It is sometimes suggested that the news value of the more sensational cases was eagerly exploited by nimble publicists, who would move through the crowd selling accounts of the crimes and the prisoners’ deathbed confessions. This seems improbable, at least in the sixteenth century. As we have seen, such accounts of notorious crimes circulated widely, and for long after the event.8 Their pedagogic value, and capacity to titillate, was not closely linked to the place where the crime or execution took place. In England such a market for news would have been impossible in any case, since there was virtually no printing outside London.9 These were news events experienced for the most part by eyewitnesses and shared by word of mouth. The corpse left to rot on the gibbet would serve as a reminder to those who came by later.
Visitors to the market could also see news being made. Authorities took advantage of the presence of a crowd to announce the latest regulations, or pass on news of recent legislation. In major cities, where the market was a permanent event, these proclamations might happen any day. In France and elsewhere the public announcement of the latest royal decree was attended by an elaborate ceremony. The royal herald would appear accompanied by a trumpeter to gain attention. Once the crowd had been silenced, he would declaim the king's announcement before moving on to the next main thoroughfare. In Paris there was a fixed itinerary to be used on such occasions. The new decree was then carried by courier to the main provincial towns, where the municipal authorities were obliged to repeat the ceremony.
It is hard to know how much the witnesses of these solemn ceremonies would have taken in. Presumably the trumpeter (in other places the ringing of a bell) would have secured reasonable attention; but the general hubbub, the clucking and bellowing of live animals, and the coming and going of impatient shoppers would have made the reading difficult to hear. Proclamations could also be long, and couched in formal legal language, complex and intricate. The announcement would therefore also subsequently be posted up, usually in many copies, which more and more frequently would be printed texts. These would be pinned up in prominent public places, in the marketplace, on the church door, in the toll booth. The public reading served as much as intimation that something important was afoot, and the citizenry should acquaint themselves with the details. These could be passed by readers to other interested parties, ideally with reasonable accuracy. For those with a professional need to know, a printed text, sometimes a broadsheet and sometimes a pamphlet, became an increasingly important adjunct to these public readings. Even so, the process of law enforcement always began with a spectacle, or announcement, in public open space.
The marketplace was volatile: a powder keg as well as a place of exchange. In times of dearth high prices or empty stalls offered a tangible demonstration of the authorities’ need to take steps to ameliorate the crisis. The gathering of disenchanted citizens provided a fertile environment for the spreading of rumour, misinformation and discontent. In such situations the power of early modern government was limited. These were not police states: most cities could afford only a handful of bailiffs or guards, and the presence of other armed men, troops or a noble retinue, was usually highly unwelcome. The maintenance of law required a tacit public consent and, if this was withdrawn, there was little the magistrates could do but ride out the storm. In such circumstances news, spread by rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding, was a poison. Its toxic quality was only exacerbated by the ubiquity of strong drink.
Singing the News
The market was an essential cog in the early modern information network. Its place at the heart of village life can be judged by its importance in folk tales: country people went to market to sell their wares, but also to be duped and cheated by the sly rogues who lay in wait. The market was too the locus operandi of the most marginal figures in the world of news, the itinerant pedlars.10 In some European cultures these were known as ‘news singers’ because they would literally sing out their wares. Their songs were often contemporary events turned into ballads.
This is the one part of the early modern news world that has no clear equivalent today. In the Europe of the sixteenth century, however, singing played an important role in mediating news events to a largely illiterate public. The news singers, sometimes blind and often accompanied by children, would sing out their wares, then offer printed versions for sale. In Spain the writers of ballads would sometimes teach them to a group of blind pedlars before sending them out on the roads. The pedlars displayed their wares on a wooden framework strung with cord, rather like a clothes line; in consequence these publications are sometimes known as ‘cord literature’.11 Broadsheet ballads were clearly printed in enormous quantities, as we can see from the thousands of copies listed in the inventories of booksellers’ stock, and ballad pamphlets were also popular. Samuel Pepys bought a whole bundle when he visited Spain from Tangiers in 1683.12 Most likely, though, with the Inquisition keeping a close eye on the print industry, Spanish ballad singers would usually have steered clear of the more dangerous contemporary news topics.13
6.1 An early song broadsheet. Note that, although this song text was conspicuously well printed, there is no musical notation. Published in 1512, it relates the French victory at Dôle in an earlier war.
