Street cries are the short lyrical calls of merchants hawking their products and services in open-air markets. The custom of hawking led many vendors to create custom melodic phrases to attract attention. At a time when a large proportion of the population were illiterate, the cries of street vendors and town criers provided the public with important messages, whether those messages were commercial in nature or of more general public interest. Street cries were part of the aural fabric of street life from antiquity.
Street cries have been known since antiquity and possibly earlier. During the 18th and 19th century, as urban populations grew, the street cries of major urban centers became one of the distinctive features of city life. Street cries became popular subject matter for poets, musicians, artists and writers of the period. Many of these street cries were catalogued in large collections or incorporated into larger musical works, preserving them from oblivion.
Contents
History
Street vendors and their cries were known in antiquity. Claire Holleran has noted the difficulty locating evidence of street cries due to their ephemeral nature. Nevertheless, she has examined literary, legal and pictorial sources to provide insights into the presence of hawkers and their cries in antiquity, especially ancient Rome and Pompeii. Collectively these sources suggest that street vendors and their cries were part of street life. She found numerous written references to the cries used by street vendors:
Pliny the Younger likens Regulus’ oratory to that of a seller in the forum (circulator in foro)
The Roman poet, Martial, compares poor oratory to the sales patter of street vendors
Quintilian’s Guide to Oratory instructs readers to aim for forceful oratory rather than the rapid speech of street hawkers
Seneca describes a disturbance caused by a group of noisy hawkers and refers to the distinctive intonation used by pastry cooks, sausage dealers and confectioners
Cicero describes the loud cries of a fig seller which soldiers embarking for Parthia interpreted as a bad omen
Calpurnius Siculus describes the loud cries of a milk hawker
Literary references and images of hawkers and peddlers during the medieval period are relatively rare. Hawkers, hucksters and peddlers occupied a different social position to merchants and were regarded as marginal in society. However, English narratives from the 12th and 13th centuries suggest that hardworking hawkers could advance to positions as packmen and ultimately wealthy wholesalers or merchants.
The number of street vendors working in European cities increased markedly from the 17th century. In London, street vendors began to fill the streets in the decades following the Great Fire when a major rebuilding programme led to the removal of London's main produce market, Stocks Market, in 1773. The displacement of the open market prompted large numbers of street vendors and itinerant traders to fill the gap in food distribution by providing inexpensive produce in small quantities to the working classes, who for their part, worked long hours in arduous occupations leaving them no time to attend markets situated away from the city centre. This led to a large increase in the informal and unregulated trade carried out by street vendors.
The number of street vendors increased again in the early 18th century, following the industrial revolution, as many dislocated workers gravitated to the larger urban centres in search of work. As the city population increased, the number of street vendors also increased. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the streets of London filled with street vendors, stimulating intense competition between them. To stand out amid the crowd, street vendors began to develop distinctive, melodic cries. Around the same time, these criers or street vendors filled the streets of other European cities including Paris, Bologna and Cologne.
The 19th century social commentator Henry Mayhew describes a Saturday night in the New Cut, a street in Lambeth, south of the river;
Lit by a host of lights … the Cut was packed from wall to wall… The hubbub was deafening, the traders all crying their wares with the full force of their lungs against the background din of a horde of street musicians.
Each trade developed its own unique type of street cry; a distinctive set of words or a unique tune. This operated as a means of identifying each type of seller and the goods sold, giving each trade its own "verbal and aural space".
During the 19th century, street traders came under increasing attack from the clergy and the authorities who wanted to rid the streets of the unruly and unregulated street trade. Initiatives to eradicate street trading had occurred intermittently in the past; various attempts to curtail street-based trading had been known during the reigns of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and Charles I (1625–1649). These constant attacks contributed to a sense of group identity amongst vendors and inculcated an air of open defiance. Street traders composed their own broadsides in which they asserted their own political identity in songs.
Historians have argued that the cries of the city were far from annoying, rather they were an essential form of transmitting important information prior to the modern period of mass communications. The term, Street Cries, is written with a capital "C" to distinguish the vendors' melodic sounds from the general noise of the street. Street Cries began to disappear from the mid-20th century as permanent markets supplanted the informal and itinerant street trade.
In literature, music and art
The street cries of major cities such as London and Paris became such an iconic feature of street life that the subject stimulated the interest of poets, writers, musicians and artists. One of the earliest literary works entirely devoted to the subject of street cries is Les Crieries de Paris (Street Cries of Paris), a poem by Guillame de Villeneuve published in 1265, consisting of some 130 cries harmoniously inserted into octosyllables. The narrator recounts the cries heard while wandering Paris streets, beginning at dawn and continuing until late evening. The cries punctuate the day, according to the activity of the street vendors. One of the first cries of dawn is that of the public baths and steam rooms while the cries of the pastry sellers occur at day’s end.
One of the earliest British works inspired by street cries is a ballad, allegedly written by an English monk, John Lydgate, in 1409. Known as London Lyckpeny, it refers to many street cries, including the often quoted "Strawpery ripe, and cherrys in the ryse". The ballad, is a satire that recounts the tale of a country person visiting London to seek legal remedies after having been defrauded. However, he finds that he cannot afford justice, and is soon relieved of his money through his dealings with street sellers, retailers, tavern-keepers and others. A lyckpeny (or lickpenny) is an archaic term for anything that soaks up money. Lydgate's ballad prompted generations of composers to write songs about the distinctive cries of street vendors.
As early as the 13th century, musicians included street cries into their compositions. A tune known as On Parole/ a Paris/ Frese Nouvelle, dating to the 13th century features a Parisian vendor's cry, 'Frèse nouvele! Muere france!' ('Fresh strawberries! Wild blackberries!'). From around 1600 English composers wrote tunes in which the text and probably the music incorporated street vendors' cries: Weelkes, Gibbons and Deering composed tunes that consisted almost entirely of street vendors' cries. Such tunes became very popular in the 17th century.
It has been suggested that street cries may have been one of the earliest forms of popular music. The 19th century folk song, Molly Malone, is an example of a tune based on street cries that has survived into the modern era. The lyrics show the fish vendor, Molly Malone, chanting "cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh". The tune may have been based on an earlier 17th or 18th century song. The 1920s popular song, Yes! We Have No Bananas was inspired by the sales patter of a fruit vendor in Long Island. The tune, "El Manisero" (translated as the "Peanut Vendor"), inspired by a Cuban peanut vendor's cries, was a popular hit in the 1930s and 1940s and was largely responsible for popularising Latin music and the rhumba with American audiences.