The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (25 page)

Singing ballads was a powerful part of information culture, and it made a good living for many on the very margins of respectable craft society. But not everyone made a good balladeer. You needed a strong constitution, a voice to make yourself heard above the crowd, and a certain charisma. The irrepressible reverend Richard Corbet, finding that a travelling pedlar was struggling to make an impact in the marketplace at Abingdon, sprang to his rescue, to good effect: ‘and being a handsome man, and had a rare full voice, he at once sold a great many, and had a great audience’.
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It is to be doubted that without this unexpected clerical support the timid ballad seller would have lasted long in the business. We should leave the last word to one Thomas Spickenell, ‘sometimes apprentice to a bookbinder, after a vagrant peddler, then a ballad singer and seller, and now a minister & Alehouse keeper in Maldon’.
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Spickenell had completed the grand slam of sixteenth-century communication media, from the book trade to singing, to the church and the alehouse: where we will now follow.

Bald Talk about Great Lords

Taverns were a ubiquitous part of early modern society. It has been estimated that in England alone there were twenty thousand drinking establishments: about one for every twenty adult males in the population.
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It is unlikely continental Europe was any less well served. Aside from the church, with which the tavern coexisted in a relationship of undisguised competition, this was the quintessential gathering place of early modern society. It was a volatile environment in which to share the news.

Like other social institutions, inns and taverns ranged widely, from large, wealthy and well-founded businesses to low dives, little more than the dingy front room of a village house. At the top end of the spectrum the inn occupied
an important place in the network of international communication. In the fourteenth century innkeepers, in addition to providing food and accommodation, played an important role in the provision of banking services for the international merchant community. Many money brokers set themselves up as innkeepers, and many innkeepers acted as brokers.
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In provincial towns the largest inns, particularly those that ringed the market square, often provided space for merchants to conduct business. Some became a semi-permanent location for trade in specific commodities.
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The development of the transcontinental road network offered further opportunities for the canny entrepreneur. The medieval itineraries guiding the traveller on long-distance routes marked the stage between each major habitation with a wayside inn. In the sixteenth century many of these places became posting stations, responsible for providing accommodation and relays of fresh horses for couriers. In many locations the postmaster was the most substantial innkeeper of the town.

6.3 A German pedlar advertises his wares. Note the copy of a
Neue Zeitung
prominently displayed.

The keepers of these elite posting houses, with their constant passing trade of well-heeled travellers, made it their business to remain well informed, as did most innkeepers. The peripatetic Anabaptist Ambrosius Stitelmeir would always call in at the tavern to discover whether the local minister preached in accordance with the Gospel.
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Innkeepers were a natural source of advice for travellers planning the next stage of a journey, or wanting information about local conditions. Pilgrim manuals recommended particular hostelries and particular hosts, such as Peter von Fryberg, the ‘German host’ in Geneva, who was willing ‘to help you in all matters’. Such a trade was very lucrative. When the pilgrim Hans van Haldheim decided to seek out a famous holy man at Bern, he directed himself to the publican of the Bell Inn. The publican willingly told him how to secure an audience with the reclusive sage, and offered a horse for the journey: ‘My good Lord, you do not have to go on foot, for I will lend you a grey stallion. I have three horses standing in my stable, and you can choose whichever you like.’
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These were the aristocrats of the industry: they made it their business to keep themselves informed, and they had plentiful opportunity to do so. In places where there were no suitable buildings such inns might serve as impromptu law courts, or even for the formal welcome of visiting dignitaries. But such high-class establishments did not describe the normal run of sixteenth-century tavern. These were raucous places, full of noise: boisterous, smelly and frequently violent. People came to let off steam, to celebrate with friends, and to forget the cares of a harsh and punishing life.

These more humble places were also important hubs of communication. Patrons would discuss the issues of the day, pass on rumours and sing together. It was expected that strangers would join the conversation: the solitary traveller who sat alone was often an object of suspicion, and in many places regulations obliged innkeepers to report the names of strangers who took rooms for the night. Even dingy village taverns provided the opportunity for travelling players and musicians to offer impromptu entertainment.

An environment in which friends met strangers, fuelled by alcohol, could be turbulent: profanity and insults led to fighting and assaults. In a wide-ranging survey of data taken from different parts of Europe, around one third of complaints dealt with by secular and ecclesiastical courts were directly linked to taverns.
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But taverns were also the location of serious political discussion and the singing of hymns and psalms. In the early days of the Reformation evangelical groups passed word of particular taverns where it was safe to congregate.
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In towns with no bookshop inns became distribution points for evangelical pamphlets. In the German Peasants’ War of 1524–5 taverns played a particularly important role in the spread of the movement, as news of the extent of the insurrection flashed around the Empire.
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The German Peasants’ War was not just a revolt of the countryside: the social gospel also had obvious relevance to the aspirations of the urban poor.
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As news of the revolt spread, municipal authorities were particularly alarmed at the thought that their own populations might join the insurrection. A particularly well-documented case arises from the investigation undertaken to winkle out supporters of the rebellion in the German town of Nördlingen. Because of its situation in the area of greatest peasant agitation, Nördlingen was in the eye of the storm, and at an assembly in 1525 sympathetic citizens had asked that the town declare its support for the rebellion. The peasants’ supporters had not carried the majority, but the town was still on a state of high alert when on 8 May a member of the night watch, Hans Trumer, was arrested for singing a seditious song. The song was the work of a local weaver, Contz Anahans, and it seems to have been circulating in the town since the events of April. It was certainly incendiary:

There was much more: another nine verses. The interrogation of Trumer and his accomplices allowed the city council to reconstruct in some detail the process by which the song had passed into common knowledge. It was sung at the inn run by Balthasar Fend, one of the leaders of the April commotion. Anton Furner, a member of the council, heard of it and asked Anahans to sing it at his house. It was then sung at another inn. By May it was so familiar that even the drunken Hans Trumer could remember the words. It is pertinent to note that Nördlingen at this time had no printing press. Contz Anahans's call to arms could only circulate by word of mouth.

