Music of Streets and Fairs

Song and Sound in London’s Streets

Para1Music, and sound in general, played a fundamental role in the tapestry of everyday Elizabethan life. While religious and civic music occupied privileged positions in early modern England, various popular forms of street, fair, and festival music thrived due to their accessibility and reflection of common people’s lives. It is likely that there would hardly have been a street or market square that did not feature at least one musician on an average day.

Minstrels and Waits

Para2The most common secular musician in England, from the 12th to the mid-16th century, was the minstrel. These were singers or musicians (or both) who played music from memory for financial gain, working either in the employ of noble houses, or traveling from place to place. However, the increasing numbers of travelling minstrels became such a problem that by the late 16th century a law was passed which suppressed them.
Para3With the decline of the minstrel came the rise of a more professional class of musician called the wait. Waits were professional musicians who could read music; cities, towns, and guilds hired them to perform on important holidays and civic occasions. However, they were often granted permission to go out onto the streets at night and on Sundays to play for extra money, making them another contributor to the near constant tapestry of sound which existed in London and England’s other major cities.
Para4Secular musicians like waits and minstrels sung a variety of different tunes, ranging from playful or romantic ballads to scathing political commentaries, many of which can be found at the English Broadside Ballad Archive, a site hosted by the University of California at Santa Barbara. Historians have documented that these secular musicians often found themselves in trouble with their civic or noble employers because of libelous or scandal-mongering songs, which meant that they often found themselves unemployed.
Para5Talented musicians often amazed the crowds for which they performed. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611), a ballad seller and singer named Autolycus is described as being able to sing several tunes faster than you’ll tell count money and that it was as if he had eaten ballads and all men’s / ears grew to his tunes (4.4.217–219). In other words, he knew the songs so well that it was as if he had ingested them, and such was his ability with them that he could make his listener’s ear grow or remain rapt with attention. Playwright Ben Jonson also contributed to the immortalizing of London’s street life with his play Bartholomew Fair, which captures the wild chaos of the city’s street fairs in both music and commercial activity.

Sounds of the Streets

Para6The citizens who walked or rode through the city contributed to the hum while street criers, bell in hand, recited news as they moved up and down different thoroughfares. Merchants and street vendors raised their voices, advertising aloud their wares to attract potential customers. These cries were documented by composers Richard Deering, Thomas Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons who wrote musical pieces in the 16th and 17th century meant to mimic the cacophony of a busy London street. Modern recordings of these songs are available, such as the 2006 album Cries of London.
Para7Plagues struck London with great frequency, often occurring during the hot summer months, and replaced the city’s joyful chaos with a somber pall. These periods of plague featured the sound of tolling bells of the dead and the sounds of the dying and mourning, crying out in pain or grief. Accentuating these macabre tones was the near constant ringing of church bells for those who had died. The ringing bells became symbols of man’s mortality, a concept immortalized by John Donne in his Meditation 17:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Key Print Sources

Josephson, Nors S. Interrelationships between the London Street Cry Settings. Musica Disciplina vol. 52, 1998, pp. 139–180.
Milsom, John. Minstrel. The Oxford Companion to Music. Ed. Alison Latham. Oxford University Press, 2011. DOI 10.1093/acref/9780199579037.001.0001.
Porter, Gerald. The English Ballad Singer and Hidden History. Studia Musicologica vol. 49, no. 1/2, 2008, pp. 127–142.
Scholes, Percy et al. Wait. The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Wilson, Eric. Plagues, Fairs, and Street Cries: Sounding Out Society and Space in Early Modern London. Modern Language Studies vol. 25, no. 3, 1995, pp. 1–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/3195370.
Wilton, Peter. Street Music. The Oxford Companion to Music. Ed. Alison Latham. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Music of the Streets and Fairs. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 18 June 2020. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/music/streets.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.
Donne, John. Meditation 17. Luminarium. 4 Nov. 2010. https://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/meditation17.php.
English Broadside Ballad Archive. Ed. Patricia Fumerton et al. University of California at Santa Barbara, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/. Accessed 6 Jul. 2024.
Holland, Bernard. Cries of London Offers Dulcet Sounds of 17th Century Sales Pitches. The New York Times. 11 June 2006.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Tyler Abbott

Tyler Abbott was a student at Utah Valley University.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Music of Streets and Fairs
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Tyler Abbot, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.