The printing explosion 1640-1660 - Christopher Hill

John Foxe attributed 'this gift of printing' to direct divine intervention. Printing greatly facilitated the spread of the Reformation in Europe, and made the fortunes of many Swiss and German towns, Lollards had circulated manuscript Bibles in English for over a century before Henry VIII's Reformation, but they were expensive—as well as dangerous. The printed vernacular text was a very different proposition. Printing stimulated learning to read; and this in return stimulated cheap printing and distribution of other books, as well as the Bible. It was a cultural revolution. Direct access to the Bible gave assurance to laymen against the clergy who hitherto had monopolised the sacred text. Henry VIII found it necessary by 1643 to abolish 'diversity of opinions', but legislation proved insufficient.

There was a minor printing explosion in Edward VI's reign. Pop-ular Protestantism was not always popular with the ecclesiastical hierarchy: it led to social heresies. Christopher Marlowe towards the end of Elizabeth's reign was alleged to have 'read the atheist lecture' to Sir Walter Ralegh and others, discussing biblical criticism, the contradictions of scripture, comparative religion, with the scientist Thomas Hariot and others; the government's informers were scandalised. Ralegh in his History of the World saw Christianity as only one of many religions, and went in for a good deal of textual criticism. By that time expansion of English trade to the eastern Mediterranean and the Far East had brought Englishmen into contact with Islam and other sophisticated religions; and the Turks—suddenly a great power—were seen as possible allies against Spain and popery. The Koran was translated into English in the freedom of 1649. It worried Bunyan.

'The art of printing', said a pamphlet of 1641, 'will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression' (Macaria).

Professor Eisenstein sees the spread of printing as a great cultural turning point. Before 1640 there were no English newspapers: they were illegal. By 1645 there were 722. These figures come from the collection made by George Thomason, a bookseller friend of Milton's, who recognised the exceptional nature of the times in which he lived. He made a point of purchasing a copy of everything published in England between 1640 and 1660. In 1640 he made 22 purchases; in 1642 he made over 2,000. Production of books and pamphlets proceeded at an average rate of over 1,000 a year. What we can never tell is how many people read these books, or had them read to them—in market places, in the New Model Army. Nor do we know how many potential authors refrained from publishing before 1640. The millenarian Joseph Mede did not risk publication of his speculations under Laud; his works were published on the insistence of Parliament after 1640. Thomas Hobbes, the greatest philosopher of his day, published his first English book in 1642, when he was 54 years of age—the age at which Shakespeare stopped writing. The early Stuart censorship was only intermittently effective; but in the two generations before 1640 there is hardly a well known poet, dramatist or historian who had not suffered from it. A great number of books by now famous authors—some by Bacon, the last three books of Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiasticol Polity, Sir Edward Coke's Reports and Institutes, appeared only after the censorship had collapsed.1 This sudden outburst of publication creates optical illusions. Bacon's ideas seem suddenly to become popular but they had probably previously circulated in manuscript, underground.

Perhaps even more important is the appearance after 1640 of books by persons without university education and all the conventional assumptions associated with that upbringing.

What we shall never know fully is how much continuity of underground radical use of the Bible there was from Lollards through Foxe's martyrs down to the apparently sudden appearance of biblical radicalism in the 1640s. We know that there was continuity in certain geographical areas, and in certain subjects—use of the Bible to criticise the sacraments and ceremonies of the church, denunciations of idolatry and encouragement of iconoclasm, millenarianism, the saints to judge the world, perfection in this life, the idea that all men and women may be saved, lay mechanic preaching, biblical criticism; and for recurrent heresies—mortalism, anti-Trinitarianism, scepticism about the existence of heaven, hell, the devil and sin, rejection of church marriage. Thomas Nashe speaks of a variety of sects already existing in the 1590s, with their own 'mechanic preachers'2 .

