The crowd lives upon news and upon rumour. Elizabeth I recalled that, as a princess, she had asked her governess, “What news was at London?” On being told that it was rumoured she was about to marry Lord Admiral Seymour, she replied, “It was but a London news.” So in the sixteenth century “London news” was considered to be fleeting and inaccurate but, even so, the object of much curiosity. In King Lear the “poor rogues Talk of Court news … who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.” Shakespeare also invoked “the newes Of hurly burly innovation” in Henry IV, Part One as well as “the new newes at the new Court” in As You Like It. It was often observed that, on entering a coffee house, the first and immediate enquiry was “What news? What news?”
The city is the centre of scandal, slander and speculation; the citizens are rumourmongers and backbiters. In the sixteenth century there were handbills and pamphlets and broadsheets devoted to the more sensational events of the day, and the street-sellers ensured that they were reported from door to door. In 1622 a weekly pamphlet of news was published in London, under the rubric of “Weekly Newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungary, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the low Countries etc.” Its success was such that it provoked the publication of many other weekly pamphlets which went under the common title of “Corantos.” The “news” was treated with great suspicion, however, as if the reports of London were based on faction or fractiousness. It was not an honest city and the editor of the Perfect Diurnal, Samuel Peche, was described in the 1640s as being “constant in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking.” He was, in other words, a typical Londoner.
There was one other aspect of London “news” which did not escape the attention of Ben Jonson. In his The Staple of Newes (1625) he suggests that news ceases to be “news” when it is printed and distributed; its essence is intelligence given in whisper or rumour, the kind of report that in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries could permeate all London within a very short period. Jonson had his own view, then, of the “stationer” or publisher of news, who
knows Newes well, can sort and ranke ’hem
And for a need can make ’hem.
In 1666 the London Gazette emerged as the most authoritative of the public prints. “It inserts no News but what is certain,” wrote one contemporary, “and often waits for the Confirmation of it, before it publishes it.” It was printed on single sheets each Monday and Thursday, and was sold on the streets by vendors known as “Mercury women” calling out “London’s Gazette here!” in Cornhill, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. Macaulay described it as containing “a royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Jannissaries … a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a reward for a stray dog.” It may be considered certain that the highwayman, the cockfight and the dog provoked the most attention.
It is some indication of the appetite for news in London that its first daily newspaper, Daily Courant, issued in 1702, predates by some seventy-five years the appearance of a “daily” in Paris. By the end of the eighteenth century there were 278 newspapers, journals and periodicals available in the city. Most of this astonishing number were published within the Strand, Fleet Street and those adjoining streets east of the present Waterloo Bridge and west of Blackfriars.
Fleet Street is an example of the city’s topographical imperative, whereby the same activity takes place over hundreds of years in the same small area. In this case, too, it was an activity that dominated the character and behaviour of those who took part in it, so that it can be said that the very earth and stones of London created their own particular inhabitants. In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde set up his printing press opposite Shoe Lane, and in the same year Richard Pynson established himself as a publisher and printer a few yards down the road at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. He was succeeded as Printer to Henry VIII by Thomas Berthelet who set up shop by the conduit, again opposite Shoe Lane, and in the early 1530s William Rastell began a printing firm in the churchyard of St. Bride’s. William Middleton printed at the George, Richard Tottell at the Hand and Star, John Hodgets at the Flower de Luce-all signs within the narrow and crowded thoroughfare.
