Page:The Newspaper World.djvu/13

2, it is hardly possible to do other than take the readei over a well-trodden road, but the effort shall at least be made to point out milestones of progress hitherto, it ma> be, overlooked, while essaying to give a clear view of thd* striking features observable in each stage of the onward journey.

It was a century and a half after William Caxton set up the first printing press in England that Nathaniel Butter printed the first weekly newspaper. News was probably disseminated by means of the printing press some time earlier, but not generally by private enterprise. In Queen Elizabeth's time, for example, the Government seems to have distributed printed intelligence about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but private effort in this direction was practically stifled. As Macaulay tells us, "No man could print without a licence; and every work had to undergo the scrutiny of the Primate or of the Bishop of London." There was the same desire for news among Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as is to be found in all ranks of society in the present day, and the demand was met by the circulation of written news-letters sent from London to the country, and containing all the information that the writers were able to gather at the coffee-houses and other places of public resort. Nathaniel Butter, who was one of these news writers, almost at the close of the reign of the first Stuart monarch, conceived the idea of printing his newsletters. In all probability he did this at first experimentally and at irregular intervals, but in 1622, under the title of The Certaine News of the Present Week, he commenced a weekly journal with numbered issues. Some of these small early newspapers were partly printed sheets, with a blank portion left for private communications. A forerunner of the large family of Flying Posts was thus announced: