ABSTRACT
The street cries of early modern London were essentially fugitive articulations. Evanescent and fleeting, they were enunciated by an itinerant population of petty retailers who made their living outside or on the fringes of the formal marketplace. Yet they have enjoyed a remarkably durable presence in a wide array of cultural forms-including ballads, prints, and plays-whose large-scale dissemination begins in the sixteenth century and extends, in a seemingly unbroken oral tradition, into the present. The antiquarians and folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had no small part to play in creating this canon-commonly termed the “Cries of London”—and in perpetuating the impression of its longue durée, through their prodigious cataloguing of the myriad types of cries and criers, and of the cultural forms in which they were (re)produced. Indeed, were it not for antiquarian collectors, many of the ephemeral forms in which street cries appear (such as broadsheet prints and ballads) would undoubtedly not have survived (see for example Bridge, Hindley, W. Roberts, and John Smith). Our access to early modern street cries and criers has thus in no small measure been shaped by the antiquarian endeavor.
