While watching The Great Food Truck Race yesterday evening,
I got thinking about whether there was any historical equivalent of such street
food in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The earliest instance of something really
similar seems to be a continent away and centuries later: the chuck wagons of
the North American cattle drives. They
had to cook things like dried beans and salt pork (one of the reasons pork and
beans became cowboy food) which would last on journeys that carried men and
women days, even weeks, away from a kitchen.
The distance and the need for portability just wasn’t a factor in
England even five hundred years ago.
There was already an established system of inns that would feed the traveller
a basic meal. However, in and around
Shakespeare‘s time and locale there existed a kind of food sellers that sold from
a vehicle on wheels, or, more accurately, on one or two wheels.
According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, a costermonger is “now, in London, a man who sells fruit,
vegetables, fish etc. in the street from a barrow. “ The current definition is less like a food
truck as what is being sold might be unprepared and designed to be taken
home. Originally though, as the “coster”
of costermonger was costard – “a kind of apple of large size,” the sellers were
offering a product that could be bought and eaten on the spot. Similarly, Henry Mayhem, writing in his 1851
book London Labour and the London Poor recounts
that a common street-sellers cry during the reign of Henry V (1386 – 1422) was “hot sheep’s feet;” presumable selling
them hot had no purpose if they were not eaten soon.
Returning to the costermonger
himself, his presence was significant enough in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries that he appears in many and often very serious works. John Foxe’s 1563 Acts and Monuments, more commonly known by its abridged title The Book of Martyrs, represents often in
grisly and graphic detail how, in the author’s view, righteous English
Protestants were abused, tortured and executed by their Roman Catholic Queen
Mary I. There is one account of a Master
Hooper, who was spirited away to his demise by two Sheriffs under control of
the Queen. Because the people of London
would have objected to the arrest of such a good man, his transport was carried
out at night and the while one Sheriff led Hooper, the other went “before, and
put out the costerdmongers candles, who use to sit with light in the streets.” Without light the people would not know to
stop the heinous deed.
A famous play of the next century
shows the street sellers in a more comic but more sinister light. Bartholomew
Fair by Ben Jonson is set during event of the same name that took place every
year in London from 1133 to 1855. Being
in reality a common sight at the event, a Costerdmonger is made a minor
character in the drama but his part is not a virtuous one. He is complicit in the plot of Ezechiel
Edgworth, a cut-purse, to rob a gentleman.
Shakespeare has his recurring comic character, Sir John Falstaff, use
“costermonger” as a general term of contempt.
Responding to the Lord Chief Justice, the less than noble knight refutes
the charge that he is a bad influence on the young prince who would become
Henry V by saying he is virtuous but that “Virtue is of little regard in these
costermongers' times.” The word took on
this negative meaning apparently because a costermonger would do absolutely
anything to make a sale. And thus we
return to the message of yesterday’s Great Food Truck Race: that selling food
in the street is quite often not about the food.
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