News traditionally was communicated by word of mouth and by participation in or observation of ritual actions; oral and ritual news persisted into early modern England, and formed the matrix within which written news would accommodate itself. Late medieval and Renaissance England saw the rise of news conveyed by writing: formed by the genre conventions of the ars dictaminis, the art of letter-writing primarily used by medieval administrators, the news letter spilled out of the bureaucratic letter and into the genre of the private letter. The supply of such letters rose sharply along with the rise in size of the Renaissance English state; so too did the demand for such letters, as humanist notions of civic virtue and the duty to counsel combined to provide England's political nation a rationale to read and write the news. England's sovereigns, however, while sometimes willing to channel this urge toward their own purposes, persistently mistrusted the impulse to communicate news independent of royal sanction; indeed, the proliferation of news in early modern England, particularly printed news, may even have sharpened the impulse to censor news by early Stuart times. The conflicting impulses of censorship and counsel turned upon the credibility of the news; news, to justify itself against censorship, would have to establish itself as credible.

Oral News

Early modern Englishmen (all too human) were an incurably gabby lot: they talked, they listened, they hungered for news. Peddlers' gossip and private letters broadcast the latest tidings. News spread by rivers, coasts, and roads, was shared at a family dinner, imbibed by friends at the back table of an alehouse, and chance-met at fairs, and circulated by all these arteries of communication to the farthest corners of the realm. Men and women of all classes and places inquired after the latest word from travellers of all sorts, and by at least the 1620s literate Englishmen not only read the news themselves but also read the news out loud to their illiterate companions. News in early modern England passed privately from individual to individual.