Whether there was continuity of radical ideas or not, there can be no doubt about the wealth of unorthodox theories, some of them fairly sophisticated, which surfaced after the breakdown of censorship. This aspect of the printing explosion of the 1640s is not always sufficiently emphasised. For the first time in English history anyone could get into print who could persuade a printer that there was money in his or her idea. Significant numbers of persons (including women) who had had no university education, often no grammar school education even, found no obstacles to publication.

So reading matter was no longer supplied only by people who shared a classical education and assumed that discussion must be conducted according to established formal rules, starting from a syllogism. What became the radicals' manifesto was a sermon entitled The Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching without Humane-Learning, published by Cobbler How in 1640. He argued that while learning might be useful to scholars, lawyers and gentlemen, uneducated persons were preferable to scholars in the pulpit, since the Spirit's teaching was all that mattered for understanding 'the mind of God'. All men should read the Bible and decide for themselves, not as the learned told them. How died a few months after his sermon appeared, but it attracted much attention. Of the 20,000 or so books and pamphlets published between 1640 and 1660, the majority were by authors who were 'illiterate' in the eyes of academics. They knew as little Latin or Greek as Shakespeare. So in the interregnum discussions there was no longer a shared background of classical scholarship; the rules of logic which structured academic controversy were ignored. University scholars treated the newcomers with contempt, and this in its turn fuelled opposition to the universities as such. The whole classical curriculum and conventions of academic argument were called in question. Indeed, were universities of any use at all?

Self taught men like Gerrard Winstanley stressed proudly that they got their ideas not from books, or from other men, but either direct from God, or from the Bible, or from common sense. Writers of the calibre of the Leveller leaders John Lilburne, William Walwyn and John Wildman, the Ranters Clarkson, Coppin and Salmon, the Quakers Fox, Nayler, Isaac Penington and Arthur Pearson, the Muggletonians John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, the biblical critic Clement Writer, the opponent of witch persecution John Webster, a religious writer like William Erbery, wholly secular writers like William Blith the agricultural reformer, William Lilly the astrologer and Francis Os-borne the essayist—all these could beat academics at their own games. Many of those I have named were important opinion formers. They were supported by university men like William Dell who joined in the attack on academic education. 'Antichrist chose his ministers from the universities,' remarked Dell. John Bunyan was deeply hurt by academic sneers at him for daring to preach and write without a proper education. He consoled himself with the reflection that God's own were not gentlemen, could not with Pontius Pilate speak Hebrew, Greek and Latin.3

In the 1640s uneducated men and women read back into the Bible themselves and their problems, and the problems of their communities, and found biblical answers there, which they could discuss with others who shared the same problems. It was a great period for public disputation. Jordan noted at least 78 recorded meetings of this type in which Baptists were involved.4 The conclusions emerging from these biblical discussions were many and varied, not all popular with educated parliamentarians. Radicals in Chelmsford were said to think that the relation of master and servant had no ground in scripture: that peerage and gentry were 'ethnical and heathenish distinctions'. They found no ground in nature or scripture why one man should have £1,000 a year, and another not £1. Universities should be abolished.5 Baxter noted that 'the antinomian doctrine is the very same in almost every point, which I find naturally fastened in the hearts of the common profane multitude!6 That was a good reason for not tolerating it. Milton proudly celebrated the ferment of uncontrolled discussion in Areopagitica (1644).

By 1644 Edmund Calamy in a Fast Sermon was complaining that `the people of the City of London have almost disputed away their repentance'; in discussing 'this opinion or that opinion' about discipline, faith and repentance were forgotten.7 Liberty of discussion seemed to conservatives to be subverting the discipline whose establishment they saw as the only way to recover God's favour.

