Billingsgate had been a market for well over eight centuries. Smithfield, the meat market, was almost as old; and since at least the twelfth century had been a market for cattle and horses, pigs and sheep as well. Despite the constant complaints of the inconvenience of unruly and stampeding cattle being driven through the streets of the City, of beasts – tormented by drunken herdsmen – taking refuge in houses, and of ‘bulls in china shops’, the sale of live cattle continued at Smithfield until 1855 when it was transferred to the Metropolitan Cattle Market in Islington. Before that Smithfield was a shambles as well as a market. Blood flowed through the streets and entrails were dumped in the drainage channels. The scene was described by Dickens:
It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides, the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping, and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene which quite confounded the senses.8
Apart from Covent Garden, Billingsgate and Smithfield there were other specialist markets all over London. There was the watercress market in Farringdon Street, a sad place where, long before daylight the buyers gathered beneath the gas-lamps over the iron gates, dressed in every kind of rags, some with their baskets over their heads, like hoods, some with shallows fastened to their backs with straps, others with rusty tea trays.
Just as the clocks are striking five, a stout saleswoman enters the gates, and instantly a country-looking fellow, in a waggoner’s cap and smock-frock, arranges the baskets he has brought up to London. The other ladies are soon at their posts, well wrapped up in warm cloaks, over their thick shawls, and sit with their hands under their aprons. The customers come in by twos and threes, and walk about, looking at the cresses, and listening to the prices asked. Every hamper is surrounded by a black crowd, bending over till their heads nearly meet, foreheads and cheeks lighted up by the candle in the centre. The saleswomen’s voices are heard above the noise of the mob, sharply answering all objections that may be made to the quality of their goods. ‘They’re rather spotty, mum,’ says an Irishman, as he examines one of the leaves. ‘No more spots than a new-born babe, Dennis,’ answers the lady tartly, and then turns to a new comer …
As the morning twilight came on, the paved court was crowded with purchasers … and the gas-man came round with his ladder to turn out the lamps. Then every one was pushing about; the children crying, as their naked feet were trodden upon, and the women hurrying off, with their baskets or shawls filled with cresses, and the bunch of rushes in their hands …
As it grew late, and the crowd had thinned; none but the very poorest of the cress-sellers were left. Many of these had come without money, others had their halfpence tied up carefully in their shawl-ends, as though they dreaded the loss. A sickly-looking boy, of about five, whose head just reached above the hampers, now crept forward, treading with his blue naked feet over the cold stones as a cat does over wet ground. At his elbows and knees his skin showed in gashes through the rents in his clothes, and he looked so frozen, that the buxom saleswoman called to him … He went up to her, and, as he stood shivering on one foot, said, ‘Give us a few old cresses, Jinney,’ and in a few minutes was running off with a green bundle under his arm.9
East of Farringdon Street Market, beyond St Paul’s Cathedral, was Houndsditch where oranges, lemons and nuts were sold by Jews and where, when the market was closed, a few sickly hens could be seen wandering about, turning over the heaps of dry leaves that the oranges had been packed in. Here the walls of the houses, blackened with soot and apparently in the last stages of dilapidation, concealed rooms elegantly furnished by their Jewish owners with Spanish mahogany, Morocco leather, Turkey carpets, ormolu chandeliers and gilt-framed looking-glasses.
As well as from less prosperous Jews in Monmouth Street, second-hand clothes could be bought at numerous markets from Saffron Hill to Shoreditch, in Petticoat Lane and Rosemary Lane, where all kinds of other articles were also offered for sale. Food markets, most of which stayed open till late at night, were even more common. Displayed by the light of oil- or grease-lamps or candles stuck inside turnips or sieves were russet apples and Yarmouth bloaters on toasting forks; gingerbread and lemonade and baked potatoes; onions, grapes, pies and muffins; whelks and mackerel (six for a shilling), live soles and mussels (a penny a quart); and any amount of turnips: ‘Here’s your turnips, ho! ho! hi! What do you think of these then? A penny a bunch! Hurrah for free trade!’ And, competing for attention with the vendors of food, were men and women and children selling bootlaces and crockery, tea trays, and combs, pens, cough drops and corn plasters.
In all large towns in the provinces there were similar markets, though in smaller places the stall-holders were likely to be not middlemen and hawkers but the men and women who had themselves grown or made what they had to sell. There was never a shortage of customers. Over half the shops in England today are food shops, but in Victorian times most people bought their food in markets; and in many towns the municipal authorities provided large, well-lit buildings in which markets could be held. Liverpool’s authorities were one of the first to do so: in their city a covered market hall, gas-lit and with a supply of fresh water, was in use by the early 1820s.10 When the Jubilee Market at Covent Garden was completed in 1904 there were few large towns in England that did not have a covered market such as that still in use at Oxford.
