Music of Streets and Fairs Music of Streets and Fairs Author Tyler Abbot Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Tyler Abbot, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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Song and Sound in London’s Streets

Music, 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

The 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.

With 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.

Secular 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.

Talented 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

The 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.

Plagues 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.