Street cries

Street cries are the short lyrical calls of merchants hawking their products and services in open-air markets.

Many of these street cries were catalogued in large collections or incorporated into larger musical works, preserving them from oblivion.

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.

[4] 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 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.

[6] 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.

[9] 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.

[11] This operated as a means of identifying each type of seller and the goods sold, giving each trade its own "verbal and aural space".

[14] 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 narrator recounts the cries heard while wandering Paris streets, beginning at dawn and continuing until late evening.

[19][20] One of the earliest British works inspired by street cries is a ballad, allegedly written by an English monk, John Lydgate, in 1409.

[21] The ballad, is a satire that recounts the tale of a country person visiting London to seek legal remedies after having been defrauded.

[22] Lydgate's ballad prompted generations of composers to write songs about the distinctive cries of street vendors.

[25] The 19th century folk song, Molly Malone, is an example of a tune based on street cries that has survived into the modern era.

It was a mid to late 16th century series of woodcuts, illustrating a book which Pepys had catalogued as "Cryes consisting of Several Setts thereof, Antient and Moderne: with the differ Stiles us'd therein by the Cryers.

"[31] One of the earliest of publications in The Cries genre was Franz Hogenberg's series of street vendors in Cologne produced in 1589.

"Buy my Larders", the cry of a Parisian street vendor, engraving by Fournel from Les Cris de Paris, types et physionomies d'autrefois, 19th century
Pottery seller, from a series of the "Cries of Naples" in Capodimonte porcelain , c. 1745
Cover of Cries of London by Robert Laurie and James Whittle, 1802
A notable feature of representations of street vendors is that the images were often given the title of the vendor’s cry as in this 1877 photograph from Street Life in London entitled, "Strawberries. All ripe! All ripe!" photograph by John Thomson in Street Life in London
Cover page of Les Cris de Paris: types et physionomies d'autrefois, by Victor Fournel, 1887