In Our Time - Seventeenth Century Print Culture

Episode Date: January 26, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 17th century print culture."Away ungodly Vulgars, far away, Fly ye profane, that dare not view the day, Nor speak to men but shadows, nor would hear Of any news, but what seditious were, Hateful and harmful and ever to the best, Whispering their scandals ... " In 1614 the poet and playwright George Chapman poured scorn on the popular appetite for printed news. However, his initial scorn did not stop him from turning his pen to satisfy the public's new found appetite for scandal. From the advent of the printing press the number of books printed each year steadily increased, and so did literacy rates. With a growing and socially diverse readership appearing over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, printed texts reflected controversy in every area of politics, society and religion. In the advent of the Civil War, print was used as the ideological battleground by the competing forces of Crown and Parliament. What sorts of printed texts were being produced? How widespread was literacy and who were the new consumers of print? Did print affect social change? And what role did print play in the momentous English Civil War? With Kevin Sharpe, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; Ann Hughes, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Keele; Joad Raymond, Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, from the advent of the printing press, the number of books printed each year steadily increased, and so did literacy rates.

With a growing and socially diverse readership appearing over the 16th and 17th century, printed text reflected controversy in every, area of politics, society and religion. In the Civil War, print was used as the ideological battleground by competing forces of Crown and Parliament. So what sorts of printed texts were being produced, how widespread was literacy, and who were the new consumers of print? Did print affect social change? And what role did print play in the momentous English Civil War? Joining me to discuss print culture in 17th century England, are Kevin Sharp, Professor of Renaissance

Studies at Queen Mary College University of London. Anne Hughes, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Kiel, and Joad Raymond, Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. Kevin Sharp, do you think the 17th century marked a printing revolution? Oh, indeed. And in fact, the numbers themselves, I think, speak volumes. We can't be absolutely certain because of duplicates, etc., but let's say roughly, in the reign of Henry VIII, we're looking at a publication rate of something like 80 a year.

80 books a year, rising to 250 or 300 by the end of the 16th century, 600 by the 1630s, and then on the eve of the Civil War we're up in 2000 in 1641, probably 4,000 in 1642, and then the rest of the century, particularly the 1680s, we're averaging something like 3,000 publications a year. So the sheer figures tell part of the story. But of course, that is only part of the story. It's a media revolution. And the impact of print across political debate and discussion,

not just among elites, but among apprentices, urban folk, and perhaps even spilling out into rural areas and villages is one of the most important facets of the story of the 17th century. Can you pluck out first two or three of the reasons, for what seems very clearly to be an accelerate? in the 17th and towards the middle of the 17th century? Well, clearly there's a relationship, but it's a complicated relationship between print

and an interest in power and politics. I think we even see that in other things like the interest in the Elizabethan theatre in plays about princes and kings, and we have to remember that plays were also very popular things to buy and read, as well as things to go and see. I mean, perhaps that's something today we don't. think about as much, the readership of plays. So I think there is a close relationship and there's no doubting the fact that print explodes into such large numbers at times of political crisis.

I mean, the civil war, but also later in the century, the crisis over the popish plot that nearly involved a second revolution in England sees print double in its annual production between the 1660s and the late 1670s. So it's clear there is this relationship between politics and print. You mentioned plays and took us back. Can we just briefly look at the 16th century with Henry the 8th and Elizabeth, particularly in terms of two things, censorship, because wherever print went, censorship went with it or snapped at its heels,

and the attempt to control that we get with Henry the 8 and with Elizabeth. Well, it's an attempt, but it's almost always a story of failed attempts. I mean, we shouldn't underestimate the fact that people are punished, sometimes even mutilated, but the effect of censorship seems to be fairly negligible. Can we be specific about Henry the 8th and Elizabeth the 1st? Yes, indeed. Well, Henry VIII, of course, tries to police, I mean, he passes new treason legislation, which even makes treason by words as opposed to by actions.

