From time to time, a recording appears or a performance takes place of one of those strange English works called the “Cries of London.”1 These pieces, composed by Thomas Weelkes, Orlando Gibbons, Richard Dering, and others during the decades 1590–1620, and scored for a mix of voices and instruments, deserve to be called “strange” because they surprise on so many counts. Most obviously, their vocal content is borrowed from elsewhere—from the cries of urban street vendors such as fishwives, fruit sellers, dairymaids and tinkers, chimney sweeps, oarsmen, town criers, and night watchmen; but these calls have been embedded in instrumental polyphony, remote from the culture of the streets, and the resulting works evidently speak to a sophisticated audience. Clearly, all manner of boundaries are being crossed here. Mercantile noise becomes artwork; oral becomes literate; outdoors becomes indoors; social classes are traversed; and there could even be some bending of genders. The works are strange, too, for being so overtly dramatic. A singer who urges her audience to “buy my quarter of good smelts” must draw her audience into a world of make-believe: momentarily, she is a fishwife, even though seconds before she had tried to sell “four ropes of onions.” Being medleys without story or narrative, these pieces are remote from the condition of opera, but nonetheless, they beckon their singers into character acting, and in places, they do possess brief moments of drama. And as a final twist: the performance fishwife who mimics her street equivalent may find it a hard act to follow, for a real fishwife can be a skilled performer in her own right, highly persuasive and memorable to those who witness her. A performance of a “Cries of London” that fails to catch or match the spirit of the streets might be deemed to have fallen flat.
Modern performances and recordings, the portals through which most people today access the “Cries of London” repertory, may add significantly to the perceived strangeness of these works. Ponder, for instance, two recordings of Thomas Weelkes’s “Cries of London” made in 2004–2005. On paper, this work is a string of street cries notated on a single stave under treble clef, accompanied by four instruments. In the first recording (Fretwork), a solo tenor sings the cries an octave below Weelkes’s written pitch, making this a firmly masculine performance.2 He adopts a modern cockney/estuary accent that identifies him as a working-class Londoner of our own time; clearly, this singer has listened to some current street vendors. He performs in a resonant building (actually a church), but he moves around it as if to imply that the criers walk as they call, or that we the listeners are passing through the streets. Supporting him are four stationary viols, soft-voiced instruments linked with interior spaces. In almost every respect, this performance differs from the second (Les Sacqueboutiers).3 Here, Weelkes’s vocal line is sung at notated pitch by a female soprano using modern standard English. Her delivery is lively but abstract; as an evocation of street life, it does indeed fall flat. She, too, is recorded indoors but accompanied by cornetts and sackbuts, instruments linked either with ceremony and spectacle or, when played by city waits, with performance out of doors. In only one aspect of production do these two recordings align: the imaginary streets they portray are eerily silent, and the only listeners are the microphones and ourselves.
Do these productions in any way touch on the realities of performance Weelkes himself would have had in mind? That question in turn unlocks a host of others. Where exactly were these “Cries of London” performed when they were new? Who sang them, who played them, and to what audience? What were the genders and ages of the musicians who took part? What instruments were played? How were the works meant to be received? Why were they composed in the first place? Their only extant sources are manuscript copies seemingly made for domestic use, perhaps by amateur musicians for their own recreation. So were these “Cries” written with that use in mind, or have they crossed boundaries from one performance context to another? Modern performers can sidestep these questions, but the historian bent on time travel needs to face them head-on. The following remarks therefore pursue them as far as the evidence allows.4
Some of these questions have been asked before. Most obviously, they were tackled by Philip Brett in his edition of Consort Songs, which includes an exemplary critical edition of most of the “Cries of London” repertory. (This volume is cited below as CS.)5 Brett knew well that the only surviving sources for these “Cries” were compiled for domestic use, but he suspected that the pieces themselves had indeed crossed boundaries in order to end up in these particular manuscripts.6 Remarking on the relative popularity of the “Cries,” some of which circulated quite widely, he has this to say:
Their vogue may perhaps be explained in terms of the increased sophistication of a court audience bored with the grandiloquent madrigal and eager to share vicariously in the rough-and-tumble of common life: a patronizing tone is never far from the surface.7
How Brett arrived at that image of a “court audience bored with the grandiloquent madrigal” is not explained, but the notion has taken root. See, for instance, the following expansion of it by Philippe Canguilhem:
this music, with its working-class inspirations, is nevertheless coming to us directly from the rarified milieu of the King’s court, whose members were in a position to appreciate the ironic juxtaposition . . . between these echoes of urban life and the elaborate musical language borrowed from the fantasia genre.8
David Pinto’s booklet notes for Fretwork seems more inclined to connect the “Cries” repertory with what he calls the “parlour,” as implied by the domestic origins of the extant manuscript sources. But he agrees with Brett that the criers themselves are “portrayed with some condescension.”9 These views need to be tested, and that means looking afresh at the works themselves.
