English Roots of the Free Press

European Background

The printed newspaper, in the form of an unbound, sequentially issued, independently edited publication using the same title but differentially dated does not appear until about a century and a half after European printing began—in other words, around 1600. During that delay, intermittently printed prose news-books on major individual events, as well as occasional digests of news, would be produced featuring stories real or imagined (e.g., battles and royal progresses as well as miracles, disasters, crimes, and celestial phenomena). The fictional as well as the factual would all be sold as “true.” These proto-news journals—referred to as mercuries, relations, gazettes, or avisos—were of a piece with the printers' other ephemera, such as woodcuts or ballads on contemporary topics, both serious and sensational.

The most economically and politically significant news enterprise was the regular exchange of information between kingdoms through their ambassadorial system or by merchants at periodic great fairs or in reports from their factors in distant cities. These communications, however, did not appear in print. They remained handwritten and secret as they had always been throughout the middle ages. Some were regular enough to be “newsletters” issued to limited readership (a bank's main clients, for example) in multiple handwritten copies. They continued to be produced by hand well into the seventeenth century. The news they contained was seen as potentially damaging if published because it could be revealing of state secrets or could possibly jeopardize commercial advantage.

Making this information—known as “intelli-gences”—more public was a fraught enterprise. Medieval merchants had not much desire to share market intelligence at all. Authorities were also fearful but were more confused as to how to deal with the issue of press control. The problem was that, from the time of the introduction of the press, they had sought to exploit print's potential as a means of information dissemination for their own purposes. Yet they felt threatened by private presses. In response, states and the church licensed the physical machines and organized printers into monopolistic guilds. They proscribed works and authors, vetted proposals, registered titles and, as a last resort, banned any work that got through the net; but printing itself remained a necessity. The result was a censorship regime less effective than it might have been. Policing was rudimentary. Authorities were willing to license publications (inflammatory blasphemous pamphlets, for example) for export which they would not countenance for domestic distribution. Ownership and operation of presses was difficult to control because they were small enough to be loaded on a handcart or concealed in any room.

Despite this somewhat confused official approach, what emerged in the sixteenth century was an ever-increasing need to distribute commercial intelligence. During the long period of print media incubation, feudalism was collapsing and mercantile capitalism was emerging as the basis of economic organization. To work, the new system needed not secrecy but informed participation. It is this realization that finally “caused” independent printed news in its modern form to emerge, despite its destabilizing potential as far as the authorities were concerned. By the start of the seventeenth century, the pressure mercantilists brought to bear—because they needed a constant flow of information to conduct their businesses—had transformed the role of the press. No longer was knowledge deemed to be only of value to princes or banking houses. Couple this development to the established popular taste for the sensational and the foundation of modern journalism was laid. As the towns of Europe grew, so did the merchant class and the numbers of those who wrote, printed, and published news-books and a range of news-sheets.

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