The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (17 page)

These were responses to extraordinary events; the bulk of sixteenth-century legislation was far more mundane. Many written texts claimed, with much justification, that the regulations had been enacted on the prompting of interested citizens. The encroachment of government into an ever-widening range of functions regulating the economy and society was indeed partly stimulated by the appeals of interested parties. Very often these were powerful economic lobbies that wanted competition to be restrained, the regulation of apprenticeship enforced, or roads and bridges repaired.

The use of print in pursing these objectives has very largely been obscured by the very poor rates of survival of such printed ordinances. Everyday print
of this sort was not intended to be collected: the exhibited copies were generally left pinned up until rendered illegible by rain or covered up by other notices. Sometimes they suffered greater indignities. In 1535 four men were called before the magistrates at Coventry to answer the charge that they had torn down proclamations posted in the marketplace, a manifest act of sedition if proved. It turned out that they had been out drinking, and after relieving themselves one of them had used the papers to ‘wipe his tail with them’.
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Printed works of this sort were not really meant to survive so we are fortunate in the extraordinary passion for archiving of the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin. Although Plantin is famous for the publication of some of the greatest books published in the Low Countries in this era, he also cheerfully undertook the publication of broadsheet ordinances for the local town council; helpfully he also retained a copy of each one for his own records.
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Uniquely, then, in the case of Antwerp, we can follow the activities of a city administration over a ten-year period in some detail.

Antwerp was one of Europe's greatest cities and these were turbulent times. The city's decrees reflect the impact on city life of the revolt from Spain and the re-conquest of 1585. Through all these great events a constant preoccupation is to ensure the food supply for the city's large population. Much attention is given to the proper regulation of markets. A not untypical edict addressed the problem of irregularities in the poultry trade. It has come to our attention, such an edict might begin, that traders are selling their chickens away from the designated poultry market. It is therefore decreed that from henceforth the following regulations shall apply: and so on, listing a rising scale of penalties for persistent infringers.
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It is easy to pass over the importance of this sort of law-making; historians very often have done, and students of communication have not noticed such cases at all. But for many of Europe's citizens coming to market with a cartload of produce, only to be turned away or have their goods or livestock confiscated, this was the news that really mattered. With this sort of legislation we also detect the beginnings of a news culture that touches on domestic affairs. This was an aspect of news that had previously bubbled along as the domain of word-of-mouth gossip, rather separate from the great events captured in international correspondence and print. In the sixteenth century matters closer to home began to impact on the news prints.

True Crime

Many of Europe's citizens would have witnessed an execution. This was part of the ritual of community life: that malefactors be put to death in the places
where their crimes were committed.
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Most were soon forgotten. Occasionally the details of a particularly heinous or curious crime might be noted by a diarist, or in correspondence. More usually, these cases have their only record in the proceedings of the legal jurisdiction that heard the cases and condemned them. But in the sixteenth century a new type of publication allowed a wider public to experience vicariously the horror or thrill of these villainous acts: the sensational broadsheets.

These illustrated broadsheets became a particular feature of German print culture in the sixteenth century. They are often beautifully designed and crafted. Invariably the top half of the sheet is given over to a woodcut illustration, usually specially cut, describing the event, which is then narrated in text below. Although eminently collectable, these illustrated news broadsheets survive only rarely. Passed around from hand to hand, or posted up on walls, they were often used to destruction. That so many are known today we owe largely to the collecting enthusiasm of one eccentric Swiss clergyman: Johann Jakob Wick.

Wick began collecting soon after his appointment to a position at Zurich Cathedral in 1557.
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Here he would have worked closely with the leaders of the Zurich Church, Heinrich Bullinger and his successor Rudolf Gwalter. Both were important sources for Wick's collection: Bullinger in particular was at the centre of one of Europe's most developed networks of correspondence, and he willingly passed on to his colleague interesting nuggets of news. Wick began collecting in 1560. From then until his death in 1588 he filled one fat volume a year, with reports of great and startling events from Switzerland and beyond. Like all great collectors, Wick was eclectic in his sources. Sometimes he transcribed reports from letters or diplomatic despatches; he took a particular interest in the Huguenot struggle in France. His collection quickly became well known locally, to the extent that visitors would drop by and share notable events and marvels they had seen or heard reported. Wick would carefully transcribe these accounts, along with the texts from news pamphlets he had been loaned. In the scrapbooks many of these manuscript entries are beautifully illustrated with hand-coloured drawings. He would also insert printed items directly into the scrapbooks: a total of 500 pamphlets and 400 broadsheets were interspersed through the pages. An important source for Wick was the Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer, who would bring back material for Wick from the Frankfurt Fair. As a result, and in contrast to the more international character of the transcribed news reports, most of the printed broadsheets in the collection are from Germany.

