page_title: Street cries
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Street cries / History
caption_attribution_description: Italian, Naples; Figure; Ceramics-Porcelain, After a print by Annibale Carracci (Italian, Bologna 1560–1609 Rome)
context_page_description: 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. During the 18th and 19th century, 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.
context_section_description: Street vendors and their cries were known in the medieval period. However, the numbers of street vendors working in urban areas 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 where 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, though they are still prevalent in underdeveloped countries.
caption: Pottery seller, from a series of the "Cries of Naples" in Capodimonte porcelain, c. 1745
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