And he's desperate to control even the reading of the vernacular. Bible. He tries to ban women and apprentices reading the Bible because this is a text that enables people to make up their own minds about scripture and therefore their own minds about his authority. I mean, he fails because there are endless proclamations every few years in Henry VIII's and his successor's reigns trying to ban both books and rumours. Elizabeth trying to bring it into the idea of companies, which is one of the dominating things about her own, the formation of these companies. She had the stationers company, which got a monopoly in return for being obedient really. How did that work?

Well, the stationers company for the most part towed the line because it wanted to retain its monopoly. But many things are published outside of the control of the stationers company. I mean, Joe may have something to say about the Martin Marplec tracks, a series of writings in the late 1580s and early 90s that were savage attacks on the episcopacy and hence on the royal supremacy. the church. So it was very hard to police print. There's a double relationship of authority in print.

On the one hand, Henry 8th and Elizabeth are keen to use the press, but on the other hand, of course, you can't control the press. So it's a double-edged thing for the state. And Hughes, one of the things that brought this surge forward was

rogue publications and publications of stories about murder, witchcraft ballads. Can you tell us how the part that applied because we mustn't get too narrow in what's happening with print. A lot of that's going on. Well, I think ballads are very interesting, I think, because although clearly print has an enormous impact

and is a new form of communication, it's also one that's deeply embedded and interrelates with the existing oral culture. So that a ballad, a song, and first ballads that were printed probably come out of the oral culture. But a ballad is a very, very popular form of printing. material as well. It's cheap. It's easy to remember. It's easy to share with people. And it seems

clear that ballads, printed ballads feed back into people's oral culture. So people who can't actually read have ballads made available to them through oral transmission. And so they come out of oral culture into print, but then back into the oral culture. And in terms of cheap print, which was available to, you know, anyone who had the smallest amount of surplus cash. A ballad is a single sheet. It has a tune. It's exciting. And, you know, it's the most popular form of cheap print, probably until about the 1620s. So that's swelled amount of print.

But also we have murder storage, witchcraft stores, stories and murder in which are very popular publications, which are teeming out at that. Yes, I think by the 1620s, I think the most popular form of cheap print is, a single sheet pamphlet where it's printed in one sheet, folded into a sort of eight, 12-page pamphlet, telling really sensationalist stories with a moral purpose. I mean, I've looked at some of the stories. They're utterly lurid, aren't they?

Oh, yes. Women being ripped open and their unborn child being spiked, that sort of thing. Absolutely. And also very popular genre is women murdering their husbands. And of course it's a classic thing in that, you know, the most common thing that happened was men murdering women. But the most interesting sensationalist pamphlets are of women who murder their husbands as a terrible warning to the readership. You know, people end up being very repentant. And so, you know, they're sort of entertainment, but they also have a moral...

I said in the introduction, more and more people are reading and so on, can you just fill that out a little for us? And Kevin refer to apprentices and so on. Where are we there? Literacy rates are very difficult to be sure about because the only way you can do it in a sort of statistical way is by looking at how people can write. And it's clear that people learn to read before they learn to write. So all the statistics we have, which are based on writing,

are an underestimate of how many people could actually read. and so it's been reading is a socially specific skill the richer you are the more likely you to be able to read men are more literate than women people who live in towns are more literate than people who live in the countryside but probably in London by the middle of the 17th century two thirds perhaps even three quarters of men could read and probably a good half of women

and I think the crucial point is that even if you couldn't read fluently as an individual, as we would read today, you know, individual silent reading, it's almost certain that every village in England, somebody would be able to read. Perhaps 90% of labourers are illiterate, but that means 10% can read. And so print is available.

People read out loud. They read in groups. So although it's not a totally literate society, It's a society where literacy is well enough dispersed so that print is available in some form to everybody. I think we could say that. Thank you very much. And Joie Raymond, just to continue to set the platform

before we get to the Civil War, can you give us some idea of the background to interest in news and its delivery by print at the end of the 60s, beginning of the 17th century? I think the interest in news is probably a basic fact of human relationships and what binds communities together. It's clearly elaborate developed all all networks for communicating news, and print is very good at inserting itself into those and transforming them as it goes along.

