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Fyne potatos fyn! Hote eele pyes! Fresh cheese and creame? Buy any garlick? Buy a longe brush? Whyt carots whyt! Fyne pomgranats! Buy any Russes? Hats or caps to dress? Wood to cleave? |
Pins of the Maker! Any sciruy gras? Any cornes to pick? Buy any parsnips? Hot codlinges hot! Buy all my soales? Good morrow m. Buy any cocumber? New thornebacke! Fyne oate cakes! |
From all this it will be seen that merchandise of almost every description was formerly “carried and cried” in the streets. When shops were little more than open shanties, the apprentice’s cry of “What d’ye lack, what d’ye lack, my masters?” was often accompanied by a running description of the goods on sale, together with personal remarks, complimentary or otherwise, to likely and unlikely buyers.
A very puzzling London Cry, yet at one time a very common one, was “A tormentor for your fleas!”[6] What the instrument so heralded could have been, one can but dimly guess. A contributor to Fraser’s Magazine, tells us that in a collection of London Cries appended to Thomas Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece (1608), he gives us this one: “Buy a very fine mouse-trap, or a tormentor for your fleaes;” and the cry of the mouse-trap man in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), is, “Buy a mouse-trap, a mouse-trap, or a tormentor for a flea.” The flea-trap is also alluded to in The Bonduca of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in Travels of Twelve-Pence, by Taylor, the Water Poet; and it reappears in a broadside in the Roxburgh Collection of Ballads, “The Common Cries of London” [dated 1662, but probably written a hundred years earlier]: “Buy a trap, a mouse-trap, a torment for the fleas!” When the great Bard of the Lake School was on a tour, he made a call at an inn where Shelley happened to be; but the conversation, which the young man would fain have turned to philosophy and poetry and art, was almost confined to the elder poet’s prosaic description of his dog as “an excellent flea-trap.” It may be assumed that fleas were plentiful when this cry was in vogue; and it may have been that the trap was part of the (undressed?) skin of an animal with the hair left on, in which fleas would naturally take refuge, drowning, perhaps, being their ultimate fate. But all this is mere conjecture.
It was unlikely that so close an observer of London life as Addison should leave unnoticed the Cries of London; and the Spectator is interspersed with occasional allusions to them. In No. ccli. we read: “There is nothing which more astonishes a Foreigner, and frights a Country Squire, than the Cries of London. My good Friend Sir Roger often declares that he cannot get them out of His Head, or go to sleep for them, the first Week that he is in Town. On the contrary, Will Honeycomb calls them the Ramage de la Ville, and prefers them to the Sounds of Larks and Nightingales, with all the Musick of the Fields and Woods.”
In Steele’s comedy of The Funeral, Trim tells some ragged soldiers, “There’s a thousand things you might do to help out about this town, as to cry Puff-Puff Pyes; have you any Knives or Scissors to grind? or late in an evening, whip from Grub Street strange and bloody News from Flanders; Votes from the House of Commons; Buns, rare Buns; Old Silver Lace, Cloaks, Sutes or Coats; Old Shoes, Boots or Hats.”
Gay, too, who, in his microscopic lyric of the streets, Trivia, omitted little, thus sings of various street cries:—
Now Industry awakes her busy sons;
Full charged with News the breathless hawker runs;
Shops open, coaches roll, carts shake the ground,
And all the streets with passing cries resound.