The genre of military news in England registered an astonishing transformation in its standards of credibility in the hundred years before the outbreak of the British Civil Wars. Credibility – truth – resided first in news transmitted and believed by means of oral communication and public ritual. A first challenge to this was by the class of English gentlemen, who formed a new standard of credibility based on honour and sociability, transmitted semi-privately by means of the humanist letter. Commercialization of the military news undid the standard of credibility based on honour and sociability; the first generation of printed news attempted in various ways to mimic honourable and sociable standards of credibility; while this was not ultimately successful, it did serve to shift the object of credibility from the person writing to the naked text. The second generation instead proffered the new standard of extensive credibility, whereby credibility was assembled from multiple, anonymous texts; it also brought forth the editor, the commercial professional whose judgement of credibility, better suited for a world of extensive anonymity, replaced the honourable gentleman's. Gentle newsreaders, so far as we can tell from a relatively thin evidentiary base, seem fairly quickly to have accepted the shifting standards of credibility proffered by the rhetoric of the newswriters; the rhetoric is itself circumstantial evidence that newsreaders in general accepted these shifting standards.

Military news does not necessarily tell us much about the other genres of news in pre-Civil War England – domestic political news, wonder-stories, crime-stories, etc. To the extent that they also became anonymous and commercial at the same time, it seems likely that a similar transformation in standards of credibility occurred in them. Nevertheless, they were never travellers' tales in the same way as military news, and so unlikely to have become so totally socially unmoored as the military news. Even if they did acquire extensive credibility at the same time, we should expect that the specific circumstances of their genres played as important a part in the narrative of their transformations as the specific circumstances of the military news played in its narrative.