The 400th anniversary of the first English newspaper

And the thirst for tidings of war.

‘Current events’, namely the hunger for news occasioned by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, remind me that it was in a similar environment that the first newspapers appeared, 400 years ago, a commercial response to meet the demands of a ready and ravenous audience. Many contemporaries had already noted the obsession the public had with the consuming of news in whatever form. Plus ça change.

The famous English playwright and poet Ben Jonson did so in several of his works; indeed a play of his written in the 1620s (The Staple of News) was set in a news office, an institution, in fact, that did not yet even exist at his time of writing.

Register: What would you have, good Woman?

Woman: I would have Sir, a groatsworth of any News, I care not what.

And in a masque written a few years prior, a printer defends his trade by reference to public appetite (not to mention gullibility):

Printer: Why should not they ha’ their pleasure in believing of lies are made for them… It is the printing of ’em makes ’em news to a great many who will indeed believe nothing but what’s in print.

Robert Burton, that celebrated literary figure, bemoaned the English public in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

Their sole discourse is dogs, hawks, horses, and ‘what news?’ … If any read nowadays, it is a play-booke, or pamphlet of newes.

In a play of James Shirley’s, one character promises that the newsmaker ‘will write you a battle in any part of Europe at an hour’s warning, and yet never set foot out of a tavern’. This hints already at the satirical butt of many jokes of the period; people involved in the communication of news were proverbially unreliable.

By the 1610s there were already available what were known as ‘Corantos’, newsbooks that had been translated directly from Dutch or German sources in Amsterdam, Antwerp, etc, printed for those eager to hear the latest news of what we now call the Thirty Years’ War. This nascent conflict had aroused Protestant anxiety with regard to the dangerous advent of Catholicism on the continent, and was given a personal element as King James’s daughter was married to Frederick V of Bohemia. The terrifying events of 1588 and 1605 would have been within living memory of many. The opening engagement of that war, enjoined in 1618 with Catholic victory, sparked the whole conflict into awful life and represented also in retrospect the birth pangs of a whole new medium.

Such documents, exported in English translations into London by Dutch merchants (incidentally yet another 17th Century Dutch innovation snapped up and mastered by the English, to add to government debt and the stock market), would have been hawked by peddlars in public spaces; these were complimented by many other, more or less formal sources of news: royal proclamations, oral gossip (the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral was the best known place to exchange gossip), printed pamphlets, ballads, even sermons. Printed news pamphlets had begun to appear from around the 1580s, focusing on particular events (floods here, monstrous creatures there, etc). Ballads about news had indeed become the most popular form of ballad sold.

In order to avoid the censor, printed news was typically concerned itself with foreign affairs, hence the focus on wars on the continent.

Before the printing of news, another system had been the ‘newsletter’, or ‘letter of newes’. This would have been a hand-written letter, often by a person knowledgeable about foreign affairs (typically a former soldier), who might write a periodic letter to a wealthy gentlemen who had retired to the country for the season, and who would have been unable to hear the latest news for himself. This medium would continue for some time, one reason being it was easier to avoid the censor. But there were also class dynamics at play; wealthier aristocrats scorned the printed pamphlet as vulgar as fit only for the common masses, and a personally written letter was seen as more fitting for their rank.

A scan of the Oxford English Dictionary demonstrates the linguistic novelty that the advent of news had given rise to; you will find there a rash of news-related coinages beginning from the 1580s and continuing up until the 1610s:

news teller, 1586

newsmonger, 1592

newsworthy, 1596

newsbearer, 1598

news-thirsting, 1600

news-loving, 1603

news-greedy, 1605

news-lover, 1607

news-bringer, 1608

news-carrier, 1612

news-crammed, 1616

An exchange in Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c.1605) also provides us with a contemporary picture of how the word ‘news’ itself had come to predominate over its predecessor ‘tidings’. Peregrine approaches the house of Sir Politic Would-be to relate ‘tidings’ to him. The latter’s waiting woman returns to inform him:

WOM: Sir, he says he knows
     By your word "tidings," that you are no statesman,
     And therefore wills you stay.

Ben Jonson additionally wrote a humorous poem sometime in the 1610s (The New Cry) satirising the phenomenon of ordinary people thinking that the consumption of a few news stories was sufficient to make them ‘statesmen’:

Ere cherries ripe, and strawberries be gone;
Unto the cries of London I’ll add one:
Ripe statesmen, ripe: they grow in ev’ry street.

So, there was evidently no shortage of news about. What will be clear by now is that the appearance of the newspaper would not by any means have appeared novel; it was merely one more point in a continuum of various media. Another point to make is that using the word ‘newspaper’ in this context is strictly anachronistic — it wouldn’t be coined for another century or so. There is in fact no clear date of the first English newspaper; convention, however, puts it to 18 May 1622 (others say 1621).

Well what is a newspaper? This printed ‘newspaper’, measuring perhaps some 6' x 7' (published by Archer & Bourne), contained very similar content to the existing ‘Coranto’. What distinguished it was 1) The fact that it was explicitly intended to be published on a regular basis. In it you could find a promise that it would be published on the same day each week — assuming there was no problem with the post. (The editions would later be numbered). At this stage they were entirely dependent on what letters reached them from the continent. One modern authority notes wistfully, ‘when things failed to happen, the purveyors of news abroad simply laid down their pens, a wholesome custom no longer observed’.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly, we hear for the first time an editorial voice as the editions went by. It was not simply a tedious translation of news from abroad with no context provided (as in the corantos). My modern analogy to that medium would be reading a literal text translation of the headlines of Dutch TV’s news at 10. No, what we have here is someone willing to corral all the information at his disposal and relate it to an English audience. It is not known who this person was, but experts have surmised the likely man as Captain Thomas Gainsford, who had served abroad, particularly in the Irish wars.

I quote here directly and at length from an academic thesis detailing Gainsford’s approach:

In an unprecedented editorial foreword that begins the June 13th edition, he lays out a methodology of news collection and presentation, almost a contract of what the reader should expect from the newsman. Against ‘the uncertain reports of partial news-mongers, who tell everything as themselves would have it,’ he assures the reader that they will publish nothing unconfirmed by ‘a sure hand…, seconded and confirmed by others.’ Gainsford goes on to assure the reader that they will not publish ‘peremptorily what we receive in doubtful terms’ an assurance to avoid the sensationalism of popular ballads.

He promises to lack partiality, to ‘keep near to the Laws of History, to guess at the reasons of actions by the most apparent presumptions,’ and to take care with the accurate reporting of places and distances, confident that no ‘pamphletter of news will take the like pains.’ Here, he equates accuracy in reporting, not with the lack of analysis, but with the insertion of a trustworthy editorial voice.

Link to the paper.

The modern cynic is both hungry for news and yet accustomed to doubting any source of news for its potential bias; we see here the beginning of an attempt to reconcile these impulses, however much we may now disdain journalism (and indeed for much the same reason as contemporaries had).

The previous corantos, pamphlets and so on were seen as being too biased, all too eager to make much of minor Protestant victories, all too happy to downplay crushing defeats (yet another parallel in the information war between today’s Ukrainian and Russian forces; Ask yourself, dear reader, whichever side you are on, who do you think is winning the war right now, and why?). However, it must be said that there appears, by modern summaries of these news sources, to have been very little by way of outright fabrication (despite Ben Jonson’s satirical barbs at the top of this piece); emphasis and exaggeration were the order of the day.

The exaggeration found in those news sources also gave rise to another type of behaviour in their readership that we are no stranger to today — a fervour in the public for war. I’m sure you have witnessed yourselves in real life the transformation of the mildest of fellows into the most ardent ‘statesmen’ (to quote Ben), hungry for a ‘no-fly zone’ to be imposed on Russia (a deluded and pernicious euphemism for war), and for nuclear war to be enjoined on the dread Russian, devil take the consequences. All after having watched the BBC news at ten or the latest missives from Twitter.

Then, as now, the press was beating the drums of war, stirring up the public mood to demand that the King send troops to help the Bohemians after disastrous defeats were reported. Nevertheless, of course, this only reflected the existing and underlying fear of Catholicism that Englishmen felt after their close brushes with disaster. While England would not formally join the conflict, then, as now, many men answered the call of duty; one modern authority has estimated that slightly over a fifth of the Protestant forces on the continent by 1623 was English or Scottish. Very few made it back. Then, as now.

Well, the initial run of newsbooks printed by Archer and Bourne eventually drifted into oblivion, their demise perhaps hastened by the death of the influential Gainsford. Their place was taken by syndicates of competing newsletters and other imitators, most famously Nathaniel Butter, who is likely to have been Ben Jonson’s direct target in The Staple of News. This vignette concludes with the final suspension of newsbooks by order of King Charles in the early 1630s. They would not re-appear until the Civil war era, but that is another (no less partisan) story.

A light-hearted postscript. These news pamphlets also led to the birth of another celebrated medium, namely the toilet book. William Cornwallis, an early English essayist in the style of Montaigne, wrote these words in a piece dating to c.1600, referring to news-sheets kept about his lavatory.

My custome is to read these, and presently to make use of them, for they lie in my privy, and when I come thither, I read them; half a side at once is my ordinary, which when I have read, I use in that kind that waste paper is most subject too, but to a cleanlier profit.