A History of the Cries of London, Ancient and Modern

by Charles Hindley

The Muffin Man.

“Muffins, oh! crumpets, oh! Come buy, come buy of me. Muffins and crumpets, muffins, For breakfast or for tea.”

The ringing of the muffin-man’s bell—attached to which the pleasant associations are not a few—is prohibited by a ponderous Act of Parliament, but the prohibition has been all but inoperative, for the muffin bell still tinkles along the streets, and is rung vigorously in the suburbs, and just at the time when City gents, at winter’s eve, are comfortably enveloped in fancy-patterned dressing gowns, prettily-worked smoking-caps, and easy-going and highly-coloured slippers, and saying within themselves or aloud:—

“Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.”

“Hot Cross Buns!” Perhaps no “cry”—though it is only for one day in the year, is more familiar to the ears of a Londoner, than that of “One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross-buns.” We lie awake early upon Good Friday morning and listen to the London bells:—

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s Pancakes and fritters, say the bells of St. Peter’s, Two sticks and an apple, say the bells of Whitechapel. Kettles and pans, say the bells of St. Ann’s. Pokers and tongs, say the bells of St. John’s Brickbats and tiles, say the bells of St. Giles’ Halfpence and farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s. Bull’s eyes and targets, say the bells of St. Marg’rets.”

And all the other London bells having rung—or, rather toll’d out their own tale of joy or trouble: then comes—rattling over the stones—W. H. Smith’s well-known red Express-carts laden with the early printed newspapers of the coming day, while all night long the carts and waggons come rumbling in from the country to Covent-garden, and not the least pleasant sound—pleasant for its old recollections—is the time-honoured old cry of “Hot Cross-Buns.” Century after century passes by, and those who busily drove their carts day after day from Isleworth, Romford, Enfield, Battersea, Blackheath, or Richmond, one hundred years ago, are as still and silent as if they had never been; yet still, Passion week after Passion week, comes that old cry, nobody knows how old, “Hot Cross Buns, Hot Cross Buns.” And as we lie in a half dreamy state we hear and think of the chimes of St. Clement Danes, which may still be heard, as Fallstaff describes, having heard them with Justice Shallow; also, how Pope, as he lay in Holywell-street—now Bookseller’s-row; and Addison and Johnson; and, before their time, Waller, at the house of his old friend the merchant of St. Giles’s; and the goodly company of poets that lived at the cost of the king, near Whitehall; then of the quaint old gossiping diarist, Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Admiralty; John Taylor, the Water-Poet; even Shakespeare himself, having each in their turn been awakened on the Good Friday morning by the same sound ringing in their ears. For this is a custom which can hardly be traced to a beginning: and all we know about it is, that as far as we can go back, the Good Friday was ushered in by the old Good Friday bun; and that the baker in the towns, and the old good wife in the country, would have thought the day but badly kept, and augured badly for the coming summer’s luck, without it.

But between the cakes of Cecrops and the modern Hot Cross Bun there is a wide gulf of 3,400 years; and yet the one may be traced up to the other. There are some, indeed, who would wish to give to the Good Friday Hot Cross Bun a still longer pedigree, and to take it back to the time of the Patriarchs and their consecrated bread; and there are others who would go yet further, and trace it to the earliest age of the world, in a portion of Cain’s sacrifice. We may, however, content ourselves with stopping short at the era of the Egyptian Cecrops, founder of Athens, who made his sweet cakes of flour and honey. Such cakes as these, as we learn from the prophet Jeremiah, were offered by the idolatrous Hebrew women to “the Queen of Heaven,”

“Ashtoreth, whom the Phœnicians called Astarte, Queen of Heaven, with cresent horns.”

Some can even discern Astarte in our “Easter.” The Jews of old had the shew-bread and the wafer of unleavened bread; and the Egyptians, under the Pharaohs, had also their cakes, round, oval, and triangular. The Persians had their sacred cakes of flour and honey; and Herodotus speaks of similar cakes being offered by the Athenians to a sacred serpent in the temple of their citadel. And, not to mention other nations, the circumstance that accompanied the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, 1857, will make memorable the “chupatties” or sacred cakes of Khrishna.