The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  Like so many of Maximilian's grand schemes, this was only partly successful. It would take another hundred years before the imperial postal network was fully functioning. But from these beginnings would eventually emerge a communications network that underpins much of what we will encounter in this book: the beginnings of a commercial market for news, and the first regular serial news publications.

  It is hard to know what inspired Maximilian to take this momentous step, but in creating such an ambitious scheme he, like so many of his Renaissance contemporaries, sought inspiration from the ancients. With the help of Francesco de Tassis, Maximilian had the chance to recreate a plausible imitation of the postal network of the old Roman Empire – until this point the most spectacularly successful communications system known to civilisation.

  1.1 Two portraits of the Emperor Maximilian. The Habsburgs were not a handsome family, though the artistry of Albrecht Dürer could at least invest Maximilian with a certain majesty.

  The passage of time had done much to obliterate the physical remains, if not the memory, of the Roman Empire; but the imprint of the Roman communications system had proved remarkably enduring. It would be the ghostly presence hovering in the background as medieval Europe gradually began to construct its own system of news and communication.

  The Ghosts of Vindolanda

  Like so much of what had been created during the Roman Empire, the Roman postal service was an achievement of breathtaking imagination and administrative ambition. The Roman road network had been designed to move large bodies of troops around a militarised domain that stretched from Spain to Germany and from Britain to Asia Minor. A high-speed courier service was an essential part of the information and administrative infrastructure that underpinned this system. Although much of the engineering work was in place under the Republic, the postal service itself only became fully established during the reign of Emperor Augustus.3 Couriers travelled by horse or by carriage. The main stage posts were established eight miles apart, with night quarters at every third stage. This suggests that a courier would normally progress at the rate of about 25 miles a day. Fifty miles would be possible if the news was especially urgent, but the journey would take a terrible toll on the messenger if the distance to be travelled was very large.

  Normally a single courier would carry the message the entire length of the journey. In principle a relay of messengers could travel in greater comfort, but many messages were so confidential that they could only be entrusted to a particular individual. Very often the written message was little more than an introduction, confirming the credentials of the bearer; the substance would then be delivered verbally. The same messenger could then take back a reply. According to Suetonius, Augustus, who took a personal interest in the establishment of the post, also regularised the practice of dating letters, even to the exact hour, to document when they had been despatched.

  The imperial postal service was created explicitly to serve the purposes of the vast Roman administrative machine. The upkeep of the service was extremely expensive, particularly after the development of more elaborate rest stations (mansiones), where travellers could find accommodation, stabling and a change of horses. The system was not generally open to the public. Yet the management of the Empire demanded the transport of a large quantity of military freight along the roads, alongside the express courier service, and it seems that this more mundane traffic provided plentiful opportunities for the citizens of the Empire, dispersed around the distant outposts, to maintain a surprising level of written communication.

  The full extent of this can only be guessed at: most of the evidence has long since disappeared. But a glimpse into this lost world opened up quite recently, thanks to a remarkable find at Hadrian's Wall, near the northern British frontier of the Roman Empire. In 1973 a team of archaeologists was continuing routine excavations at Vindolanda, one of the military camp settlements adjacent to the wall. Excavating a trench they came across a mass of leather, textiles and straw, mixed with bracken and wood. Some of the wood was in small, thin fragments. When they inspected these slivers, it became apparent that these were covered in writing. What had been discovered were the first of nearly two thousand writing tablets, all written in ink on a wooden veneer – somehow miraculously preserved in the anaerobic soil of Northumberland.4

  The wooden tablets found in this excavation have transformed what is known of the writing culture of the northern Empire. Britain was as far away as it was possible to be from the production centres of papyrus, the versatile reed that provided the cheapest and most abundant writing material in Roman times. Where papyrus was not available, officials used waxed wooden tablets, where notes could be inscribed in the wax. A large number of these were also found in the Vindolanda excavation, though with little or nothing still legible once the wax had disappeared. The slivers of wood discovered at Vindolanda, subsequently confirmed by other finds, reveal a whole new writing medium, and one open to a wide cross section of the general public. The tablets, now in the British Museum, preserve communications from over one hundred writers, from the local governor and his wife to relatively humble members of the garrison community.

  1.2 Fragments of a wooden writing tablet from Vindolanda. This contains the draft of a letter from a prefect of Vindolanda to a certain Crispinus.

  The ghosts of Vindolanda are often no more than tiny and incomplete fragments of enigmatic and cryptic messages. Yet they reveal a writing community of depth and breadth even in a frontier outpost at the very edge of the Empire, manned, it should be remembered, not by Roman legionaries but by auxiliaries raised from other subject peoples. We do not know how widespread were the skills of reading and writing in the Roman Empire.5 But what can be inferred from the Vindolanda tablets is that even when societies were not highly literate, systems of government and administration could be built around the assumption that written communication was a normative means of conveying news.