But in the end of the 1580s and the beginning of the 1590s, increasingly we see translations of foreign news, news of the wars in France, translations of French propaganda, which appear to create and satisfy an appetite for, for up-to-date accounts of political and military news. Why do you think it did French news, there was such an appetite for it in this country? Because it was news of the day, wasn't it?

You felt you'd been in that battle, in that? This was new as well as news, wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's genuinely exciting what's happening in Europe because one sense of British readers in the 16th century felt that they were part of European history,

not of a local English history as well. They'd sense that what's at stake is religion. What's at stake is that the conflict between, in the late 16th century, it's between the French and the Spanish. And this affects English politics and international relations. And in a bigger picture, I mean, they sense that the fate of Protestantism might hang in the balance, depending on what happens between France and Spain. Momentously, in 1641, Parliament abolished two commissions which had enabled King James. the first, to control the press. Now, what was the effect of this? This was just before the Civil War. The two courts that the Parliament abolished were the means by which the presses,

or two means by which the presses were controlled. Essentially, the stationers company, as Kevin said, had a monopoly on controlling print, and it was engaged in a trade-off. It agreed, in return for having sole right to print and distribute books, that it would maintain order within the... trade. When that order broke down, once somebody committed an offense, they were taken to Star Chamber or the Court of High Commission. With the abolition of those two courts, it seems that

the modes of recourse that Parliament or a member of the government might have for a publication which they deemed offensive were wiped out. This meant that there was a sudden and very, very dramatic increase in the number of publications, as Kevin said, that appeared in 1641. Meanwhile, Charles has ruled without Parliament for eight or nine years. Charles I first had ruled without Parliament for eight or nine years. He had to call a Parliament in 1640 in order to fund a recent failed war against the Scots. And there is a febrile excitement, especially in London, about the meeting of this Parliament. And very rapidly, manuscript accounts of the proceedings in Parliament become available on the streets

London. These look quite similar to modern newspapers. They're weekly, they're organised chronologically, and in 1641, someone comes up with the terrific idea that you might actually print these on a weekly basis,

number them, give them a recognizable title. This is just before the Civil War, and it looks very much like the appearance of the newspaper. Kevin, what part then we're into the Civil War and what part, and And Joe described vividly what's happening.

That's all set up. So what part did print play briefly and generally for the two sides between 42 and 48, for let's say 42 and 50 even? They're seizing on print, aren't they, in a different way than ever before? Oh, yes. Well, they have to.

I mean, I think print does two things. I mean, it's a double thing because on the one hand, print reflects political division, but on the other hand it also creates and exacerbates political division that vitu-protiff exchanges in print and, after all the very names royalist and cavalier and roundhead come from print. I mean, print constructs otherness and opposition.

What I think is interesting, though, is that on the eve of the Civil War, there wasn't an official government newspaper. Listening to Jod there, talking about newspapers, there is a great danger that we think of news as an opposition. positionist demystifying thing. And indeed, in terms of the attitude of authority, it largely is in England. But interestingly in France, you see, there is an official newspaper, Cardinal Richelieu's Gazette.

And such a proposal was put to Charles I first in the 1630s. Charles II took it up. I mean, after the Civil War, there were official newspapers proposed and briefly in existence by Charles's press licensor, the Seconds called Roger Lestrange. So it's slightly puzzling that the Caroline regime before the Civil War didn't create an official news organ. It may even have paid a heavy price for not doing so. Because in the Civil War, Charles I, the government's voice,

is one voice in a cacophony of contending voices. And the whole point about authority is it ought to be, and has always hoped to be, sitting above the fray, not just being one voice in the fray. Chode, as I understand it, about 72 hours after the regicide, after the execution of King Charles I, icon Basilica was published,

which was the best-selling book of the 17th century, one always has to accept the Bible. This was the royal portrait. And that was massively effective, not just in the argument, but in the actions of the time. Would you elaborate on that?

Yes, it was an underground, bestseller, an example of how censorship can't control the press is, and it appears to have been successful because it rests public sympathy, which is interesting because it shows how much had changed over the past 10 years. So can you just tell us what it contained? I mean, the King has been executed and therefore the expectation, looking back, and it, well, that's a massive, massive thing, but it is done now. We will proceed without him.