This was not the case elsewhere in Europe, where topicality was a major selling point. Although the sellers were among Europe's most marginal groups, and could be brutally treated by the local authorities, the trade was lucrative. In 1566 a travelling pedlar in the Low Countries had a printer in Overijssel run off one thousand copies of a sheet containing three popular political songs. He paid one guilder for the whole batch. Even if he sold them for the smallest coin then in circulation, he would have made a handsome profit.14 The trade in song-sheets was also welcomed by more established members of the trade, such as the Oxford bookseller John Dorne: in 1520 he sold over two hundred broadsheet ballads in forty separate transactions. He charged a standard halfpenny a sheet, though there were discounts available for customers who bought more than six.15 In Italy the printed versions of performed songs tended to be short pamphlets rather than broadsheets; here, it is suggested, pedlars might take the edition from the printer in instalments, taking more copies as the cash came in.16 The most successful public singers moved far beyond these humble beginnings. The famous blind singer of Forlì, Cristoforo Scanello, owned his own house and was able to invest two hundred scudi in having his son trained for a commercial career. Another well-known and versatile balladeer, Ippolito Ferrarese, was able to build on his fame as a performer by publishing his own compositions.17
In Italy, in particular, the street singer was deeply rooted in the culture of the urban commune. In the thirteenth century cities had employed singers to perform at public ceremonies. This official encouragement prepared the way for an increasingly overt political repertoire in the sixteenth century. The crisis in Italian politics with the French invasions after 1494 provoked a flood of sung commentary. In 1509, the height of the danger for Venice, a local chronicler complained that throughout Italy anti-Venetian verses were being sung, recited and sold on the piazzas ‘by the work of charlatans, who make a living from this’.18 Some of this was deliberately orchestrated by the Pope, Julius II, a determined and deadly foe of Venice and a statesman who took an active role in promoting political propaganda. Many of these songs were very cheap: ‘so that you can buy it, it will cost you only three pennies’, as was stated in one song celebrating the might of Venice's opponents. Some texts, indeed, were distributed free of charge, as was the case with the propagandistic poetical works showered down from windows and distributed on the piazza when the papal legate made his formal entry into Bologna in 1510.19
These songs were clearly intended not only to entertain but also to inform. The anonymous author of a poem about the battle of Ravenna in 1512 told his audience that his principal intention in composing the work was ‘not because you would take pleasure from it, but so that you might have some indication of this event’. Events moved fas
t in this conflict of swift marches and topsy-turvy alliances, and the singers were obliged to respond. A song composed to celebrate the naval battle between the Ferraresi and the Venetians, which took place on 22 December 1509, was already in print by 8 January 1510. A singer who published a song about the battle of Agnadello in 1509 claimed to have composed and given it to the press within two days.20 A French example from a later date has a song celebrating the Huguenot victory in Lyon in 1562 on the streets the very same day.21
Singing was an important part of the festive culture of the day. The most popular of these political songs were those that captured a public mood of celebration, usually with new words set to a familiar tune (compositions known as contrafacta). But singing also offered a means to process bad news. A local publisher would not, on the whole, wish to test the patience of the local authorities by publishing a prose account of a crushing defeat: such adverse news was usually left to pass by word of mouth. A poignant lament, on the other hand, could catch the mood of the moment, without calling down retribution. But even here, care was required. The Venetian Senate was certainly aware of the potential dangers of free circulation of political songs at a time of crisis. In 1509 they intervened to remove from sale a song critical of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, an erstwhile foe but now an ally (it is possible the vendor had just not kept up with the turn of events). The Senate continued, however, to encourage the sale of songs against the Ferraresi.
This period of frenetic activity seems to have been the high-water mark of the political song in Italy. At this moment street singing lay truly on the front line of communication.22 As the century wore on, Italian street singers seem to have withdrawn to safer topical ground. They would celebrate the withdrawal of an unpopular tax, or report a tumbled-down bridge. This may partly have been self-censorship, but it also reflected a more hostile political climate. In the second half of the sixteenth century Italian authorities intervened to bring order to the piazza. The regulation of public space was partly prompted by Counter-Reformation disapproval of anything that besmirched the dignity of public religion (and many of the songs were scarcely disguised satires of religious tunes). But the new restrictions may also be seen as a concerted attempt to draw in the boundaries of popular politics, particularly when set alongside the brutal assault on the writers of the pasquinades and the regulation around manuscript avvisi.23 However, at least as regards street singers, this effort at regulation seems largely to have failed. As members of a marginal social group, professionally peripatetic, the news singers had far less to lose than established printers and the owners of news agencies. When in 1585 Tommaso Garzoni published his encyclopaedia of the professions, the street singer occupied a prominent place. Far from being banished by hostile regulation, they had ‘grown like a weed, in such a way that, through every city, through every land, through every square, nothing is seen other than charlatans or street singers’.24