  The Romans were of course masters in the exercise of power. The creation of the imperial postal service reflected a recognition that the control of information, and the swift passage of vital news, was essential to the government of widely dispersed and thinly garrisoned possessions. Roman Britain was an archetype of the large province managed by an astonishingly small occupying force. It was only possible because the control of communications meant that a larger, irresistible force could swiftly be marshalled.

  The Roman postal service died with the Empire, to be resurrected only by the equally ambitious German emperors at the turn of the sixteenth century. But the main lesson of the Roman communications network, that control of news was an essential attribute of power, was fully grasped in medieval Europe. We will see it reflected in the conduct of all three of the major power brokers in the medieval world: the Church, the State and the merchant class. All three would develop a vivid culture of news.

  From the Cloister

  The Church was one of the great estates of medieval Europe. Its institutions had played a crucial role in the preservation of learning after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Since membership of the clerical estate was essentially defined by literacy, it was inevitable that the clergy would be the designated record-keepers of early medieval society. As the Church consolidated its reach across the whole of western Europe, it would also be in the forefront in the transition from a culture where inherited wisdom was preserved by memory to one of written record.6 Not that the assumed superiority of writing would go entirely uncontested. In the various confrontations between secular and ecclesiastical power that erupted in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, lay folk were not always prepared to concede that verbal reports were any less authoritative than, as they put it, ‘words written on animal skins’.7 This well-turned insult drew attention to the rather unromantic origins of parchment, which was at this point the only abundantly available writing material. Parchment, made of the dried hide of sheep or calves, was a good, reliable and durable writing surface, but complex and expensive to prepa
re. The writing surface had to follow the irregular dimensions of the original hide, so notes were often written on thin slips cut from the edges. So for all but the most ceremonial purposes, such as a charter or treaty, there was a strong incentive to keep messages short. Often, as in Roman times, written communications would simply attest to the trustworthiness of the messenger, who could deliver the substance of the message verbally. Parchment could also be reused, but then important documentary information is often lost because a text has been scraped off and overwritten. This means that the information culture of the early medieval period often has to be reconstructed from very fragmentary remains.

  Problems of this nature apply even to those at the very apex of medieval Europe's emerging news networks. The Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, was one of the most distinguished voices of medieval Christianity. He was deeply involved in the major political and theological controversies of his day. He spoke out against the Cathars and the theologian Peter Abelard; he intervened freely in disputes over the election of bishops, and offered his counsels to the French king, Louis VI. Between 1146 and 1147 he preached passionately in favour of the Second Crusade. All of this required close attention to the maintenance of an active network of information, messengers and correspondence.

  In the conditions of twelfth-century Europe this was by no means easy, but Bernard possessed one priceless advantage. As Abbot of Clairvaux, the mother house of an extensive network of monasteries, Bernard could call upon the assistance of a willing band of peripatetic and literate churchmen. A remarkable number of Bernard's letters survive – around five hundred – far more than for his contemporary (and rival) Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny.8 These were just the visible remains of an information network that extended far beyond regular communications with Rome, even as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem. The maintenance of such a network was not without its challenges. As was the case with Roman couriers, the written communication was often little more than a letter of introduction, with the substance of the message intended to be conveyed verbally. Bernard would sometimes have to wait patiently for a suitable envoy who could be trusted to deliver a sensitive communication accurately. He was lucky that Clairvaux was a regular stopping place for numerous pilgrims and clerics on official business, situated as it was in prosperous Champagne, between Paris, Dijon and the Alpine passes.

  Bernard was, by the standards of the time, exceptionally well informed. But there was still a large element of chance in the individuals who passed by and the news they brought. It was seldom possible to corroborate a report brought by a visitor – Bernard would have to make his own estimate of the reliability of the source. Many of those who brought news – of a disputed episcopal election, for instance – had their own axes to grind. If the news was important enough for Bernard to send his own messenger, it might be many months before he received a reply. Even a journey back and forth to Rome, the hub of Europe's most intensive traffic in information, might take up to four months, as the messenger inevitably had his own business to conduct, and might not be planning a return trip to Clairvaux. Contact with more occasional correspondents was even more sporadic. A complex negotiation, which required the passage back and forth of several despatches, was hard to envisage.