Then up pops this book or this pamphlet. Or what is it? Tell us what it is. And I've read that it sort of underestimbing. mind the next 10 years of the Commonwealth. I think that would be an enormous and grotesque of a statement. It's a narrative of the king's actions, a self-execopatory narrative of some of the key political events of the 1630s and 1640s. The civil war broke out in part because Parliament seized on a number of the things that the king had done wrong and publicised them very well. the response in Icon Basilicae was to rewrite that story

and present the king in a much more sympathetic light. It was probably based on some of the king's prayers and notes the king had made while in prison, but written by Bishop John Gordon, who had to keep his mouth shut because it was very important. This was Charles's book and not somebody else's book, because this was authentic testimony, an authentic testimony of a king.

So a king who'd tried to suppress news in his early reign and then avoided publicity to some extent during the war, with some important exceptions, suddenly came clean, and this was his life according to Charles. And it presents him as a very godly, conscientious, eucsorious man, and a good family man who had been manipulated and twisted by events into making certain poor decisions, which had then been exploited mercilessly by his enemies. I do take the wrap of the knuckles about exaggerating the effect that this book had,

but I do apologize to the three of you, all extremely serious academics, but I'm going to persist. The fact is that the idea of loyalty to the monarchy persisted in the 1650s, despite every, every massive attempt, Cromwellian attempt, to stamp it out. And that book was what they gathered around, as I understand it. Please tell me if I'm wrong. And Milton was rolled in to crash to, to, to put it. to put that book to flight, and he failed,

because his defense was to, as I understand it, now you slaughter me now, Kevin, as I understand it, it was too strange defense, an Icon Basilica sailed on, and it was a gathering point as a print gathering point for what became an extraordinary reversal when Charles II came back. Now, is that completely grotesque?

No, I fully agree with you and disagree with Jod. I mean, the facts speak for themselves. Milton's iconocleses, the response to Icon Basilicae, I think, had two editions, and the Icon Basilicae had 35 editions in one year and continued to sell throughout the 17th century. There were several attempts to undermine it, and they largely failed.

It didn't just sell as a book. It's famous engraved frontist piece of Charles kneeling at prayer, sold as a separate image. It was engraved on tobacco boxes and snuff boxes, on counters, on royalist tokens and coins. It really was a very powerful text and image. And I think what's interesting about it is we were talking again earlier about, and we know that print demystifies in many ways.

It renders things public and open to even popular discussion. The strange thing about icon basilicae is it's a sacred image of kingship, which also becomes enormously popular. So it warns us that we shouldn't have... Well, among... Yes, absolutely. And I think it did huge damage to the Republic. I think the Republic never recovered

from the image, the popular image of Charles as a martyr, which was the whole point of Icon Basilicae. And I think that the Republic starts from... That book, some people argue, the book appeared on the very day of the regicide, where we're not sure whether it was the day or the day after. But certainly the Republic was a... born with an extremely popular, powerful oppositionist text

appearing in print the very day of its creation. A printed piece, a piece in print, brought together a community, a constituency, a constituency of opposition to, let's say, Cromwell and the protection, and so on and so forth. The levellers, the levellers were all over the place. They're in cells all over, but they were together as a unit because of print. So print is having a difference. It's changing, as it were, the geography of dissent, isn't it?

I think also it's in terms of what Kevin was saying about Icon Basilica, it's also I think one reason why non-monarchical regimes fail is because there are so many musings and reflections in print about what the meaning of parliamentarianism or republicanism is. And I think the levellers, levelers are a sort of democratic, politically democratic London movement. But the levellers, they do at least two things in place. print. One is that they make their own individual sufferings emblematic of sort of where Parliament's going wrong generally. And you could only do that through publicity in print. John Lilbin, a level

leader, he's sort of arrested for, you know, radical pamphleteering. And he says, you know, the case is not just mine. It's the whole of the Commonwealth's case. And the other thing they do, which is taking us back a little bit, is that they debate Parliament's own declarations. And, you know, and basically saying Parliament has claimed to be the representative of the people, or it's claiming to be fighting God's cause. But it's not acting like that. It hasn't done anything for us. So it's a sort of way in which print has made the cause effective.

