The space allotted in a seventeenth-century newspaper to domestic and to foreign news varied considerably from one paper to another. In the early years of the Restoration, Muddiman and L'Estrange published a good deal of foreign news, and the Gazette had often little else to offer. Later, when the unlicensed newspapers were appearing, foreign news might take up one, or even two, of the four columns available in such a paper as Smith's Currant Intelligence. On the other hand, Harris, Thompson and Benskin, all of whow had the words ‘Domestick Intelligence: or, News both from City and Country’ in their titles, showed comparatively little interest in what was happening abroad, either because their appeal was to less educated readers, or because their papers were appearing in years of political crisis, when foreign affairs were crowded out by more pressing issues at home. In the reigns of William and Anne, when England was at war with France, European affairs inevitably became more important for most readers, and papers such as the Post Man and the Daily Courant concentrated on the latest foreign news. When the six-page weeklies began to appear in the second decade of the eighteenth century, and the problem of how to fill so much extra space arose, it was partly answered by including a considerable section of foreign news, whether readers wanted it or not.