The casual reader of CS will reckon there are four pieces in the “Cries of London” repertory: one by Thomas Weelkes, one by Orlando Gibbons, one anonymous, and one by Richard Dering. A more careful reading of Brett’s edition shows that the situation is in fact much more complex. The setting by Weelkes (CS no. 66) survives in two quite different states, one considerably shorter than the other; they are designated below as Short Weelkes (recorded by Les Sacqueboutiers) and Long Weelkes (recorded by Fretwork). Brett himself makes no judgment as to which version is the prototype. Loosely related to them is an autonomous third work, unattributed in its only known source, which Brett describes briefly in his Textual Commentary but excluded from CS itself. This rejected work is, in his view, “modelled closely” on Short Weelkes, “except that the cries are not restricted to one voice. It is of inferior workmanship and may possibly be by William Cobbold, whose ‘New fashions’ is the next item in the MS.”10 This rejected piece, designated below as Anon/Weelkes, is not currently available in a modern edition or recording; it is also incomplete, one partbook being missing from its only known source.11 Collectively, the three pieces mentioned so far constitute the Weelkes group. Turning next to the setting by Orlando Gibbons (CS no. 67), Brett’s edition gives it as a long work in two halves, each built on a statement of the In nomine cantus firmus. Brett’s textual commentary, however, explains that this is an unstable piece; its two halves circulated independently and sometimes in reverse order, making it unclear whether this is in fact one piece or two. In the discussion below, its two halves are designated as Gibbons A and Gibbons B. Fretwork, following Brett’s lead, present them successively as Gibbons A/B; Les Sacqueboutiers give us Gibbons A alone. Allied to Gibbons A/B in the sense that it usually circulated with them is the anonymous “Cries of London” (CS no. 68). However, this piece is not based on the In nomine cantus firmus, and on stylistic grounds is unlikely to be by Gibbons himself. For reasons explained later, it is cited below as the “Winter Cries”; there is a recording by Les Sacqueboutiers. Last comes the setting by Dering (CS no. 69), the longest and probably the latest of the group. It is cited below as Dering, and is recorded by Fretwork. CS presents the pieces in what Brett reckoned to be their possible chronological order. In his view, Long/Short Weelkes is the earliest, dating from “around 1599,” and all the works were probably written “before 1615.”12
Our best point of entry into this thicket is Long Weelkes. On paper, it looks like a song for solo voice with instruments, and Fretwork treat it that way. But there is a discrepancy here: the melodic line is inherently multivocal, a medley of cries by many different vendors and tradespeople. Fretwork transpose the line down an octave and make use of spatial effects to break up the chain of cries, but the solo tenor never varies his accent or delivery, and he ends up sounding like a jack-of-all-trades. No heed is paid to the closing words of the text, which point to a radically different solution. “White lettuce, white young lettuce!” sings the last of the vendors, followed by this coda: “Now let us sing, now let us sing; and so we make an end: with alleluia, with alleluia.” There is an air of schoolboy humor about the pun on “lettuce”/“let us,” but it also allows the coda to speak in the plural: “now let us sing.” Then come the last two words, “with alleluia,” which are incongruous and unexpected. Why are they there? One possible explanation is that the notation is misleading: not a song for solo voice, but rather, music for a cohort of singers who perform singly for the individual cries, then in unison for the coda. If so, then the words “with alleluia” allow the singers to unmask themselves: they are no longer street vendors; they are probably choirboys. Thomas Weelkes, composer of this piece, worked with boys throughout his adult career, first as organist of Winchester College (a school) from 1598, then as master of the choristers at Chichester Cathedral from 1601/2, and perhaps also as a Gentleman Extraordinary of the Chapel Royal, whose choristers were famous boy actors.13 In any of those capacities, Weelkes would have been ideally placed to devise and even stage an entertainment in which choirboys impersonated vocalists of a quite different kind: the community of street traders.