These news broadsheets constitute an irreplaceable resource for the study of early crime reporting. Stylistically the woodcut illustrations fall into three groups. Some, the smallest number, present a single dramatic moment in the narrative. An example is the tale of an apprentice who murdered a ten-year-old girl and dismembered the body. The woodcut shows the perpetrator surrounded by body parts: an arresting image, although crudely done.
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More often the woodcut presented several scenes from the drama in a sequence that scrolls around the landscape from the crime scene to the place of execution. This format, well known from the Passion narratives of late medieval painting, was particularly well adapted to crime reporting, where the cruelty of the mode of execution was matched to the shocking nature of the crime. Several of these broadsheets show a notorious criminal being tortured on their way to the place of execution, there to be broken on the wheel.
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A variation of this narrative form was to have the drama broken up into separate scenes, in the manner of a strip cartoon. One crime that we find represented in both ways is the shocking case of Blasius Endres, who, on discovering that his wife was stealing money from him, murdered her and their six young children.
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These crimes were committed in Wangen, 150 kilometres north of Zurich. One of
the broadsheets was printed in Lindau, the other in Augsburg, 150 kilometres further north. News of the most spectacular crimes spread widely, and also found its echo in the pamphlet literature.

4.3 True crime. A graphic representation of the murder of a young woman by a German apprentice.

The exemplary character of crime and punishment was not diminished by distance, nor particularly by time. The London printer Thomas Purfoot published in 1586 an account of a triple murder committed by a Frenchman in Rouen, the victims being an innkeeper, his wife and child.
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Readers would be chilled at the predicament of a family slaughtered by a stranger in their home – it did not matter that in this case the events occurred abroad. The recitation of shocking and unnatural deeds, decorously clothed in a narrative of horror, discovery and signal justice, catered to many tastes, godly and ghoulish, and ensured a steady market for these sorts of news pamphlets.
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In such cases cruel and exemplary punishment was seen as a necessary part of the fight between good and evil. The world was full of danger, and many lived a life of quiet desperation. In a society where only very limited resources were available to the state for preventative policing measures, it was widely believed that only the fear of a gruesome death could act as a deterrent. In the literature of crime, most of those apprehended went to their deaths sorrowful and repentant. To die a good death was an important part of the healing process.
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In his diary Wick records the case of a young thief who went to the place of execution cracking jokes along the way. He died with the words, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my soul’.
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This last case was not sufficiently memorable to merit publication. The broadsheets concentrated on the most arresting cases, such as the man who allegedly disguised himself as the Devil to commit his crimes.
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Cases like this shaded easily into the wider literature of sensational and supernatural events that were the stock in trade of the news broadsheets. Publishers and woodcut artists turned out a steady diet of monstrous births, strange animals, unusual weather events and natural disasters.
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Earthquakes and floods were chronicled with some care. By far the most popular with the buying public were tales of celestial apparitions. These could be meteors or comets, or the vision of an armed man, a flaming cross, or horsemen riding through the sky. Wick chronicled these events assiduously and without scepticism. Comets and other heavenly perturbations were widely interpreted as portents of future calamities. A spectacular showing of the Northern Lights in 1560 was associated with an extraordinary number of different events over the following decade. Wick possessed a magnificent, if not particularly authentic representation of the Aurora Borealis from a later manifestation.
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In 1571 he transcribed into his notebooks an excerpt from a French pamphlet written by Nostradamus describing a comet seen in the sky over Langres. Wick returned to this page some time later to add a further sober reflection: ‘I believe this apparition could
be seen as a warning and presentment of the terrible murders that occurred the following year on St Bartholomew's day in Paris, and other places in France.’
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The news prints showed a particular fascination with the crimes of women. This was partly because they were exceptionally rare. A comprehensive survey of German legal documents for sixteenth-century Württemberg finds that only about 5 per cent of crimes concerned women.
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Spectacular cases, such as the English pamphlet account of a woman who incited her lover to kill her husband, were thus all the more newsworthy. They also spoke to society's deepest fears of attacks on established social and gender hierarchies. Particularly shocking were crimes by women against their own children. One particularly wrenching broadsheet from 1551 illustrated the case of a woman who had murdered her four children before committing suicide.
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In common with many of the broadsheets, the text narrative is in verse: the starving woman had seen no other way out of her predicament. Such a story spoke to the most dreadful anxieties of a society where many lived on the edge of subsistence, and where a sudden change of fortune, the death of a breadwinner, adverse weather, the incidence of war, could plunge them into destitution. Such anxieties help explain the popularity of a very different tale of providential deliverance, in which a starving family is saved by a shower of corn. This marvellous example of divine inspiration was the subject of several broadsheets and pamphlets, and even turned up in an English collection of
God's marvellous wonders
at the very end of the seventeenth century.
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The morbid fascination with hailstorms and extreme weather also speaks to the same nagging anxieties about the food supply.

Most of the crime pamphlets and broadsheets were published without naming the author of the accompanying text. But where the author is known, a significant number were clergymen. This is less surprising than it might seem. Such dramatic narratives offered the opportunity for a living sermon: a story with a lesson to teach. Horrid crimes confirmed the ministers’ theological sense of the utter depravity of human nature and the ceaseless activity of the Devil. The success of the 1551 broadsheet describing the murder of four children by a starving mother owed a great deal to the skilful writing of Burkard Waldis, a Lutheran pastor. Waldis was a prolific writer of fables, plays and anti-papal satire, and he was able to wring every drop of pathos from the terrible scene, as when the young son, cornered in the cellar, pleads for his life: