The Bluffer's Guide to: The Media Landscape

Question 1

Annabel Patterson on the relationship between print and government

Answer 1

Annabel Patterson argues that a delicate balance existed
between writers and those who held power; she claims that ‘what we are considering here was essentially a joint project, a cultural bargain between writers and political leaders’

Question 2

A very brief overview of print censorship across the century

WOODFORD

Answer 2

PRE 1641

• In the sixteenth century, the Stationers’ Company was responsible for monitoring the book trade.
• Also a licensing system established by the Star Chamber and overseen by six individuals

POST 1641
- After the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641, the licensing system ceased to exist, leaving
no effective controls on the press
- the Long Parliament attempted to restrict the expanding print industry by passing its own printing regulations in 1643 and 1647
- In 1649, the Rump Parliament passed its own print act, which empowered the Masters and the Wardens of the Company to ‘make diligent search in all places where they shall think meet, for all unallowed Printing-presses, and all Presses any way imployed in the printing

CROMWELL

• Licencsing act 1655
• Printing the Instrument of Government only permitted by one printer
• Effective control of the press in the Cromwellian Protectorate often relied on soldiers and other state officials spotting hawkers selling pamphlets in the street, and then following up these leads.
• Supression of ‘Killing No Murder’, published in Holland, advocated assassination of Cromwell

Question 3

Evidence of classism in supression of libeling

FOX

Answer 3

There were, for example, 154 people so charged from the five counties which comprised the Home circuit assizes in the period 1558–1625, and 228 people arraigned in a sample taken from the seventeen counties making up the Home, Northern, Norfolk, and Oxford circuits during the years 1660–85.

——-> In both cases, 86 per cent of the individuals were described as being of‘yeoman’ status or below

Question 4

Gossiping… who and where?

FOX

Answer 4

It was hardly surprising, therefore, that as political tension began to mount again in 1638, there should be particular concern about beggars and the unemployed who, it was believed, ‘in tymes of suspition or trouble, may by tales and false rumors distracte the peoples mindes’

Around the Royal Exchange, along Cheapside to St Paul’s churchyard and walk, in the taverns and inns which lined Fleet Street and the Strand on the way towards Westminster Hall, the latest news could be found on everyone’s Lips.

Question 5

The independence of gossipping: Fox

Answer 5

rumours not dependent on the written word

Question 6

Fox: The Growth of Written News

Answer 6

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a huge growth in the production and accessibility of written news. The progressive increase in literacy levels, the continued expansion of a thriving scribal culture, and the steady growth of printed news in various forms all contributed to this process.

Question 7

Fox, the changing significance of newsbooks in the English Civil War§

Answer 7

• the role of printed works as vehicles for the dissemination of news was relatively limited pre-civil war

BUT

• With the abolition of the Star Chamber and High Commission at the Civil War, however, the major courts with jurisdiction in such matters were removed and thereafter newsbooks began to flood London.
• In September 1649 the Rump Parliament introduced stringent measures to try to control such publications which Cromwell enforced with particular rigour between August 1655 and his death in 1658.
• After the Restoration, the Licensing Act of 1662 provided an even tighter framework for control of the press until its lapse for the final time in 1695

Question 8

Fox: The quantity of newsbooks across the period

Answer 8

• Single-sheet corantos, dealing only with foreign affairs, were first published in London in 1621, to be followed by quarto newsbooks which ran from 1632 until their suppression six years later.
• The lapse of control over the press during the Civil War gave rise to an explosion of journalism.
• In all there were no less than 350 separate news tides to appear between 1641 and 1659

AFTER THE WAR

With (p.395) the return of licensing, the government-authorized London Gazette, which began in 1666 and was also confined largely to foreign reports, became the main official source of news.

• In practice, however, the tradition of open and partisan journalism which the mid-century upheavals had spawned could never be suppressed effectively and by the late 1670s factions of all political stripes were again publishing their own weekly and periodical bulletins under the nose of government regulation

Question 9

Britain’s first newsbooks

RAYMOND

Answer 9

First newsbook appears in November 1641
Weekly
8 pages long
Domestic news
—> ‘There rapidly developed a culture of the pamphlet, of which the newsbook was a central, driving feature.’
Changing style of news
no longer just narrative, but ‘a bitter and aggressive instrument of literary and political faction.