Outside the towns, fairs, markets and pedlars still supplied the wants of hundreds of thousands of country people. A small village might have a cobbler, a baker, perhaps a butcher and a grocer who kept a few items of drapery. Small towns had their shoemakers’ shops, their butchers and bakers, their grocers and drapers. Most of them had coal and timber merchants, corn-chandlers and tailors. Aldeburgh in Suffolk, for example, which had a population of 1300 in the 1830s had, in addition to eight inns, six shoemakers, four drapers who also stocked groceries, two haberdashers, three bakers, two chemists, four tailors, three milliners, five blacksmiths, a saddler, a coachmaker, a hairdresser, and a carrier who transported goods two days a week to and from Ipswich. There were, however, no fishmongers, no greengrocers and no butchers, the provisions which these resident tradesmen would have supplied being available in the markets which were held every Wednesday and Saturday. There were also local fairs in March and May.11 And it was upon such fairs and markets that country people relied for all that their local shops could not supply.
To them the cottager of the 1880s still went for his ‘store pig’, the shepherd for his bells, and the agricultural labourer for his linen gaberdine – the good old garment of his Saxon forefathers – and for his leather gaiters. ‘At country fairs everything sells,’ wrote a travelling salesman who took his goods from one fair to the next, ‘bridles, saddles, whips, guns, padlocks, saws, etc., etc., all goods of amounts varying from a shilling to three pounds and upwards.’12
This man, a cheapjack, travelled all over the country with his horse and cart and at least £100 of stock, standing on the tailboard of his cart when he arrived at his destination, offering his goods with a beguiling stream of comic patter to attrac
t a crowd around him. ‘I used to go out with a lot of goods on the Wednesday to Romford Market,’ he recalled, ‘on Thursday to Bishop Stortford, Friday to Chelmsford, Saturday to Colchester, Monday to Hadleigh, Wednesday to Bury St Edmunds, Thursday to Diss, and on the Saturday to Norwich … that is on the market days as they fall to each of the above places … The best fairs are those held in the autumn, as Peterboro, Cantbury, Maidstone, Maldon, Colchester, etc.’13
The recollections of another cheapjack reveal the hazards of the trade. He had begun his working life in Kent at the age of five or six when he was sent out with a roll of matches and strict instructions not to come home without the money received from their sale. Thrashed by a drunken father when he did not sell them all, he ran away one morning soon after his eighth birthday with nine-pennyworth of matches, determined never to return. He made his way to Deptford, staying in lodging-houses on the way, paying twopence for the share of a third, fourth, fifth or even sixth part of a bed, and each day saving a penny from his profits to buy brimstone to make more matches, begging the wood from carpenters. From selling matches he progressed to selling song sheets in public houses, and was taught to read the words on them by a kindly old soldier; then he turned to selling tapes and thread, then to rabbit and hare skins. When he was twelve he went to Norwich and began to sell phosphorus boxes – ‘a piece of phosphorus was stuck in a tin tube, the match was dipped into the phosphorus, and it would ignite by friction’ – but a constable, ‘considering they were dreadful affairs, and calculated to encourage and assist thieves and burglars’, took him to the private house of a magistrate who, ‘equally horrified’, sent him to prison for a month. Upon his release he was given a shilling with which he purchased some songs; and he travelled to Yarmouth to sell them to sailors. After a few weeks he had made 12s with which he purchased ‘some hardware at the swag-shop and commenced hawking’. He did well, made £5, ‘bought a neat box and started to sell a little Birmingham jewellery’. ‘I was now respectably dressed,’ he said, ‘was getting a living, and had entirely left off stopping at common lodging-houses. But I confined my visits to small villages – I was afraid of the law; and as I was pursuing my calling near Wakefield, a constable inquired for my hawker’s licence. I had none.’ He was sent to prison again and lost his box of goods; but when he came out he went to Leeds and, at a fair there, met a cheapjack who offered him regular employment as his assistant and a steady wage besides all he ‘could get above a certain price placed upon each of the goods’. After fifteen months he had saved £25. He bought a hawker’s licence, started up on his own; and when he told his story in the late 1840s had a good stock of goods worth at least £50. He was married and had a family. He travelled only in the summer; his wife stayed at home looking after their little swag-shop which always turned in ‘at least the family expenses’.14
Pedlars had to pay £4 for their licences, but this was considered far from excessive by shopkeepers who regarded cheapjacks as a serious threat to their own trade, and had long thought them so. ‘There is not any commodity to be named that can be in any way ported but that the Pedlar doth carry it about all the country to sell,’ an aggrieved pamphleteer had written in 1684. ‘People (after a while) will have little or no occasion to come to the Cities or Market Townes for anything.’ Fifty years later another writer complained, ‘The Shopkeeper has the Milk where the Pedlar has the Cream; the Shopkeeper has the Gleanings where the Pedlar has the Harvest.’15 Pedlars were accused of carrying stolen and smuggled goods, of cheating their customers, of damaging the trade not only of country town shopkeepers but of London merchants, too, since retailers in the provinces no longer found it necessary to come to the capital for their stock now that they could buy all they wanted from the caravans of travelling salesmen whose heavily laden packhorses tramped through the roads of every county.
