The printer's


In journalism’s first days, printing home news could land you in jail. Jonathan Sale reports from the 17th century


T


homas Archer, a printer based in Pope’s Head Alley off Cornhill in the City of London, made his mark twice in the early pages of journalism. In 1621, he became


the first person to bring out in England what could be called in any sense a newspaper; and, in late summer of the same year, became the first person in the news business to be imprisoned because of his trade. It was not the betrayal of state secrets or


hacking into private correspondence of 17th century citizens that caused Archer to be escorted through the prison gates. It was not that he had infringed the tyrannical Star Chamber’s ban on the publication of any domestic news – he obediently confined himself to items about the other side of the Channel, which would not stir up anti-government feelings on this side of it. Even then, he would surely have avoided anything contentious: in the fraught Catholic vs Protestant atmosphere, he would have watched his step as surely as if there had been a notice pinned up in his office commanding: ‘Don’t mention the Thirty Years’ War!’


His mistake was a failure to obtain the official licence necessary for his publication, a ‘coranto’, to come out at all. This was one of a new breed of printed journals or newsletters providing a ‘current’ of flowing news. (It was also known as a corrant, corante or courant – in the 17th century there was no spellcheck or indeed spellchecke.) Consisting often of only a single sheet of paper, scrappily printed and coming out sporadically, corantos were what the 17th century had instead of the internet. These newsletters began in Germany and took off in a bigger way in Holland, with Amsterdam becoming the news hub of Europe. The Dutch corantos were written, naturally enough, in Dutch. However, the Corrant out of Italy, Germany etc was a different kettle of font. It occurred to Pieter van den Keere, an Amsterdam map-engraver who had worked in England, that he could recycle material from Dutch corontos by having articles translated into English and exported across the Channel. The heavy linguistic lifting could be done by the untouched pool of, well, not exactly talent, let’s say unskilled labour hanging around Amsterdam in the shape of dissident Puritans and mercenaries waiting for their next gig on the battlefields of Europe. The result was the Corrant out of Italy,


Germany etc. The first edition wasn’t called by that title or indeed anything at all, while later editions of the Corrant did bear that name but with slight variations of it in the mastheads. This may or may not have been a way of keeping the editorial head down; would it fool the dimmer


secret policemen into thinking these were all different papers with different proprietors? Another low-key element of the launch edition


was the splash, which demonstrated that, being an engraver, the publisher had a somewhat idiosyncratic news sense: ‘The French ambassadour hath caused the Earle of Dampier to be buried stately at Presburg.’ This was a hard act to follow and van den Keere may well have hoped that he could top it with, say, a fascinating account of a deceased Italian aristocrat who had been given a stately send-off. Sadly, the post from Rome was delayed, to judge by a story (if that’s the word) which began: “The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com,” an interesting variant on the concept that no news is good news. Still, there was plenty more where that came from – ie the back numbers of the Dutch publications – and soon several rival corontos were being hurriedly translated and printed in time to catch the next boat tacking across the North Sea. The Dutchmen were flying high: coranto affairs sailed along smoothly, ticking over financially on circulations of a mere 500 copies. And they were all safe from the attention of the king of England. At least they were for a while. Coming between


the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, those were politically edgy times. To James I, all this anodyne stuff about an earl’s burial arrangements and Italy being very quiet was as contentious as Wikileaks today: too much information for the hoi polloi to be trusted to handle. Although James could not lock up proprietors who were safely over the water, he could and did tell the Dutch authorities that he


10 | theJournalist


HULTON ARCHIVE


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