Early modern Europe’s most famous town crier was fictional. The satirical Spanish novella The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, published in at least six languages and more than eighty editions from 1554 onwards, sees the eponymous hero adopt a variety of apprenticeships and professions, including that of a crier:
For it is my duty to proclaim the wines that are sold in this city,
And [to cry] at auctions and lost property sales,
to accompany those who suffer persecution for justice
and to declare their crimes aloud: a crier, speaking in good Romance.Footnote 1
The travails of Lazarillo the crier would have been immediately familiar to the broad European public that was exposed to his adventures in multiple languages. In Spanish, he was a pregonero, a term closely related to the Latin praeco (crier) and the Italian preco or precone.Footnote 2 Various Italian cities also used the term banditore, comandadore or cintraco to refer to the same individual, linguistically emphasising the relationship between the crier and the law (ordinances were often called bandi or commandare). A similar bond was evoked in France with the use of juré-crieur or crieur public to refer to the town crier. Likewise, the German, Dutch and English titles stadrufer, stadsroeper and town crier or common crier underscored the relationship between the crier and the community that they served.
The town crier was a significant civic figure in early modern Europe, instantly recognisable to their fellow citizens as they regularly trod or rode a defined circuit through the community in their distinctive livery. In virtually every European town, criers were publicly appointed and formally represented the authority of the ruling council or court. This representation was often emphasised through their dress, the use of musical instruments and the ceremony involved in their rounds. The crier’s voice embodied the law and the good governance of the community. Yet at the same time they were often closer in status to the people to whom they communicated edicts than to the councillors in the town hall who determined their messaging. The crier was also, crucially, an agent of the public, available upon (often tightly regulated) payment to announce commercial or personal news, from the sale of goods or real estate to the loss of valuables.
References to town criers abound in literature and popular culture, both early modern and contemporary, from Hamlet (act iii, scene 2) to the video game series Assassin’s Creed or an episode of The Simpsons. Criers in such media are typically depicted as colourful and comedic purveyors of news. This trope is strengthened by the survival of extravagantly dressed criers who perform ceremonial roles in many European communities today, mostly out of civic pride, and for the entertainment of locals and tourists alike.Footnote 3 The town crier’s office existed already in ancient Rome, but in the broader popular imagination they are most commonly associated with urban medieval Europe. Likewise, many scholars who have investigated town criers have concerned themselves with a period between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote 4 Criers are in this respect strongly identified with an era of communication that predates the invention of printing and the mass adoption of paper over parchment. In his influential study of the criers of late medieval Florence, Stephen Milner speculates that the relevance and power of town criers diminished once print became fully embedded in urban culture in sixteenth-century Italy.Footnote 5
By contrast, this article argues that it was only during the early modern period that town criers were fully institutionalised throughout Europe, and became fundamental to strategies of state communication. The rise of the town crier was closely tied to a marked increase in the issuing of law across the continent. Early modern state formation and bureaucratisation led to far more frequent regulation of daily life, epitomised not least by the emergence of notions of gute policey, or the good policing of society.Footnote 6 Rising demands for taxation by monarchs and estates filtered down to civic governments, which were forced to extract ever larger sums from their communities, thereby prompting greater regulation over commercial and industrial activity. Even in smaller municipalities less affected by such activity, there was a drive to regulate and control information at the local level.
The general expansion of lawmaking and the growing use of print by political authorities in the early modern period led directly to their greater reliance on town criers. It was a widely established norm in Europe that laws had to be orally proclaimed to be considered valid.Footnote 7 Proclamations were important political ceremonies, but they were also vital as a practical means of informing the public and explaining the need for legislation. Given that the early modern period was marked by a rapidly expanding media landscape, in which information became more accessible in a range of commercial and non-commercial media, authorities began to place greater emphasis on projecting their voice, influence and power.Footnote 8 The increasing use of paper and print for the codification and communication of laws did not diminish the importance of orality. As multiple scholars have pointed out, there was a close interaction between oral, handwritten and printed means of communication.Footnote 9 Town criers were ideally suited to operate at the intersection of these different media. Notices recording their oral proclamations were printed at the bottom of edicts, particularly in Italy and France, a practice that became increasingly common from the second half of the seventeenth century. Similarly, in many parts of Europe criers were responsible for posting up placards of the texts that they announced orally. These key elements of the state communication process demonstrate how the town crier acted as a mediator between oral and written culture, embodying the concept of ‘intermediality’ recently popularised in the early modern context by Daniel Bellingradt and Massimo Rospocher.Footnote 10
In the present article, we examine the town crier’s profile and activities as an agent of state communication in early modern Europe. Despite their evident importance, early modern town criers have yet to receive any systematic or comparative study, a gap we seek to address here. In the historiography of early modern Europe, criers most often appear incidentally or tend to be the focus of specialised local studies. Criers are mentioned in numerous scholarly investigations of the early modern period, many of which concentrate naturally enough on politics, information, urban culture and soundscapes, but which also include topics as varied as East Anglian land reclamations, Parisian scandals, and race relations in sixteenth-century Seville.Footnote 11 In none of these studies, however, do criers take centre stage.