Pedlars did have their champions, though. When the government decided to bring in a Shops Tax and, as compensation to the shopkeepers, to make all peddling illegal, there was an outcry from the manufacturers of linen, wool and cotton goods who protested that they would be driven out of business were it not for travelling salesmen and the so-called Scotch Drapers who called from house to house in the industrial districts of the north, selling ‘hosiery, drapery and other necessary articles’ on credit in the manner of tallymen, collecting weekly sums and offering new goods when the score was settled. Manufacturers contended that in the mill villages of the West Riding alone, Scotch Drapers were owed some £40,000 by ‘labouring mechanics’ and ‘manufacturers’. It was also maintained that hawkers and pedlars had ‘contributed greatly to the Extension of many of the Manufacturers of both England and Scotland by introducing them into Parts of the Country where they could not otherwise have been Sold’.
Many great and important Advantages are derived from the said useful and industrious Class of Tradesmen [one petition from Cumberland emphasized], the Quantity of goods bought and disposed of by them being considerably more extensive than has been generally conceived, and the Mode of Sale which is wholly confined to small Villages and Places remote from general Markets tends very greatly to diffuse the Manufacturers of the Kingdom in general and is a source of great convenience to those Inhabitants who live at a Distance from the principal Towns, great Quantities of goods of almost every Description being vended in detail, which the remote Inhabitants could not find Leisure to seek; and when Necessity might compel him to go from Home, the Expence of his Journey would frequently be as great as the Object of his Purchase.16
The protests were heeded: the pedlars were spared; and while their numbers declined in the nineteenth century as more shops were opened in country places, they survived – and many prospered – throughout and beyond the Victorian age.
PART FOUR
From the Victorians to Modern Times
48 Owners of the Land
It has long been supposed that the English nobility had survived so successfully because it was much more open to the middle classes than the French and thus had not aroused that violent antipathy which the tiers état had felt for the noblesse. But a recent study of estates in three representative counties, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire and Northumberland, has indicated that this supposition may be wrong, that, unlike the landed upper classes in other countries, those in England were careful to keep their large estates in manageable holdings within their families, to improve and enlarge them by money acquired from rich brides, and to ensure by legal instruments that they remained within the family, secure from the effects of partible inheritance, unwelcome outsiders being kept at arm’s length. In the three counties mentioned no more than 137 ‘men of business’ bought a country seat between the Dissolution of the Monasteries and 1880.1
The riches of the most wealthy of English landed families were prodigious. Disraeli assured Queen Victoria that the Duke of Bedford, the ‘wealthiest of all her subjects’, had an income absolutely exceeding £300,000 a year, a sum which might perhaps be compared with about £20 million today, or, at a time when the pound was worth $4.86, an equivalent of almost 90 million dollars a year. Later on in the century, the Duke of Westminster was enjoying an annual income of £250,000 from his London properties alone, the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate brought him £217,000 a year, the Duke of Devonshire’s £181,000, the Duke of Northumberland’s £176,000, the Marquess of Bute’s £150,000. The Duke of Marlborough, who lived in the grandest style at Blenheim Palace, was relatively poor with a mere £37,000 a year (about £2.25 million in present-day terms) from an estate of less than 25,000 acres, a very small estate compared with that of the Duke of Buccleuch who had 460,000 acres or the Duke of Sutherland who owned 1,358,000, an area larger than the counties of Bedfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire put together. In all there were forty-four great landowners who had over 100,000 acres each and many more whose income – derived from stocks and shares, royalties from minerals or docks, from rich wives, as well as from land – exceeded £100,000 when income tax was 2d in the pound.
Most of them lived in a style of appropriate grandeur. The Duke of Rutland’s guests at Belvoir were awoken in the morning by a military band; at Inveraray Castle, the Duke of Argyll’s were given strident notice that it was time to change for dinner by his grace’s personal bagpipers; at Pet worth, Lord Egremont stabled 300 horses; at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, where guests were entertained ‘on a truly royal scale’, they could look out upon grounds tended by forty gardeners.
At Blenheim Palace, guests of the Duke of Marlborough sat down to dinners of alarming richness. First two soups, one hot and one cold were served simultaneously; then two kinds of fish, again one hot and one cold. After the fish came an entrée, then a meat dish, followed by a sorbet. This was followed by game – grouse or partridge, pheasant, duck, woodcock or snipe. In the summer, when there was no game, there were quails from Egypt, fattened in Europe, and ortolans from France ‘which cost a fortune’. ‘An elaborate sweet followed, succeeded by a hot savoury with which was drunk the port so comforting to English palates,’ the ninth duke’s American wife recalled. ‘The dinner ended with a succulent array of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, raspberries, pears, and grapes, all grouped in generous pyramids among the flowers that adorned the table.’2
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