of 1665 and crushed out L'Estrange; finally, when Williamson tried to deprive him of his newsletter correspondence, Muddiman started another periodical-the official The Current Intelligence (of 1666)—under protection of Monck's cousin, another secretary of state, Sir William Morice. Thus, Williamson was brought to terms. He had to carry on a newsletter correspondence himself after this, in order to feed the Gazette; but his duties prevented his giving his personal attention either to the Gazette or to his newsletters; and, while the former lapsed into a moribund condition, the latter did not pay. The newsletters of the man whom he had attempted to oust became a household word throughout the kingdom.

These newsletters, closely written by clerks (from dictation) on a single sheet, the size and shape of modern foolscap, headed 'Whitehall,' to show their privilege, beginning 'Sir,' and without any signature, misspelt, the writing cramped and crabbed to a degree, but literally crammed with parliamentary and court news, are easily distinguishable from the rarer productions of less successful writers. They were sent post free twice a week, or oftener, for £5 a year and, from the lists of correspondents at the Record office, as well as from numerous references to Muddiman in the various reports of the Historical Manuscripts commission, it is evident that no personage of consequence could afford to dispense with them. A vast number of them still exist; one collection contains a complete series for twenty-two years. They have never yet been systematically calendared and published.

Anthony à Wood continually visited Short's coffee-house in Cat street, Oxford, in order to read 'Muddiman's letter' and was in the habit of paying two shillings 'quarteridge' for them when they were done with. Sir Roger North, in the life of his brother, shows that they were held in much the same esteem at Cambridge.

Once or twice, Muddiman got into trouble. In 1676, the king was much annoyed at a statement made in a newsletter found in a coffee-house, to the effect that a fleet was to sail against Algiers under Sir John Narborough and that the duke of Monmouth was to be one of his captains. The letter was at once suspected to be Muddiman's. Pepys got a copy of it for Williamson, and Muddiman was examined before the council, the king stating that he would not suffer either Muddiman or any other person to divulge anything agitated in council 'till he thought fit to declare it.' When the matter was enquired into, the writer was proved to have been Williamson's own head clerk, and he had to dismiss him. The following year, Muddiman was arrested for 'writing confidently that the Spaniards intended war against England,' but nothing

seems to have come of it. Wood also records in his diary that, in 1686, in the days of James II, Street, judge of assize at Oxford, spoke in his charge to the grand jury against newsletters, particularly Muddiman's, and, after noting that they 'came not to Oxon afterwards,' adds, 'other trite and lying letters came". But, as he was on the popular side and opposed to James II, his letters were soon back again. His Gazette may be said to have been the first printed newspaper, for it at once gained the title of a 'paper' as being a departure from the ancient pamphlet form and no longer a 'book.' It was only 'half a sheet in folio' and clearly designed to be sent with his letters. The word 'newes-paper' was not long in being coined as a result, and, from analogy with this, was at last obtained the word 'newsletter.'

The career of Sir Roger L'Estrange, who supplanted Henry Muddiman for about two years, would (like that of Henry Walker) require a volume to do it justice, if his surveyorship of the press were taken into account. Nevertheless, his role as journalist was brief, uneventful and unimportant. His two periodicals The Intelligencer and The News (31 August 1663 to 29 January 1666) were only half the size of his predecessor's publications and, in 1664, were paged and numbered together as one periodical. This was a device to make them pay. L'Estrange was a better pamphleteer than journalist; his Observator, issued in later years, consisted of nothing but comment without news. When Muddiman put an end to L'Estrange's journals with the Gazette in 1665, L'Estrange, by the king's orders, was pensioned off with £100 a year charged on the Gazette, his future services as surveyor of the press being paid for, in like manner, by £200 a year out of the secret service money.

Of the immense journalistic output which Cromwell had suppressed, the net results at the end of the reign of Charles II were: first, the official recognition of the necessity to gratify the public desire for news, shown in the continuance of the Gazette as a permanent institution; and, secondly, the striking manner in which newsletters were permitted, unfettered and uncensored, for the benefit of the upper classes, to supply the defects of the official print. No longer ridiculed, newsletters at last obtained a place in public esteem which had never been obtained by newsbooks. That, before the end of the century, the liberty of the press should begin and the modern newspaper follow, was but a logical corollary to this.

1 Jeffreys took the extreme step of suppressing coffee-houses that 'dealt in newsletters.' Ellis correspondence, by A. Ellis, II, p. 243.

CHAPTER XVI

THE ADVENT OF MODERN THOUGHT IN POPULAR LITERATURE

THE WITCH CONTROVERSY. PAMPHLETEERS

THE enlightenment of the renascence had never penetrated the deeper recesses of the popular mind. The social, religious and economic revolutions of Tudor times; the fermentation of city life under Elizabeth and James; the growth of national consciousness; the discoveries of travellers and men of science; above all, the popularisation of biblical and classical literature, had added enormously to the interests and imagination of the ordinary man, without transforming his sentiments, convictions and ideals. His mental vision was crowded with new and engrossing objects, but his outlook remained medieval. It was the task of the Jacobean and Caroline generations to effect a mental reformation. Had the age been a time of political peace and social calm, the first half of the seventeenth century would have proved to be one of the most interesting epochs in English literature. In an atmosphere of learning and discussion, humanists of the period would have adjusted their heritage of old-time beliefs and aspirations to the maturer, more tolerant wisdom of Erasmus, More, Wier, Bullein, Montaigne, Scot, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Earle and Bacon. All that was best in the Middle Ages would have expanded into modern thought, and a second, more spiritual renascence would have inspired a series of masterpieces, such as the work of Vergil and Molière, in which the past and present join hands. As it was, though knowledge continued to increase, the thoughts and emotions of the people were diverted by class hatred, religious controversy and the political crisis. The consciousness of fellowship, essential to intellectual progress, had died out. Thus, humanists, instead of broadening and redirecting the tendencies of popular thought, either relapsed into scepticism, as in the instances of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, or let loose their