Important to the early development of the field was Michèle Fogel’s 1989 monograph on the rituals of political information in ancien régime France, which stressed the function of Parisian criers within the ceremonial culture of French state communication under Louis XIII and Louis XIV.Footnote 12 More recently, Gautier Mingous and Jamie Cumby have explored the role of criers in disseminating official information in sixteenth-century Lyon, and Filippo de Vivo and Isabel Castro Rojas have done the same for criers in Venice and Madrid respectively.Footnote 13 Claire Judde de Larivière and Marco Francalanci have shone additional light on the general activities and status of sixteenth-century criers in Murano, an island dependency of Venice, and Milan.Footnote 14 Arthur der Weduwen, Demi van Breukelen and Tom Ottens have recently conducted a broader survey of town criers across the Dutch Republic, for the first time extending the study of criers into the eighteenth century, and in the process underscoring the importance of the office of the crier even for small towns and villages.Footnote 15
This new yet comparatively modest interest in town criers further enriches the growing attention paid by scholars of early modern Europe to processes of state formation, government communication, the regulation of information and sound, and orality more broadly.Footnote 16 Nonetheless, the relative obscurity of town criers in the historiography is also mirrored by their marginal position in the source base that enables us to study them; few archival collections are specifically devoted to the crier’s office. However, information on criers can be found dispersed throughout municipal and national archives across Europe. When one begins to look for evidence of town criers in registers of payments, instructions for civic officials, collections of proclamations or ordinances, court registers, or even newspaper advertisements, the quantity of references to criers can become overwhelming. But variations in the surviving records between different towns, and internal inconsistencies within archives themselves pose a major challenge. The first official instructions for a town crier from a particular municipality might date from 1636, for example, but this does not mean that a crier was not active before then. Payment registers or collections of edicts may be in large part incomplete, presenting a fragmented picture that often prevents direct comparisons across space and time.
What we will attempt here, then, is to paint a portrait of an understudied civic official in early modern Europe by piecing together this fragmentary source base, drawn from our own archival research as well as existing literature. This research emerges out of the ERC-selected, UKRI-funded COMLAWEU project, hosted at the University of St Andrews.Footnote 17 The core of our archival work has concentrated on towns and cities in France, Italy, the Netherlands, northern Germany, Sweden and Poland, where collectively we have worked in over forty archives in search of town criers. Additional archival research has been conducted in Riga, Vilnius and Oslo, while relevant published literature has also been consulted for other parts of Europe (Spain, Britain, Southern Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark). While this by no means equates to an exhaustive European survey, it has allowed us to identify some overarching similarities, as well as key differences, in the importance, profile and activities of criers across the continent that we hope will guide future research.
The article first describes the general character of the town crier’s office and duties, and their relative importance to the governance and regulation of information. We then explore how official crying was not an uncomplicated political and social practice in the early modern period. Because they often held a monopoly on announcing information, criers might be challenged by individuals or authorities who asserted the right to make their own proclamations. The article finally turns to the ritual performance of criers’ duties. It emphasises the central role that the performance of the law played in the creation and maintenance of urban political space, as well as the bonds between rulers and ruled. From maintaining order, the practice of crying could itself produce tension and conflict between people and institutions. As highly visible representatives of state and municipal governments, criers became focal points for resistance to authority, attracting opprobrium and sometimes even violence.