What are you the better for having the Scripture in your own language? When it was locked up in the Latin tongue by the policy of Rome, you might have had a learned friar for your money at any time (to have interpreted the same); and though now you have it in your own language, you are taught not to trust your own understanding (have a care of your purses!), you must have an university man to interpret the English... Let me prevail with you to free yourselves from this bondage.8

The Leveller leader John Lilburne was said to have the Bible in one hand and the legal writings of Sir Edward Coke in the other. He claimed that his attack on bishops 'could neither be factious nor seditious, unless the Book of God be faction and sedition, which were blasphemy once to think'.9 'God has revealed the way of eternal salvation', Milton declared, 'only to the individual faith of each man, and demands of us that any man who wishes to be saved should work out his beliefs for himself.' So he justified his religious creed, for which his only authority, he said, was 'God's self revelation' in 'the Holy Scriptures'.10 The concept of social revolution also emerged in the forties and fifties, in Biblical phrases like 'the world turned upside down' and Ezekiel's 'overturn, overturn, overturn'.11

The 20 years freedom of talk and publication proved a turning point in many respects. In politics, for instance, Levellers produced democratic and republican political theories of some sophistication; Winstanley and the Diggers, theories of communism; Ranters advocated free love and sexual permissiveness. Hobbes, Harrington, Milton, Marchamont Nedham were the first Englishmen to produce political theories of lasting interest (if we except More, whose Utopia was written in Latin). These theories look forward to Locke and the European Enlightenment.

In science England had been a backwater. James | had no use for the scientific ideas of his Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon: his writings came into their own only after 1640, many published for the first time. In the 1650s science flourished in a purged Oxford and elsewhere, and received government support. After 1660 the scientists came together to found the Royal Society of London, of which Charles Il wisely became patron. Its first secretary, John Wilkins, was symbolically both the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell and a future bishop. Margaret Jacob, who knows about these things, said that lsaac Newton was ‘unthinkable without the English Revolution’. Professor Eisenstein thought that in the generally repressive atmosphere of the later 17th century modern science survived only because of the freedom of the press in England and the Netherlands.

In England the science of political economy was invented by William Petty, John Graunt, Gregory King, leading on to John Locke. Quakers, refusing to haggle at the market, helped to standardise prices. Simultaneously with political economy the English invented the novel—England’s contribution to world literature.

Even the reaction in England after 1660 could not efface the memory of the revolutionary years. Freedom of discussion and freedom for protestant dissenters to worship in their own way were too well established. After the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695 there was no longer a government or ecclesiastical censorship. Quakers censored and often drastically amended books by their members; publishers did not accept books which they regarded as dangerously radical. Writings by Milton, Marvell and Ludlow were published, not the writings of Levellers and Diggers.

• 1See my Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England (1985), pp39-54. Ditto plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Massenger, Middleton, Dekker, Ford, Shirley; John Dorme's sermons and other prose; Firm jonson's prose; poems by George Herbert, Carew and Corbett, Our knowledge oldie great age of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature would have been far law complete without the outburst of printing between 1540 and 1600, and the expansion of popular demand.
• 2See my Religion and Politics in 17th Century England, pp89-116; T Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, his Supplication to the Divell (1592) (G B Harrison (ed)., 1924) pp27, 57.
• 3The joke had been made in 1655, three years earlier, by two Quaker women, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, To the Priests and People of England. But Bunyan, who prided himself on not raking his ideas from other people, would hardly have cribbed from Quaker women.
• 4See A Hughes, 'The Meaning of Religious Polemic: Oral Debate and Pamphlet Controversies in the 1640s and 1650s'—Millersville.
• 5[Anon], Angliae Ruinia (1647). p27.
• 6Quoted by WM Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (1979), pp128, 143.
• 7FS, XIII, pp124, 145; cf PL II 556.561—'in wandering mazes lost'.
• 8W Walwyn, The Power of Love (1643), p47, in Writings, pp95-96.
• 9J Lilburne, Come Out of Her My People (1639), p25.
• 10M C P W, VI, pp118-121.
• 11Psalm CXLVI, 9, Isaiah, XXIV, 1-2, 20-1, Acts, XVII, 1-6, Ezekiel. XXI, 27.