What we have at the time, Judge Raymond, is political clashes, as Anne's indicated, and I'm rushing on a bit there, but still political crashes, but also religious clashes. Can you tell us how print fueled a religious polarisation in this period of the Civil War? One of the things that happens in that initial explosion at the very beginning of the 1640s is that different kinds of voices begin to appear in print and among them are the voices of those who are, who perhaps have been quiet in the 1630s

who are questioning the authority of bishops and wish to articulate a different kind of vision of the church and perhaps a different kind of vision of their own personal religiosity or devotion. And so we have to articulate. figures like the levellers who are very much driven, I think, towards something like democracy by a set of religious convictions. But subsequently, people like the ranters.

Also, women preachers, women are obviously not allowed to preach within the church at this period, but they begin to preach on the streets of London in the 1640s and they print sermon. So we get new kinds of voices that are kind of articulating a different idea of what religion is. and claim, as Protestantism will, that one's own relationship with God has a particular value in society and a particular validity. I was just going to say, I think the most obvious group who used print enormously, effectively,

and slightly surprisingly are the Quakers. And the Quakers are, you know, on the one hand, they're inspired by God. They have this immediate, you know, mystical experience, but they're very, very practical. If God sort of moves a Quaker to go to Chesterfield or somewhere, then they have printed pamphlets and they've circulated them in the marketplace beforehand. And that is, I think,

probably the group most easily defined, they define themselves, they take on their opponent's name of Quakers and they certainly spread all around the country very, very rapidly using print in a very strategic and practical way. Can we pick up

a stitch that we were, if you can raise a stitch, earlier in the program, Kevin Schaub. And the idea of the newspaper, the modern newspaper coming into existence in about 1641 with great editors, John Thomas, and then you had much more needham, who had a great friend of Milton's and so on, and the court paper eventually and the parliamentary paper. Can you just encapsulate for us how the newspaper, as we might know it, came into existence then and what it was then?

As a consequence of the civil war, domestic news becomes now a fact of life. And in the restoration, for instance, you go to a coffee house in the 1660s, and you go there not to just drink your dish of coffee, but to catch up with the news. And coffee houses subscribe to most of the major news periodicals. And in fact, interestingly, a lot of coffee housekeepers are women. They're involved in print and news, not in official ways, but by the most of the major news. by subscribing to the papers, circulating them, and making them available for discussion and debate.

But can we just nail very briefly, how the newspaper started, who started it and won't joke? It begins, in a sense, as a manuscript form in 1641, and I think what probably happens is that Parliament realises that increased circulation of news is in its interest, and it gives the nod to a printer who then prints one of these manuscripts.

This happens on the 29th of November 1641, and basically from that day to the present day, we've been not without newspapers. Very, very quickly, the print trade is a great venue for improvisation. Very, very quickly, people figure out, okay, you number newspapers. You give them a continuous title

so people can go out on the same day of the week by the newspaper that they recognise. Very quickly, editors realize that you can combine the reporting of news with expressions of editorial opinion. with advertising in order to increase the profitability. So as a literary form, if you like, the newspaper is incredibly flexible, very adaptive to the market, but also very, very useful to quite subtle political manipulation.

But always connected to political division. I mean, newspapers are answered as soon as they come out one by the other, the royalists, the parliamentarians in the late 17th century, the Whigs and the Tories. Briefly just round the table, would you say that print was a democratic force, the 1640s. Yes, and I would also say it's a demystifying force. It's a force that enables people outside of political elites to discuss the actions of their betters and the great.

So in that sense, it has a democratic impulse. I think it's an emancipatory force. I mean, partly because of political division in that people are given a choice, royalist and parliamentarians, and also all sorts of varieties of parliamentarianism. And because literacy, although it's, you know, is widespread enough that most people have access to it. And I think that probably from the 1640s onwards, a much larger section of the population believe that they have a right to know what's going on in government. Thank you very much, Anne Hughes, Kevin Sharp and Joad Raymond. Next week we're talking about the Abbasid Caliphate.

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