  Chronicles

  Bernard of Clairvaux was an exceptional figure: a true prince of the Church. But the wish to stay abreast of events, and an awareness of the significance of life outside the cloister, was shared by many of his fellow clerics. Medieval monasteries served an important function as custodians of the collective social memory: monks were the first historians of western Christendom. To perform this function required that they make assiduous efforts to gather information on the world's follies and travails; in the words of the chronicler Gervais of Canterbury, ‘such deeds of kings and princes as occurred at those times, along with other events, portents and miracles’.9

  Some of these events had a decidedly contemporary character, and this trend becomes far more pronounced in the chronicle-writing of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This development was partly the consequence of the increasing predominance of chroniclers who were secular priests and even laymen, many with close access to the centres of power in the royal courts. The monastic chroniclers in contrast had, by nature of their vocation, been largely confined to their own houses. These new chroniclers could get out and about: they frequently wrote from their own experience, or recorded having personally spoken to eyewitnesses or participants.

  These medieval chroniclers offer a precocious and unexpected sense of developing news values. Naturally they write from a religious perspective: events reflect the unfolding of God's purpose and must be interpreted within the context of divine revelation. But the chroniclers also reveal a profound concern that the events they record should be credible and recognised as such. They offer repeated testimonials to the quality of their sources, the social status or number of the witnesses, and whether the writers were personally present. Even the recording of distant events reflects a clear concern to report only what was credible. Thus the chronicler of St Paul's Cathedral in London recorded, of an exceptionally severe frost in Avignon in 1325 in which many froze to death, that ‘according to the testimony of those who were there and who saw it, for one day and night the ice covering the Rhône, which is an extremely fast-flowing river, was more than eight feet thick’.10 Note how the addition of a seemingly precise but unverifiable detail, the thickness of the ice, adds greatly to the credibility of the account.

  Many medieval chroniclers were partisan – fierce critics or passionate supporters of the kings whose deeds they record. But they also exhibit a pre-cocious instinct for the ethics of news reporting. If they rely on second- or third-hand accounts, these are identified as such: ‘so it is said’, ‘so people said’ (ut fertur; ut dicebantur). When they know of conflicting accounts they are often scrupulous in reporting this fact. Of course chronicles are written with the benefit of hindsight, when events have been resolved; this was reporting without any of the hazards of contemporaneity. The chroniclers were able to look back and draw the appropriate morals: that a comet had portended great evil, that a king had been rewarded for his virtue or laid low by his vices. News was never fleeting or ephemeral, but always imbued with purpose. This form of moralising was equally characteristic of much of the news reporting of the following centuries, as we shall see. In this and so many other respects the medieval chroniclers’ views of contemporary history would prove profoundly influential in the development of a commercial news market. They reflected a shared vision of the continuum of history, linking past, present and future events in one organic whole.

  The Pilgrim Way

  Medieval travel was never undertaken without purpose. The hardships and dangers of the road were well known, and there were few with the resources or leisure to undertake journeys not directly connected to their occupational needs. A traveller passing through a town or village on the road, if he was not one of the traders who plied that route, was likely to be either a pilgrim or a fighting man. Pilgrims often traded conversation for charity. Sometimes they could be persuaded to carry letters or messages to an intermediate destination. Few would have approached a band of armed soldiers for a similar favour.

  For large parts of the high Middle Ages the eyes of both groups were turned towards Palestine. The mustering of crusader armies were major public events from the eleventh to thirteen centuries. Calls to arms and for pious donations to underwrite the costs of the Crusades reverberated around Europe. Many of Europe's citizens would have known someone who had joined the holy hosts, and returning knights and camp-followers brought their own accounts of these strange and unforgiving lands. Jerusalem was the ultimate test of pilgrim devotion, the more so because after the fall of Acre in 1291 the holy sites were never again in Christian hands.

  Those setting off on these arduous journeys could, in the centuries that followed, avail themselves of a quite considerable body of trav
el literature offering routes and a tour of the sacred places. By the fourteenth century such travelogues offered a wealth of observation on local customs and exotic beasts (travellers were particularly amazed by the giraffe).11 The time such written guides took to filter through to a wider public undermines their claims to be news publications – this was a time, remember, when each book had to be laboriously copied by hand. But they do mark the first stage of a certain broadening of horizons, and an expansion of the geographical frame of reference, which will be one of the key aspects of news culture in the centuries that follow.

  The Crusades must certainly have impacted on most communities in the western countries where the crusader armies were recruited. In a society where speech was still the main means of delivering facts, people were eager to hear tales of faraway places. In the eleventh century, it has been said, an ordinary Christian would likely have been more familiar with the existence of Jerusalem than the name of their nearest big city.12 But this came at a price. By inflaming Christian opinion against Islam, the seemingly endless Crusades canonised a series of lurid stereotypes that proved remarkably enduring. Even the most anthropological pilgrim narratives of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seem to have had little impact in challenging the exotic fantasies of Islamic society that resonated through the literature of the period. If Christian society knew anything of the Saracens, it would have been from the popular epic poems of the Chansons de geste, rather than eyewitness accounts.