Germany too had a lively musical tradition which could be put to use in the service of popular politics. Martin Luther was a passionate musician and composer of hymns: some of his compositions are still staples of the repertoire. Because the tunes were soon so strikingly familiar, they were obvious candidates for reuse in a more overtly political context (later French Calvinists would use the tunes of the psalms in exactly the same way).25 The high point of political song in Germany came in the wake of the Protestant defeat in the Schmalkaldic War (1546–7). The victorious Charles V now attempted, by way of the Augsburg Interim, to enforce a partial restoration of traditional Catholic practices and beliefs. Although the settlement was reluctantly accepted by some Protestant cities and theologians, including Philip Melanchthon, much of Lutheran Germany stood firm. Led by the free city of Magdeburg in a heroic four-year resistance, Lutherans vented their anguish in a storm of pamphlets and songs.26 A diligent search of printed and manuscript sources has revealed a remarkable number of songs about the Interim.27 Most of their composers were educated men; this was not, initially at least, the music of the streets. But it clearly became so. The disapproving Catholic chronicler of Magdeburg recalled:
The Interim teaching in itself has been treated quite disgracefully and contemptuously. People played ‘Interim’ on gaming boards, cursed it, and sang about it as follows: Blessed is he who can trust in God and does not approve of the Interim, for it has a fool behind it.28
Luther had shown the way with a clever satirical song, ‘Ach du arger Heinz’, attacking the resolutely Catholic Heinrich of Braunschweig. This was to be sung to the tune, ‘O du armer Judas’. Here the resonance of the title added a further layer of insult, as well as providing a familiar tune.29
When exhaustion and military stalemate forced Charles V to compromise, the liberties of Germany Lutheranism were restored. Magdeburg surrendered to Charles's then ally, Maurice of Saxony, on remarkably generous terms. But Maurice made one exception to this leniency: he required that the minister Erasmus Alber be banished from the city. Alber's contribution to the published literature of the resistance, consisting almost entirely of hymns and satirical songs, had clearly hit home. Maurice insisted that because Alber had attacked him ‘coarsely in public and in private writings, with rhymes and with drawings he must be got rid of. Even a peasant would not bear such an attack lightly.’30
Remembering how they had harnessed the power of song so successfully, the Lutheran states were all the more determined that it would not be employed against them. Several cities took action to control or ban the Marktsänger and Gassensänger, as the singers were known (because they sang in the marketplace or alleyways). As early as 1522, Augsburg had required its printers to take an oath that they would not print any disgraceful book, song or rhyme. When the city finally instituted reform in 1534, the new discipline ordinance specified carefully that it was illegal, not only to print offensive books, songs and rhymes, but also to write, sell, buy, sing, read or post them; or, indeed to bring them to the light of day in any way.31
6.2 Fighting back in verse. One of the many musical works satirising the Augsburg Interim.
In Germany the control of opinion necessarily worked rather differently from the centralised nation states of western Europe. Most German towns, in principle, established a process for the pre-publication inspection of books and pamphlets. But this would have been far too time-consuming in practice: the designated censors, usually civic officials rather than clergymen, were far too busy with other duties. In any case much of the printed material in circulation would not have been printed within the local jurisdiction. So most German authorities essentially relied on self-regulation, encouraged by harsh punishments when they learned of a particularly malicious or politically dangerous public utterance.
If we examine the management of opinion in one particularly important jurisdiction – the great imperial city of Augsburg – it is striking how often these interventions were prompted not by print but by seditious singing. In 1553 a bookseller got into trouble when he passed around a tavern a song mocking Charles V's recent humiliation at the siege of Metz. If the bookseller was attempting to road-test a potential song pamphlet, the strategy backfired badly, as most of the drinkers were too shocked to want anything to do with it; further attempts to have the song copied led to his arrest and interrogation.32 Here the city council could rely on the support of local people in enforcing reasonable standards of decorum.
In the last years of the sixteenth century this social consensus became increasingly frayed, as Lutherans reacted with mounting alarm to the resurgence of Catholicism. The expulsion in 1584 of Augsburg's popular Lutheran minister during the controversy following the imposition of the new Gregorian calendar led to a barrage of songs critical of the city council and supportive of the exiled clergy.33 Some were printed but others circulated widely in manuscript copies, or by word of mouth. These were tough times economically, and discontented weavers became heavily involved in the agitation. Abraham Schädlin confessed that he had written ‘Wo es Gott nit mit Augspurg
helt’ ('When God does not stand by Augsburg'), a political song based on the Lutheran psalm ‘Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält’ (taken from Psalm 124, ‘If the Lord had not been on our side'). Because Schädlin had turned himself in, he was treated leniently. Jonas Losch was not so lucky, and two extended interrogations under torture extracted the story of a song he had adapted from a printed original and then sung on the streets. These interrogations (still preserved in the Augsburg town archives) reveal a busy world of singing and cheap print.34 Losch made extra money singing at weddings before turning to politics; the printer Hans Schultes sold 1,500 copies of an image of the expelled minister Georg Müller; two women caught up in the agitation made money selling on the copies. The intersection of political dissent with this lively culture of singing and pub-going was a potential powder keg, and the Augsburg authorities clamped down hard.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Page 16