The city council clamped down hard. Those involved were interrogated under torture. The innkeeper Fend was executed. Without such severity it is highly unlikely we would possess this forensic reconstruction of how news spread, and how a potential insurrection was fomented. In more normal times, when asked to name names, most people caught up in an act of group violence struggled to remember particulars. The famous early modern memory, a cornerstone of information culture, was replaced by fumbling and
incoherence. This was a very sensible defence strategy. The early modern justice system relied to a very large extent on confessions for convictions, so those under interrogation were understandably reluctant to engage in potentially lethal acts of self-incrimination. Faced with such self-deprecating forgetfulness, few magistrates were sufficiently dogged to persist in the face of conflicting or incomplete evidence. The bureaucracy of justice was at this point simply not up to the task. The Spanish Inquisition, defending the purity of faith, was a rare exception. In the patient investigations of the Inquisition many words that had been spoken in anger or due to drink were repented at length.
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The German Peasants’ War was a time of particular tension, when the Reformation and German society entered uncharted waters. But as the place where groups most regularly gathered to enjoy the loosening of normal social restraints, the tavern provided obvious opportunities for potentially subversive conversation. ‘Do you want to hear bald talk about great Lords, princes and powerful men? Just go to a tavern.’ This was the resigned conclusion of one critic of tavern culture in 1610.
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As time passed, innkeepers exploited the potential of their premises as hubs of communication more systematically, posting printed broadsheets on the walls and, in the seventeenth century, providing newspapers. In some German jurisdictions it was legally required that inns display printed copies of local ordinances.
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Numerous pictorial representations of the seventeenth century show the inn as a place of communal reading, with the country dullards crowding open-mouthed around the literate neighbour who carefully picks out the news. These were fairly stock representations of country folk, intended for the mocking amusement of the sophisticated bourgeois. But they must certainly have possessed a grain of truth.

Most of what passed in ale-house conversations is lost to history. But enough has been preserved to make clear that sixteenth-century governments were well aware that tavern conversation had a dangerous potential to incite and inflame. The careful steps taken by Thomas Cromwell to police information during the most anxious years of the Henrician Reformation provide us with many examples of the inflammatory potential of the spoken word. In the poisoned atmosphere of the 1530s many citizens were happy to imagine not only the fall of Anne Boleyn but the death of Henry VIII. A rash of false reports led the Henrician government to take firm action to ban any seditious prophecy. It was clear that at least some of these malicious stories were deliberately planted, often by leaders of local society who opposed the king's policies. In December 1537 parishioners from Muston in the East Riding went to York to accuse their vicar, John Dobson, of spreading such prophecies in the
village, repeating them ‘both in the church porch and the alehouse’.
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But it was not easy for the government to get their message across. In troubled times people were particularly prone to panicked and incendiary interpretations of newly published laws. Lewis Herbert, returning home from London to Wales, stopped off at the Sign of the Lamb in Abingdon. Faced with the inevitable ‘What news at London?’, Lewis had something sensational to share. ‘There was a cry at the cross in Cheapside,’ he told his audience, ‘that no unlawful games should be used, and that angel nobles should go for 8s and cross groats for 5d apiece’ (the angel was originally 6s 8d and the groat 4d).
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There was nothing more likely to disturb his audience than an unverified account of the manipulation of the currency.

It was no wonder in the circumstances that the English government took repeated if largely unsuccessful action to prohibit the spreading of rumour and false reports. The Henrician treason legislation made it an offence to act, write or speak in a manner tending to the overthrow of royal authority. The act of 1532 was progressively extended in scope by those of 1534, 1552, 1554, 1571 and 1585, that is, in the reign of every Tudor monarch of whatever religious persuasion. In laws inherited from the medieval period it was already an offence to utter words considered seditious, and this too was reinforced by new legislation in the Tudor period.
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Rulers comforted themselves that such measures were necessary, because the people were by nature credulous and easily led. ‘How ready vulgar people are to be abused by such and are disposed to disperse seditious rumours thereby to procure troubles and motions,’ as Queen Elizabeth put it in a letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1565.
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In many respects this was unfair. The common people were often rather shrewd judges in the essentials of a case. Historians would now generally accept that the common voice, which despised Anne Boleyn and stoutly maintained the rights of Katherine of Aragon, understood the cause of the revolution in the English Church rather better than those in the political nation who insisted on the purity of the king's religious motives. And the people had plentiful opportunities to keep themselves informed. Everyone agreed that if the English people had one characteristic, it was a passion for news. The Italian observer and language teacher John Florio noted that an enquiry after the news was always ‘the first question of an Englishman’.
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To help travellers abroad, the editors of language primers took to including instructions on how to ask for news in their imagined dialogues. Thus Claude Holyband in the
French Littelton
: ‘What news have you? How goeth all in this city?’, along with some conciliating replies: ‘Surely I know nothing. All goeth well. Great cheer he that hath money.’ The dialogue was called ‘of the inn’ and the French translation of these conversational sallies was given on the opposite page.
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