Selling clothing beyond the boundary of the shop remained an important part of clothes retailing in the nineteenth century. The early consumer market in clothing accessories, as traced by Margaret Spufford, had been principally developed through the efforts of pedlars and hawkers and they continued to play an important role in the dispersal of clothing across the countryside. Indeed, at various points, they came into direct competition and conflict with retailers, resulting in legislation designed to curb both their activities and reach. There is a growing recognition by historians of the complexity of the retail trade and the coexistence and close interaction between different retail circuits, which require both integrated and comparative analysis, a concept which this book seeks to address. This chapter will thus focus on the itinerant trade and its links to existing retail provision.

There are problems in examining the itinerant or ambulant trade, both in terms of sources and in definition. For example, it could be an informal trade, taken up when times were hard with little capital investment, as part of the economy of makeshifts, which left little trace behind. The evidence for hawkers and pedlars, however, is often focused on those who were licensed and therefore have left a paper trail behind. Numbers of licensed itinerants have been extrapolated to give an idea of how prevalent the trade was and how it changed over the centuries.