnest money, usually a shilling, which " fastened " the contract for a twelvemonth . Some few days after the Statute Fair it was customary to hold a second called a Mop Fair or Runaway Mop . " Mop " (from Lat. mappa, napkin, or small cloth) meant in Old English a tuft or tassel, and the fair was so called, it is suggested, in allusion to tufts or badges worn by those seeking employment . Thus the carter wore whipcord on his hat, the cowherd a tuft of cow's hair, and so on . Another possible explanation would be to take the word " mop " in its old provincial slang sense of " a fool," mop fair being the fools' fair, a sort of last chance offered to those who were too dull or slovenly-looking to be hired at the statute fair . Perhaps " run-away " suggests the idea of those absent through drunkenness, or those who simply feared to face the ordeal of the larger hiring and so ran away .