Samuel Pepys’ Cries Of London
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As part of this year’s Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, I shall be giving an illustrated lecture in St Bartholomew’s Church at 7pm, tomorrow Friday 15th September about my love for the CRIES OF LONDON, showing my favourite images of four hundred years of street life in the capital.
What a man’s mind is, that is what he is
For a while now, I have been collecting sets of Cries of London down through the ages and I am fascinated by the diverse permutations of these cheaply-produced prints which, even at their most stylised or sentimental, always reveal something of the reality of those who earned their living by street trading.
Recently, I was curious to discover that more than three hundred years ago, Samuel Pepys (coincidentally, also a regular at The George in Commercial Rd) was equally in thrall to these popular images of street vendors and hawkers. Among more than ten thousand engravings and eighteen hundred printed ballads he amassed in his library was a folio entitled “Cryes consisting of Several Setts thereof, Antient & Moderne: with the differ Stiles us’d therein by the Cryers.” In this binder, Pepys kept three sets of the Cries of London, plus two Cries of Bologna, and single sets each of the Cries of Rome and Paris.
Published below are the anonymously produced Cries of the earliest set in Pepys’ collection which was already a century old when he acquired it – described thus “A very antient Sett thereof, in Wood, with the Words then used by the Cryers.” Printed in the late sixteenth century, this set of twenty-four illustrates the Cries that would have been familiar constituents of the street life of Shakespeare’s London.
The Cries genre itself originated with a woodcut produced in Paris around 1500, beginning a tradition that lasted into the twentieth century, spreading to major cities across the globe and spawning an infinite variety of portrayals of pedlars. By the time the series illustrated here was created, the Cries were already available throughout Europe, bringing images of the urban poor into common currency for the first time.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
More John Player’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
More of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Adam Dant’s New Cries of Spittlefields
This set of London Cries very much needs to be rendered as a suite of delft tiles! Maybe for the C17th room at Museum of the Home?
Yesss, indeed!
These are fabulous — I feel transported to 16th-century London. It was probably a trial to be Mrs Pepys and I’m glad I wasn’t, but what a wealth of history Samuel Pepys left us!
I was fascinated by this article, and have just posted a blog of my own on the significance of St Thomas’s onions: https://professorhedgehogsjournal.uk/2023/10/11/st-thomass-onions/ Many thanks for the inspiration!