augmented volume of learning and sentiment into the old, narrow channels. Whenever an age fails to find new interests, intellectual intemperance results. And, just as, at an earlier date, social writers lost touch with ideas and squandered their originality on experiments in style1, so, now, the more learned divines and physicians devoted their scholarship and research to the barren mysteries of demonology.

In order to understand the witch controversy of the seventeenth century, it is necessary to remember that primitive people had always cherished a veneration for the 'wise woman", probably a relic of the mother-worship of the premigratory period, and that her broom, ladle and goat may, possibly, be regarded as symbols of her domestic power. She was supplanted by the new polytheism of warrior spirits; and, when they gave way, in their turn, to Christianity, some of the dispossessed deities became saints, while others went to join this earlier deity in the traditions and folk-lore of the people. As western Christendom became familiar with the teaching of the Greek church and with eastern religions—at first by the researches of theologians and then through the Saracenic wars in Spain and the crusades-these rites and superstitions were gradually coloured with rabbinical conceptions of the devil's hierarchy and with the Neoplatonic doctrine of demons and intermediary powers. Despite the rationalism of Jean de Meung and Roger Bacon3, patristic conceptions of demonology were codified and systematised in the Middle Ages. Such superstitions as the incubus and succubus, the transmutation of men into beasts, the power to fly by night were then, definitely, incorporated in medieval theological conceptions. From the twelfth or thirteenth century onwards, new feelings of horror and loathing began to be associated with this entanglement of traditions. Not only was the underworld of disinherited deities regarded as a rival by the Church, and, therefore, credited with the infamies which are usually attributed to heretics', but as men struggled towards a higher level of civilisation, they instinctively accused these pariahs of all that they were endeavouring to eliminate from their own daily lives. The calamities and controversies of the fifteenth and

1 See ante, vol. Iv, chap. XVI.

2 Karl Pearson: see essays on Woman as Witch,' 'Ashiepattle,' 'Kindred Groupmarriage' in vol. 11 of Chances of Death, 1897.

3 Roman de la Rose, pt. 11, c. 1280. Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis operibus artis et natura et de nullitate magiae, c. 1250 (ptd Theatrum Chimicum, Nürnberg, 1732).

See, especially, the bull of Gregory IX, 13 June 1233.

sixteenth centuries only added to men's sense of danger and misery and inspired a yet more pessimistic school of demonologists, led by Jacquier, Institoris and Sprenger. By the time we reach the seventeenth century, the imaginary realm of spirits, ghosts, gnomes, fairies, demons, prophets and conjurors-now stigmatised as the implacable enemies of mankind—became allegories or symbols of all that was degraded, perverted, revolting or terrible. The devil, from being a denizen of lonely or impassable places, had now grown to be the monarch of innumerable hosts. As the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been disgraced in the eyes of the priesthood by blasphemous parodies, so, now, the diabolical empire was believed to be a monstrous imitation of the kingdom of heaven, with disgusting travesties of church ritual. The fiend's one object was to seduce mortals from the worship of God, and as, from early Christian times, both monkish doctrinaires and secular humorists had depicted women as loose, malevolent or ridiculous, so, now, it was with this sex rather than with men that he found his easiest victims and most willing allies. This predilection stimulated the dreams of diseased imagination. The witch or 'wise woman' was looked upon as the devil's chosen handmaiden. The most elaborate pornography grew up around this supposed union, and the witches' sabbath or Walpurgis night—a relic of mother-worship, at which licence abounded-was conceived to be a kind of devil's mass, at which debauchery ran riot1. Other obsessions came to be connected with the witch horror. From prehistoric times certain animals had been regarded as spirits of evil. Recollections of these legends blended with the fear of noisome and poisonous animals, and led men to believe that such creatures were auxiliaries of Black Magic. Human deformity abounded in medieval slums, and people still believed in monsters half man and half beast. And, as witches were hideous hags, men attributed to these old women the birth of abortions such as Hedelin2, Stengesius and Paré described and the people themselves read of in broadsides.

From prehistoric times, men had been, and were still, accustomed to regard the trivial enterprises and interests of bucolic life as under the influence of witches. Such things as the growth

1 See Jules Baissac, Les Grands Jours de la Sorcellerie, 1890, chap. vi. See, also, chap. vir in Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, by Fuchs, E., 1909.

2 Des Satyres, Brutes, Monstres et Demons. De leur Nature et Adoration, par Francois Hedelin, 1627. (Hedelin is better known as the Abbé d'Aubignac.)

2 De Monstris et Monstrosis, 1647 (?).

• Deux livres de chirurgie, 1573. Eng. trans. by Johnson, T., 1649.