The Street Cry of the Afanc Egg Seller

I took a few liberties with the history of street cries here. Let’s step back for some context.

The biggest market in London during the reign was Stocks Market. If you’re looking for its historic site, due to one of those twists of history, it is underneath Mansion House, the formal residence of the Lord Mayor of London. The market was set up for the coronation of Edward I in 1272, because people thought all the hawkers along Cheapside were a security threat to his coronation procession, or at least they were unsightly, poor, and noisy. They were all moved to the new site, and laws were passed to make stallholding where people had traditionally held markets illegal. This did not work. Similarly monarchs since, including Elizabeth, attempted to stamp out street pedlars, and force people to go to the market. This, also, did not work at all. In 1345 the poulterers, fish-sellers and butchers of Cheapside were again moved on to Stocks Market. Eventually the market became too large and smaller parts broke off for other premises. Speaking loosely, the stocks was the “fish and flesh” market. Annoyingly if you wanted vegetables, you’d need to hike over to Saint Paul’s Churchyard. We have to visit that area in Magonomia eventually. It was also the centre of London’s book trade.

If you were rich, you’d want meat from the Stocks Market just because people who bought from there were sick there less often. It was by one of the little rivers that snaked through London, Wallbrook. Water from it was used to wash things down. It even had a rudimentary sort of flushing toilets in period. By the game period it was controlled by the Wardens of London Bridge, who rented out canopies for life tenures.

Its name comes from the stocks, the punishment device, which was in Stocks Market. I’d have put it near the fruit sellers, but they didn’t ask me. This was the one set of stocks for the city of London. This seems less unlikely when you remember that, at this point, many parts of modern London were separate towns and villages. This is also the origin of the modern word “stockmarket” although if you wanted to invest and do financial things in period, you’d do better over at coffee houses near the Royal Exchange. Stockbrokers weren’t allowed in the Royal Exchange itself, because their manners were bad, something they really leaned in on with the “men shouting in a pit” model that immediately predated computerisation.

So, the stock market is crowded and loud. , and if you are street peddling you need people to look up from their work and come out into the street to buy your stuff. Enter the street cry. Street cries have been recorded since Roman times, but the sort of melodic street cry we have included here is most well known from the Victorian period.

It’s very long for a street cry, but there are recorded examples which are even longer. These focus on goods the customers do not know, and would not otherwise wish to buy. So, the street cry in London for fresh fish was a couple of words, whereas the street cries for apothecaries, which are the closest thing we get to street cries from magicians, sound more like snake-oil patter. They talk about how rare the ingredients are, how far they have been shipped, and how many things they can cure.

Eventually, in London and other cities with strong guilds, people with staples developed a single cry for each product, so if you heard a particular tune, even if you couldn’t make out the words, you’d know it was being said. Over in the Venetian stories we had the alternative, the American consul to Venice reported he kept seeing a girl with bloodshot eyes in his street, and he discovered she was a pear seller who yelled the name of her wares so loud each day that it caused the haemorrhaging. I’m reminded that locally a company has reconditioned a set of old ice cream trucks, and so my children have learned that a truck playing Greensleeves in the street is offering ice cream. Greensleeves really wasn’t written by Henry VIII to seduce the Queen’s mother, but you could use it that way if you wanted. We know King Hal had his own band and performed on stage.

We know there were street cries in London a century before Elizabeth’s reign, because a poem from 1410 says that vendors were crying “strawberries ripe and cherries on the rise”. I should record that poem eventually: it’s called The London Lickpenny and has a man touring the capital and being ripped off. You’ve probably heard the Victorian version of “Strawberries Ripe”. It is in the musical “Oliver!” as part of the market cry melody. I’m not a musical person, so I won’t torture you with any of the instruments I play badly. I’m not sure when it swapped from a plain cry to a melodic cry, but there’s my tenuous link to say that a likely lad could have come up with a performance poem to sell monster eggs, and because they are a new product, he needed it to be long.

Lad, in this case, because I came up with it when I was standing about doing COVID chaperoning at work when, I had a day dream as clear as day in which a version of the Artful Dodger came up to me and said “Scoop of the arsebiter eggs, gov? Fresh today.” He would not, in the real world have said “fresh”, which in period meant “unsalted”. He would have said “new”: there are period records of fishwives calling that they had “new salmon”, for example.

When I was writing it, I did have a tune in mind. It’s the second line of Three Blind Mice, but with the pauses moved around (“See how they-run” becomes “arse bi-ter eggs”). The even verses us a version of Pop Goes the Weasel with a similar bit of shifting about. The sad thing here is that I have accidentally used the very best known of the surviving street cries for an already existing product, and no-one in period would have done that. Three Blind Mice shares its tune with Hot Cross Buns which managed to escape extinction by becoming a nursery rhyme. There’s a way out for me, yet, though.

A few other cries have similarly survived as fossils in other work. The somewhat chesty lady in the episode art is a statue representing Molly Malone, a famous fishmonger and ghost of old Dublin town whose cry you can here in many Irish pubs on the regular. As anyone who has gone to these things knows, there are traditional gestures for when drunkenly sings the bit about “cockles and mussels” To make the arse bitter eggs song different from Hot Cross Buns, you just need to slap your arse hard enough for it to be a percussive element before each line. In a way this is an unnecessary precaution, because hot cross buns used to be a festive food only available for a brief window after Lent. Some versions of the song say that they are made only on Good Friday. It seems odd that something heard so little is the great survivor of the Darwinian song contest of the market, but they were pitched as a treat for children, which is how the song slid across to the nursery.