Illustrations of Social Life III: Street-Cries

Summary

Englishmen began to advertise their wares by word of mouth as soon as Englishmen began to live together in towns. This we may presume; but the earliest literary reference I know of is in the Prologue to Piers Plowman where cooks and their servants outside their shops cry ‘Hot pies hot! Good gris [little pigs] and geese. Go we dine, go we!’ The fifteenth-century London Lickpenny describes the misfortunes of a poor Kentishman in London and Westminster in sixteen eight-line stanzas with the refrain ‘For lack of money I may not speed!’ The lawyers in Westminster gave him nothing for nothing, and the shopkeepers of London with their ‘Strawberry ripe and cherry in the rise [on the branch, fresh]’, ‘Hot sheeps’ feet’, ‘Rishes [rushes] fair and green’ were not more generous. From the sixteenth century onwards hundreds of these cries have come down to us.