Anon/Weelkes and Short Weelkes now need to be brought into play. Philip Brett reckoned Anon/Weelkes to be “modelled closely” on Short Weelkes and “of inferior workmanship,” but he does not justify those views nor probe the reasons why these three interconnected works should coexist, so some pressing issues remain unexplained. Under what circumstances would somebody take the unorthodox step of either pruning or expanding an existing polyphonic work? Why would a wholly new piece then be “modelled closely” on the short version, giving rise to music “of inferior workmanship”? Exactly how do the members of the Weelkes group relate to one another?
Full responses to these questions must await an edition of Anon/Weelkes, but in the interim, the following points can be made. First, Anon/Weelkes differs from the other “Cries of London” in an important way: at least six of its street cries are passed imitatively from voice to voice in the manner of a catch or round.14 This is how older polyphonic pieces based on street cries had behaved; each vendor is mimicked by two or more singers rather than by a solo voice.15 But the later “Cries of London” for voices and consort do not do this. In Short/Long Weelkes, the street cries unfold sequentially on a single notated line, to be sung either by one solo voice or by a chain of soloists who unite at the end; Gibbons, Dering, and the “Winter Cries” avoid any polyphonic sharing of individual calls. If the imitative polyphony of Anon/Weelkes seems to take a step backward from Short/Long Weelkes, then we must ask if Anon/Weelkes might actually be earlier than them, and perhaps even the prototype of the whole genre. Not only are some of its cries delivered polyphonically, but the whole piece is also densely textured, giving it the effect of a consort fantasia that just happens to be studded with some street cries.
At this point, the relationship of Anon/Weelkes to Short Weelkes needs to be assessed. These two pieces are copied side by side in GB-Lbl Add. MSS 18936–9, which is their only extant source; the manuscript is cited below as Aldhouse. One of these settings must indeed be “modelled closely” on the other, because their selection of street cries is almost identical, and delivered in virtually the same order. Brett assumed that one composer borrowed from another, which is indeed possible, but there is also a chance that both settings are actually by Weelkes himself; Aldhouse is a significant source of Weelkes’s music, containing early states of some pieces he subsequently revised for publication.16 Either way, however, it is tempting to reverse Brett’s chronology, and to view the semimadrigalian fantasia of Anon/Weelkes as having been radically refashioned to create the more declamatory Short Weelkes—which, in turn, was expanded into Long Weelkes by adding two new passages of further calls, including that of the town crier. Such reworkings, if that is what they are, look very much like a project in progress, as if someone were refining and developing a successful concept, such as a choirboy entertainment.17
The three members of the Weelkes group have one thing in common: they are all medleys without inbuilt elements of drama. No real attempt is made to evoke the nature of a street-vending scene, and instead, the cries are delivered in tidy groups arranged by genre: first the fishmongers, then the fruit vendors, then the pie sellers, and so on.18 Anon/Weelkes ends by signaling nightfall with the words of the night watchman (“Maids in your smocks, look well to your locks, your fire and your light, and so goodnight”), but Long Weelkes actually steps away from the streets for its punning coda, and Short Weelkes probably did the same. (In Aldhouse, its final words have been deliberately missed out, as if unwanted for the purpose this copy was meant to serve.) If the “Cries of London” were indeed conceived as semidramatic works, then we might reckon the composer(s) of the Weelkes group to have missed a trick. What, then, of their successors?