George Thomason begins to collect print in 1640s, which helps

Mercurius Politicus, which would be Britain’s main political publication for next two years, founded in 1650

Question 10

Key arguments: RAYMOND

Answer 10

‘Newsbooks were, and newspapers continue to be, a central constituent of culture, the network of meanings which operate within a society and regulate communication within it

Question 11

How were newsbooks disseminated?

Answer 11

Carriers

The Post

Chapmen (travelling seller)

Armies (incidentally)

Question 12

Distribution of literature, volumes of literature, literacy rates

Answer 12

DISTRIBUTION
- South East better read
High literacy in London
Far reaching: Scotland, ‘the dark corners of Wales’

VOLUMES

• Very hard to say - has been estimated 200 (absolute min), 500 as average minimum
• Methodologies vary: measure length by cost, time taken to print

Literacy rates

• People of all literate classes read newsbooks
• Higher in cities (approx 30%)

Question 13

Some examples of newsbooks

Answer 13

Aulicus

Mercurius Politicus

Question 14

How critical were news readers?

RAYMOND

Answer 14

Some readers of newsbooks were far from the gullible, passive victims guided by their appetites described by some of their proud contemporaries and a few later historians. The involvement of persistent readers must change the way we perceive not only these readers but the newsbooks themselves.

Question 15

Cogswell on the significance of Libels

Answer 15

‘…everything was not tranquil and consensual in early Stuart England. Once we expand our enquiries to include all forms of information, it becomes apparent that the safety of the underground manuscripts allowed contemporaries to conduct a steady, often violent, political debate.’

Question 16

You get in there, it’s a shit paper… who you gonna call?

Answer 16

PUBLIC SPHERE Habermas, Mark Knights, David Zaret, Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee (2005)
CENSORSHIP, Woodford, Patterson
SPOKEN WORD, Fox
NEWSBOOKS, Raymond
LIBELS AND MANUSCRIPT, Millstone, Cogswell, Bellany
PETITIONS, Zaret, Knights

Question 17

Sharpe and Lake’s suggestions for new scholarship on the 16th century landscape

Answer 17

Revisionism and the challenge it has posed to whig history and its concern with high politics has resulted in a new focus on 16th century politics
challenge to ‘principle-centred politics’ thesis, which split the political culture into neat and opposed groups.

Question 18

Mark Knight’s Five Factors for Change in the 17th century

Answer 18

Frequent elections and Pariament’s coming of Age

Frequent elections 
Electoral conflicts 
A Bigger Electorate 
20% of adult male population by 1715, higher than after 1832 reform act 
Frequent sessions
Also longer, av. 112 days after 1689 
1679 - 1716, frequent sessions 
1660-1688, 26 statutes per session, 1689-1714, 64 per session 

The development of a fiscal military state and commercial expansion

Growth of state from 1640s, and in French War 1689-1713
Higher tax revenue and stronger army
Expansion of commerce

Print, coffee houses and clubs

More print, less censorship, more literate population
Illiteracy from 70 to 55% 1640-1715
See fig on p. 16
Unprecedented volume in 1642
Lapse of Licensing Act allowed for provincial publishing
Coffee houses
500 by 1700

Ideological conflict and politicised religion

Disputes over succession
Fear of Jacobite plotting
More ‘public’ than ‘godly’ debates over religion
Debate about the ‘relationship between civil and religious power’
‘we should see political and religious concerns as entwined’

Partisanship and parties

‘formalization, popularisation, and politicisation of partisanship were developed to new heights.’
Debate over whether parties were ‘coherent or organised’ as opposed to ideological, but use of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ labels is ‘significant’
Terence Ball: ‘Party’ in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
Party labels don’t mean people liked division, but it was accepted as part of the political landscape