huckster and hawker and tripe wives

The previous two essays have explored pedlars, haglers, cadgers and lots of other people who made sales possible in Medieval and Early Modern England. Before moving on to hawkers, I need to make one more comment on peddlers. I stated earlier, that the word was not spelled "peddler" until the 20th century, except when it was used in a negative way (the peddler as a one who trades in illicit merchandise--going back to 1872). Before that time it was either pedler or pedlar, with the former usually preferred before the 17th century, while the latter rose to popularity in the 18th-19th.

But here is my problem. The original version of The Night Before Christmas, first published in 1823, has St. Nicholas as a peddler opening his pack. Or, at least, that is what the authoritative website on the poem says.* I could otherwise find no attestation for that spelling of peddler in the OED before the 1870s. Any help that you can provide?

[*Nancy H. Marshall, the world expert on "The Night Before Christmas" has written to me to say that, indeed, Moore's original MS. spelled the word "pedlar" and his 1840 and 1844 poetic anthologies also spelled it that way. So, the spelling is "modernized" in the version she gives on the web.]

Hawker

In mid-19th century statutes, hawkers and pedlars are usually referred to together--as people who were required to pay a license fee to sell their goods itinerantly. We have already seen that the difference between the two (from an 1895 quotation) is that a hawker carries his goods on an animal or cart, while the pedlar uses a pack. From examples illustrating the historical development of hawker, it appears that the word had a negative connotation from early days, in contradistinction to pedlar/pedler. A statute from the days of Henry VIII spoke of "Sundry evill disposed persons, which commonly beene called hawkers...goe about from place to place within this Realme, using buying and selling of Brassse and Pewter." By the late 17th century, we have the following from the London Gazette: "A sort of loose and idle persons, called Hawkers, who do daily publish and sell seditious Books, contrary to Law." The OED defines the hawker as one who "goes from place to place selling goods, or who cries them in the street." So, the word goes back either to the sound of the person (he sounds like a hawk) or, more likely, the fact that such a person was always concentrating on his prey, like a hawk. In any case, the less derogatory usage of the term seems to arise in the 19th century, where the hawker is just one who sells goods more demonstrably than the peddler.

The term is used unexpectedly in another way. Many words have their origins in divinity or theology and then become "secularized" over time. Not here. So vivid was the picture of the hawker that he became assimilated to a sort of speaker of holy things. By the 17th century, one could be known as a "hawker of divinity." From 1683: "The Churches Hawkers in Divinity, Who 'stead of Lace and Ribbons, Doctrine cry." Or, from Tennyson (1855): "This broad-brim'd hawker of holy things."

Huckster

The term huckster is very old, going back to the 13th century. The OED refers to the Middle Low German word "hoker," which may be rendered "higgler, hawker, retailer, market-man, costermonger," but then it says "none of these, however, appear to be known as early as our huckster." The OED posits that its original meaning was a "retailer of small goods, in a petty shop or booth, or at a stall; a pedlar, a hawker." It was applied at first to women alone or to either sex. Thomas More, in 1534, called someone "A substanciall merchaunt and not an hukster." Similarly, from 1641: "Wee buy our molten tallowe..of the hucksters and tripe-wives (women who sell fish). Or, from 1705: "The throwing down of a Hucksters Apples by a Fisher-Boy."

But increasingly, by the mid-17th century, the word huckster took on a negative meaning. The verb to huckster emerged, and it meant not simply to traffic in but to haggle over or to adulterate something. The word was especially used in theological polemics. From 1642: "This graduall Huckstering up the purity of truth," or, from 1677: "Such as hucstered and made merchandise of Christ." John Goodwin urged his readers in 1665 to "Be ingenuous and noble towards God, and not stand picking and huckstering with your hearts to know how you must do to escape hell fire." Yet, still in the 19th century, a huckster could be defined as "an inferior dealer or minor trader; a hawker or itinerant vendor of goods with a pack, box, or tray." Or, in words that brings us back to an early meaning of cadgers or higglers, hucksters were said to be "dealers in farm produce, who attend the markets to purchase from the producers for the purpose of retailing it out again to small customers." By the late 19th century, this practice of retailing seemed to have no stigma attached to it, though our mention of forestalling showed that in an earlier century (at this point I am not able to pinpoint it precisely), the middle-man who bought from one party, upped the price and sold to another party, would be committing an indictible offense.

Conclusion

But before going on to canvassers and others, I need to take yet another detour and talk about the notion of the middleman and the retailer in early English law, and raise the question, through introducing new words, of why England was so deeply offended by "middlemen."

[Next]

1700