There is much to ponder in the setting(s) by Gibbons. Echoes of the Weelkes group are to be heard everywhere, most obviously in the selection of street cries: a large number of them were used by Weelkes, sometimes with identical words and melodies, to the extent that one wonders if Gibbons is sometimes intentionally quoting from Weelkes, not from the streets.19 A major departure, however, is that Gibbons A and B are both built on the In nomine cantus firmus, which is played continuously in long notes in the middle of the texture. This might have been done to show the composer’s dexterity in combining street cries with plainchant; but it is equally possible that the In nomines are there to remind us of that genre’s long association with choirboy pedagogy, a link that would be especially apt if Gibbons A/B too were written with boy performers in mind. Unlike Weelkes, Gibbons has put street cries into all five of the polyphonic parts, so that low broken voices are needed as well as high trebles. The cries are now largely jumbled together rather than grouped by type, and they also sometimes sing over one another, as if to mimic the reality of the streets; thus one vendor will sell salt while another sells a dish of eels, and so on.20 But Gibbons has also struck on the bright idea of what David Pinto calls “tracing the passage of dawn to dusk.”21 The outcome, though not exactly drama, adds structure and form where Weelkes had none.
That being said, the effectiveness of Gibbons partly depends upon performance decisions reached about its unstable text. Not only are the two halves reversible and separable; hands other than Gibbons’s have tampered with this piece, changing or adding extra street cries, and even extending Gibbons A with a large chunk of new music that has no right to be there—the “Chandler insert” transcribed by Brett in CS page 126. The performance by Fretwork accepts almost all of these contaminations, and also presents the two halves in what is arguably their less successful order (A/B); the results may be remote from what Gibbons had in mind. The performance by Les Sacqueboutiers, which is of Gibbons A only, without Chandler or the spurious extra cries, sidesteps the question of how A and B might interrelate. In the absence of a recording, words alone must serve to present a different reading.
If Gibbons B is placed before Gibbons A and the spurious material excised, then there are several definite gains to be had. First, the piece begins with one of the best jokes in early music: the start of what seems to be an earnest In nomine is plunged into bathos as a solo treble sings the immortal words “A good sausage, a good, and it be roasted.” There follows a medley of street cries, ending as Anon/Weelkes had done with the call of the night watchman. Its first three lines are sung solo, watchman-like, after which the other voices join in for the last line, “and so goodnight.” Here the piece might have ended, inviting applause—but not if it plunges quickly into Gibbons A. The watchman now announces daybreak with the words “God give you good morrow, my masters, past three o’clock and a fair morning,” and a new medley of street cries unfolds, with no repetition of those already heard in Gibbons B. The last of them is a different watchman’s call: “Lanthorn and candlelight, hang out, maids, for all night.” There follows a formal close, sung by all five voices in madrigalian fashion: “And so we make an end, and so we make an end.” As in Long Weelkes, the singers might remove their masks here and become themselves.
Where, when, and for whom could Gibbons have composed this work? Its polyphony is unsophisticated—little effort was needed to combine street cries with the In nomine plainsong, the notes of which are often divided—and this, plus its alliance to the In nomine genre, might imply that Gibbons was or had recently been a chorister when he wrote this piece. Gibbons was of humble birth. His father, William Gibbons, was a municipal and university wait, employed variously in Cambridge and Oxford, and seems to have played wind instruments, specifically the “tenor hoeboye” or shawm.22 The link with the waits is interesting, but the main issue here is that of class: Orlando Gibbons’s origins as the son of a city wait did not place him significantly higher in the social order than the street vendors he portrays in his “Cries of London.” So the question arises: need Gibbons’s “Cries” have been made for the eyes and ears of a “court audience bored with the grandiloquent madrigal and eager to share vicariously in the rough-and-tumble of common life,” as Philip Brett suggests, or might it derive from another facet of Gibbons’s career? Is a “patronizing tone . . . never far from the surface” in this work? These are guesses, and they could be far from the truth.
No composer’s name is attached to the “Winter Cries” (CS no. 68)—a regrettable loss, because this fine and fascinating work might have been more easily understood within the frame of a biography. It opens with a spoof on the call of the town crier, a figure who features prominently in Long Weelkes and Gibbons A but not in their likely predecessors Anon/Weelkes and Short Weelkes. Normally, the crier seeks news of a lost horse, but this time, his quest is for “a little maiden child about the age of six, or seven . . . and forty,” for which there is a reward of fourpence, “and that’s more than she’s worth.” Street cries follow; they include vendors of “fine Seville oranges,” which are in season in winter, and of “white Saint Thomas onions” (the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle falls on December 21), but there is no mention of summer fruit such as strawberries. At the center of the piece, something happens that has no equivalent in any of the other settings: some of the criers briefly interact with one another. The scene is the river; boatmen vie for trade, and a customer chooses between them. This exchange invites action, perhaps even the theatrical use of space:
[first boatman]: Will you go with oars, sir, will you go with oars?
