ABSTRACT
This chapter turns away from the settled and respectable world of urban retailing, including it's more innovative and fashionable practitioners, to look at some of those who were on the margins. These include hawkers and pedlars, street traders, second-hand dealers and backstreet shops in growing towns. The chapter considers village shopkeepers who represented another facet of the world of traditional retailing and serve as a reminder that shops were geographically widespread. There can be no doubt that itinerant traders were a familiar sight in early modern England. The number of hawkers and pedlars may be hard to determine, but the hostility towards them continued unabated throughout much of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth. Shopkeepers also petitioned the House of Commons for legislation to suppress hawkers. Leaving little trace in the records and occupying a murky area between licensed hawkers and legitimate market sellers were the street traders.
