Costermonger, coster, or costard is a street seller of fruit and vegetables in London and other British towns. The term is derived from the words costard and monger, and later came to be used to describe hawkers in general. Costermongers met a need for rapid food distribution from the wholesale markets by providing retail sales at locations convenient for the labouring classes.
About Costermonger in brief
Costermonger, coster, or costard is a street seller of fruit and vegetables in London and other British towns. The term is derived from the words costard and monger, and later came to be used to describe hawkers in general. Costermongers met a need for rapid food distribution from the wholesale markets by providing retail sales at locations that were convenient for the labouring classes. Their distinctive identity and culture led to considerable appeal as subject-matter for artists, dramatists, comedians, writers and musicians. Parodies of the costermonger and his way of life were frequent features in Victorian music halls. Their numbers began to decline in the second half of the 20th-century when they began to take up pitches in the regulated markets. The word coster is a corruption of costard, a kind of apple, and the term mongers, meaning a trader or broker. The first known user of the term coster was by Alexander Barclay, poet and clergyman, in the Fyfte Eglog of Alexandre Barclay of the cytezene and vpondyshman published around 1518. The term can be used. to describe anyone who sells goods outdoors or in the streets and has come to be a synonym for street vendor. Most contemporary dictionary definitions of costermongser refer to them as retail sellers or street vendors of fresh produce, operating from temporary stalls or baskets or barrows which are either taken on regular routes for door-to-door selling or which are set up in high traffic areas such as markets or lining of busy thoroughfares.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a coster as a person who sells fruit or vegetables outside rather than in a store. Of course, some of these people carry on their business at the same stall or stationary in the street, while others go round on the same stationary stationary stall or go round the same go-round on the street. Of these people, Henry Mayhew, a Victorian social commentator, distinguished between itinerant and coster in the following terms: ‘street-sellers as such such as deal in fish, fruit, and vegetables, purchasing their goods at the wholesale and fish markets, and others on the gorounds on the streets, going round the street selling fruit, vegetables, and fish.’ The term costers was used in the early 16th century by Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English language, published in 1759, and also in 1851 by Charles Knight’s London. Although the original meaning of coster applied to itinerant apple-seller, it gradually came to refer to anyone who sold fresh fruit or. vegetables from a basket, hand cart or temporary stall. Their loud sing-song cry or chants used to attract attention became part of the fabric of street life in large cities in Britain and Europe, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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This page is based on the article Costermonger published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 13, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