[second boatman]: Will you go with a sculler, sir?
[first oarsman]: I am your first man, sir, will you go with oars?
[customer]: I will go with oars.
[first boatman]: George, George, George, George, bring the boat to the stairs.
The work’s crowning glory, however, is its ending. “Wassail, wassail, jolly wassail!” sings the treble; “Master and mistress, if you be within, call for some of your merry men to rise and let us in, with our wassail, our jolly wassail.” A five-voice chorus then closes the piece: “Joy come to our jolly wassail, our jolly wassail!” The intended function of this ending is unclear. Does it merely evoke a wassail, or do the singers here cast off their masks (as at the end of Long Weelkes) and address the audience as themselves, as part of a midwinter entertainment? Either way, there are two important details to note here. First, the wassailers are by implication outside while the company they address is “within”; this again invites the use of theatrical space. Second, the company is headed by a “master and mistress.” There is no suggestion here of a “court audience.” So for whom could such a work have been made?
Possibilities abound. One of them emerges from the text of an entertainment made for use at St. John’s College, Oxford, on Twelfth Night 1603; it brings to an end a sequence of dramatic entertainments in rhyme composed specifically for that year’s Christmas festivities, and it would have been performed in the college hall before an audience comprising the president, fellows, and their guests. The task of introducing the wassailers fell to the college porter, who spoke the following words to the assembled company:
If youl have any sporte, then say ye woord
Heere come youths of ye parish yat will it affoord
They are heere hard by comminge alonge
Crowning their wassaile bowle with a songe . . .
I am your porter & your vassaile
Shall I lett in ye boyes with their wassaile
Say: they are at doore to sing they beginne
Go to then, ile goe & lett them in. /
Enter ye wassaile, two of them bearinge ye bowle, & singinge ye songe & all of them bearing ye burden23
A different kind of context was documented forty years earlier by Henry Machyn, parish clerk at the church of Little Trinity in the City of London, who compiled a detailed chronicle of civic events in the central decades of the sixteenth century. It refers to a midsummer festivity, and is therefore seasonally remote from the “Winter Cries,” but its explicit mention of musicians playing and singing before one of London’s foremost livery companies (the Grocers) and their guests is relevant and noteworthy:
The xvj day of June was the masters the Grossers fest; there dynyd my lord mare, [then a list of named men], and mony worshephull men and mony lades and gentyll women; and grett chere; boyth the whettes [waits] and clarkes syngyng, and a nombur of vyolles playhyng, and syngyng. . . .24
Here is rare documentation of apparently two different vocal/instrumental ensembles performing at a feast: first, the waits and parish clerks (loosely equivalent to the forces used by Les Sacqueboutiers but all male), then a consort of voices and viols (as used by Fretwork, and again likely to be all male). Records such as this and the one from St. John’s alert us to the fact that there were many different types of performing context where the “Cries of London” repertory might have been welcomed. The royal court was only one of them.
After the “Winter Cries,” Richard Dering’s “Cries of London” offers meager fare to the historian, partly because the piece contains so little that is not present in the other settings, partly because its composer’s life is too thinly documented to hint at the work’s origin and function. Dering seems to have taken most of his street cries from the Weelkes group or Gibbons A/B, and bulked the piece out with street songs in rhyming verse that more probably come from his own imagination than from the streets themselves.25 The following is representative:
Garlic, good garlic, the best of all the Cries;
it is the only physic against all maladies;
it is my chiefest wealth good garlic for to cry,
and if you love your health, my garlic then come buy!26
Similar tableaux are found in Dering’s matching “Country Cries” (CS no. 70), and they give the impression that Dering has tried to develop the picturesque genre established by his elders by means of extension. But otherwise, he attempts little real novelty, and his London “Cries” remains a medley, with barely any marking of the passage of time, no dialogue, and no implied actions. Thus the last of the “Cries of London” tells us nothing we did not already know. Here, the repertory runs out; as the final chorus of Dering puts it, “and so goodnight.”
