Stocks Market

[2]: 256 Stocks Market was formally established in 1282 by Henry le Walleis, the Lord Mayor of London.

[2]: 256  By 1359, Stocks Market had 71 'covered plots' in four rows for the sale of meat and fish, and 27 more in covered areas along the outer walls.

[2]: 256 From 1400, the market was under the control of the Wardens of London Bridge,[2]: 199  who let stalls to butchers and fishmongers for the term of their life.

The Bank of England and the Royal Exchange had been built nearby, and the site was chosen for the Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London.

The number of costermongers, hawkers and other types of itinerant street vendors increased substantially following the demise of the Stocks Market.

Thence with mighty content homeward, and in my way at the Stockes did buy a couple of lobsters, and so home to dinner, where I find my wife and father had dined, and were going out to Hales’s to sit there, so Balty and I alone to dinner, and in the middle of my grace, praying for a blessing upon (these his good creatures), my mind fell upon my lobsters: upon which I cried, Odd zooks!

But then I cried, what is become of my lobsters?In 1675 an equestrian statue of King Charles II trampling on Oliver Cromwell was erected at the market.