Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The livestock part of the market

[Side note:  This is our last day at the castle!  We're headed to London tonight, and we leave for the States tomorrow morning.  I've still got about a month's worth of blogging to do, though, so here in blog-land, we'll just pretend like we're still in England!]

Recall the line-up for the Melton Mowbray market:

We saw the Farmers Market and Trade Stalls in the last post.  Everything else was an auction of some sort.  Let's start in the Fur & Feathers barn.

Cage by cage, chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons are auctioned off:

Along with free-range eggs.  If you win the bid, you can pick however many dozen you'd like to buy at that price:

And the Game area of the barn, you could bid for (hopefully recently) dead animals including deer, pigeons, and rabbits.

There was a Pets section where you could bid for hamsters, ginea pigs, and canaries.

The Cattle barn was exactly what you'd expect.

This was the sheep auction. 
The folks in green on the ledge are the auction staff.  The people on the right bid for first choice of the sheep in each pen, and the guy standing in the sheep pen spray paints the ones each winner chooses so they can sort them out later. 

In this corner of the barn, you could buy planks of wood.  You bid per plank (20 cents, 50 cents, whatever), and then can choose however many you want at that price.

Again, every Tuesday this happens.  I couldn't believe the number of people and animals in these barns...  And it was a neat experience for Alan's kids to see the auctions and watch markets (in the econ sense of the word) working for things like a 20-cent piece of wood and a bundle of dead pigeons.

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