What exactly has the present study achieved? Little by way of locating hard facts. It hazards some guesses at questions posed at its start, but frankly, we remain in the dark about the why, where, when, and to whom of every piece in the “Cries of London” repertory, and probably always will, unless explicit documentary evidence should come to light. Its main achievement is therefore to have muddied the waters, by cautioning against linking these works too securely with any single function or context or place of origin. Nothing in them demands that they be connected with royalty, nobility, or court, and in truth, they could have been written for all manner of unsuspected uses. The “Cries of London” repertory could well have appealed to a “court audience bored with the grandiloquent madrigal and eager to share vicariously in the rough-and-tumble of common life,” but its true roots may lie elsewhere.
Who would have first performed these works? This study makes a case for boy choristers, at least for Short/Long Weelkes and possibly for the entire repertory. London’s choirboys were among the most trained and talented actors in England, and the “Cries” themselves invite acting, movement, masking, and disguising. As for instruments, the extant manuscript sources imply viols, a view promoted by modern opinion, and viols were definitely played by choirboys; however, these soft-toned instruments might have been too quiet for larger spaces with rowdier audiences. In addition, viols have implicit links with education, gentility, and refinement, making them strange bedfellows with street cries. The same is not true of shawms, cornetts, sackbuts, and violins, which are the instruments of the waits, and therefore the instruments of the streets and theaters.27 To perform the “Cries of London” with viols, as Fretwork do, may be true to the spirit of the surviving manuscripts, but if these works did indeed cross boundaries from origins elsewhere, then the sound world of Les Sacqueboutiers may in fact come closer to hitting the mark.
Finally, some thoughts about intentions: How were these works meant to be received when they were new? Is “a patronizing tone . . . never far from the surface”? Do Weelkes, Gibbons, and the rest really portray their street criers “with some condescension”? An alternative view is that these works are really burlesques of genres, not of people. They take the genres of the verse anthem and the consort song and eject their usual vocalists, replacing them instead with raucous vendors and tradesmen—a carnivalesque travesty that is cleverly reversed at the end of Long Weelkes by the words “with alleluia.” Perhaps, then, these “Cries of London” ask their audiences to laugh with the criers rather than at them. The street cries themselves are never parodied (though the town crier does say some ridiculous things), and even the putative street songs in Dering are neither patronizing nor condescending.28 The instrumental parts carry their polyphony lightly—so lightly, in fact, that we might ask if the juxtaposition of fantasia with street cries is really so much ironic as incongruous. Thus the real wit of these works, at least from an early listener’s perspective, may have lain in the fact that so many boundaries are being crossed here. Noise becomes art; outdoors becomes indoors; social classes are traversed; and the genres of consort song and verse anthem, conventionally sites for serious thoughts, are quite literally dragged down to the level of the streets.
1. In their earliest sources, these works bear titles that do not necessarily emanate from the composers themselves; they include “The Crie of London,” “Cryes of London,” “The [second etc.] London Crie,” and “The Citty Cryes.” The works are here collectively called the “Cries of London” repertory.
2. The Cries of London, performed by Theatre of Voices and Fretwork (Harmonia Mundi HMU 907214; rec 2005); booklet notes by David Pinto.
3. The Cries of London, performed by Les Sacqueboutiers (Ambroisie AMB 9965; rec 2004); booklet notes by Philippe Canguilhem.
4. Many of the ideas explored in this chapter were first aired in oral presentations delivered in 2008 to the Viola da Gamba Society of Great Britain in Oxford, United Kingdom, and at the York Early Music Festival in York, United Kingdom. I am grateful to members of the audiences on these two occasions for their comments and suggestions, several of which have been incorporated and developed here.
5. Brett, ed., Consort Songs.
6. For details of the manuscripts, their copyists, owners, and functions, see Monson, Voices and Viols in England.
7. CS, xvi.
8. Booklet notes for Les Sacqueboutiers, 21.
9. Booklet notes for Fretwork, 5.
10. CS, 184.
11. A reconstruction by the present author is in preparation, to be published by Fretwork Editions.
12. CS, xvi. None of the pieces can be dated more precisely than this. Estimated dates of 1599 for Weelkes and Dering, 1614 for Gibbons, and ca. 1614 for the “Winter Cries” by Smith in The Acoustic World, 64, are unexplained and misleading.
