Street cries

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.

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:

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.