Customers & Markets

The meat went where the money was.  Up to around 1600, drovers supplied beef for the tables of kings and their armies, to rich noblemen and abbeys.  But when the merchant middle class grew rich, in Queen Elizabeth's 1's reign, Welsh and Scottish meat fed the hungry mouths of the big cities. London was enormously wealthy compared to the rest of the country - nothing seems to change - and had 4,000 butchers' shops in the 1840's when most of the country had few or none at all. 

Another important customer was the navy, for the sailors' weekly ration included four pounds of beef and two of pork.  The price of an animal at Smithfield went up from £8 to £14 in the Napoleonic Wars, then dropped again in 1815 after Waterloo.

Mike Farnworth has pointed out two superb comments on Smithfield at its busiest and worst, reminding me that the final stage of the journey was not pleasant for beast, drover or (especially, perhaps) Londoner.  The first is from the pen of the master - Charles Dickens - in an excerpt from Oliver Twist:

"It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.” 

The second is a print by a Smithfield-dweller, exultant at the thought of the closure of the live-meat market on his doorstep and its removal to Islington in 1855.  There is much activity here!  Among the more amusing scenes: the army of Peelers taking the wounded (dead?) man off to hospital (mortuary?)  and the frisky bull in the right hand corner... But the wording at the bottom says it all! (#2)

Thanks, Mike, very much.