13. Katherine Steele Brokaw also addresses the fluidity of performance between choirboy and actor from the mid-Tudor era in “Tudor Musical Theater,” this volume. By 1600, the renowned troupe of boy actors that had emerged from the Chapel Royal choir had become a commercial venture with a rather loose relationship to the actual chapel and its choristers; see Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama, 7–10; Gibson, Squeaking Cleopatras, 161–173; Lamb, Performing Childhood, 61–65; Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 24–29; and Wallace, “Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars.”
14. This number is calculated on the basis of the four extant voice parts of Anon/Weelkes. Tentative reconstruction of the missing voice part suggests that it, too, shared street cries with the other voices.
15. Distant precedents would include Clément Janequin’s “Les Cris de Paris,” in which four singers deliver the words but not obviously the melodic contours of street vendors. Models closer to home would include (1) the anonymous and fragmentary St. Cuthbert’s Day song from Durham, discussed in Milsom, “Cries of Durham”; (2) the anonymous three-voice round “New Oysters,” first recorded in the Lant roll of 1580 (GB-Ckc Rowe MS 1), edited in Morehen and Mateer, Thomas Ravenscroft: Rounds, Canons and Songs, 7; (3) the anonymous four-voice “Cony Skines Maydes,” copied by John Sadler in GB-Ob Mus. e. 1–5; no modern edition.
16. GB-Lbl Add. MSS 18936–9; discussed in Monson, “Thomas Weelkes: A New Fa-la,” 133–135.
17. Short/Long Weelkes include a component that is absent from Anon/Weelkes: a “street song” that may actually derive from the theater rather than the streets. “Have you any boots, maids” in Short/Long Weelkes (CS no. 66, mm. 148–155) is a cognate of the song delivered by the character Conscience in R[obert] W[ilson], A Right Excellent and Famous Comoedy Called the Three Ladies of London (1584), sig. D4r; this connection was first noted in Bridge, The Old Cryes, 27.
18. It is possible that the order of the criers in the Weelkes group broadly corresponds to the daily timetable of street vending, though the settings themselves do not specify this.
19. This raises a vexed question: did early modern street vendors and traders use fixed and invariant calls, or did the composers of the “Cries of London” repertory borrow from one another? The first interpretation is preferred by Bridge, The Old Cryes, 25. For a useful tabulation of all quoted material in the “Cries of London” repertory, arranged by category of crier, see Sargent, Oyez! Elizabethan and Jacobean Street Cries; its transcriptions derive from Brett’s CS editions.
20. The same effect is achieved in the four-voice round “Brooms for Old Shoes,” the earliest source of which dates from 1611; modern edition in Ravenscroft: Rounds, Canons and Songs, 104.
21. Booklet notes for Fretwork, 6.
22. Harley, Orlando Gibbons, 5–14.
23. Elliott, Nelson, Johnston, and Wyall, Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, vol. 1, 269.
24. Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn, 260.
25. For an alternative view, see Bridge, The Old Cryes, 46–51, which assumes that the tradesmen’s songs in Dering have their origins in oral culture. The truth may never be known.
26. CS no. 69, mm. 145–146.
27. For summary information about waits, see most recently Marsh, Music and Society, 115–130. Collaborations between the waits and London’s companies of child actors are discussed in Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama, 24–25 and 61–76.
28. The same is true of the various etched and woodcut images of street vendors that were published in single-sheet format during the seventeenth century; they represent the criers in a neutral way, without caricature or comment. The target market for these sheets is unknown. None of them can be dated precisely; all extant copies seem to belong to the second half of the century. Images of a selection of them can be accessed on the British Museum’s website, via the tags “Research” and “Collections,” using the search term “cries.” One of these sheets, “Made and Sold by Richard Newton,” includes verses that loosely resemble the street songs featured so prominently in Dering. For a reproduction of the top of this sheet, see Shesgreen and Bywaters, “The First London Cries for Children,” 228; the lower portion of the sheet can be viewed on the British Museum’s website using the search term “Richard Newton.”