The crier’s office and duties
When Dutch settlers in 1635 drafted the statutes for their new town of Friedrichstadt, founded in western Holstein at the behest of Duke Frederick III of Holstein-Gottorp, they included the office of town crier as a pillar of civic governance. They noted that ‘it is habitual in all cities that there is a public crier, whose announcements give notice to all citizens’.Footnote 18 This does not seem to have been an overstatement. We have found evidence of the existence of town criers in urban communities in almost all early modern European territories. In many of Europe’s largest cities, the authorities recognised the need to appoint more than one crier, or, at the very least, to grant a single privileged crier an extensive team of assistants (as in Amsterdam). The major cities of the Italian peninsula, such as Florence, Milan and Genoa, employed at least six town criers for much of the early modern period. Lesser but still sizeable urban centres of around 20,000–50,000 inhabitants, such as Groningen and Leiden, employed two or three criers, whereas many others made do with one.Footnote 19
It is remarkable, however, that the employment of town criers was also extremely common in many towns of no more than 2,000–5,000 inhabitants, including newly founded Friedrichstadt in Holstein, Leer and Norden in East Frisia, Tiel in the Dutch Republic, Laon in Picardy, Murano in Italy and Lutsk and Ovruch in Ruthenia.Footnote 20 In the Dutch Republic, even villages with around 500 inhabitants, such as Mijdrecht in the province of Utrecht, would commonly have had a crier by 1700.Footnote 21 The office was also readily exported to European colonies overseas, with criers known to have been active in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Quebec, Nieuw Amsterdam/New York and Curaçao.Footnote 22
If the town crier was ubiquitous, the size of the community was the main factor that determined their role and income. Inevitably, a crier could expect more business from the authorities and the inhabitants of a large city than a small town. There is financial evidence from England and the Netherlands that criers employed in cities were better compensated for their efforts, a natural consequence of the more arduous route they had to embark on when making announcements across an expansive urban landscape. As a result, the crier of a village such as Mijdrecht might receive only a sixth or even a twentieth of the fee for every cry compared to their colleague in a city like Haarlem or Leeuwarden.Footnote 23 In France, where venality was especially important to the system of government, the town crier’s office had to be purchased by the office-holder.Footnote 24 The monetary value and prestige of the privileged office of the crieur public in large French cities is attested by the fact that in Paris and Lyon, acquisition of the position required a substantial outlay of funds by the prospective candidate.Footnote 25
Criers were paid by the authorities either per commissioned proclamation, or by a combination of a base salary, paid in weekly, monthly or annual instalments, with additional separately paid commissions. Stipends or grants for uniforms and other expenses were also frequently offered. In general, however, salaries remained relatively small. The weekly salary of the crier of Kraków between 1600 and 1750 was never greater than 12 grammes of silver a week, and was among the lowest wages paid by the town council.Footnote 26 In the Dutch Republic, the annual salaries of criers paid by a municipality were no higher than 150 gulden a year; most were significantly less, and it is notable that criers were paid less than other civic officials, such as municipal trumpeters, engineers and port masters.Footnote 27
In many European towns where only a single crier was active, the crier’s employment was essentially guaranteed for life, and their office was commonly passed down to family members.Footnote 28 In numerous Dutch towns in the seventeenth century, criers were still working into their sixties and seventies, and copious evidence exists to suggest that they either died in office or retired as a result of old age or incapacitation.Footnote 29 In Palermo, the De Perino family held the office for over two centuries.Footnote 30 In cities with multiple criers, the crier’s position was often less stable. In sixteenth-century Milan, there were at least sixty-three different town criers employed at one point or another, implying that many served only for a short period of time.Footnote 31 In Florence, the contracts of the holders of the six offices of town crier lasted for one year, although they were often renewed several times.Footnote 32
The duties of the town crier seem to have been performed exclusively by men until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. We have identified several female criers in Scotland, the earliest of whom was Beetty Dick (1693–1773) of Dalkeith, though so far we have not found any elsewhere.Footnote 33 However, as with other civic offices such as official printers, widows in France and the Netherlands sometimes inherited the office of town crier and employed men to carry out these duties on their behalf.Footnote 34 For example, in Lyon, where the office of crier was hereditary, Jacques Bigaud occupied the position from at least 1577 until 1610. A relative, Antoine Bigaud, then inherited the office and held it until his death in 1627, when his widow received payment from the municipal authorities in his stead.Footnote 35
Large cities tended to issue more law, and were often home to a variety of administrative, judicial or commercial institutions that might require the crier’s services. This was not the case in the majority of urban communities, however. It was therefore extremely common throughout Europe for town criers to hold other offices besides that of crier, or for the crier’s office to require other duties in addition to making announcements.Footnote 36 In Poland, Spain and some French and Dutch cities, criers were also employed as minor judicial officials or bailiffs.Footnote 37 In early eighteenth-century Toledo, the town crier was also in essence the market master, responsible for enabling the sale of private goods on the main square (the plaza). His instruction noted that he was also tasked with ‘sweeping and cleaning the plaza … [and] he must ensure that piglets do not enter the plaza, and if any do, he may confine them and collect a fine of four quartos from their owners’.Footnote 38 In sixteenth-century Murano, the town crier, Antonio Malcanton, also organised auctions and acted as a bailiff’s assistant to summon citizens. He held the simultaneous offices of caradori, which put him in charge of the wood supply, and of the governor’s boatman.Footnote 39 In Ath, a small town in Hainaut, the early seventeenth-century crier Jean Maes was also a local bailiff and owned the town’s single print shop.Footnote 40
The different offices that criers might hold varied widely even within a single political territory, and could include those of executioner, street cleaner, messenger, funeral announcer, guardsman and musician. In France and Italy, the crier was sometimes referred to as the ‘trumpeter’ (trompette, trombetta or trombettiere), because these functions were combined.Footnote 41 Such variations in terminology and the multiple duties of town criers significantly complicate the task of identifying criers in the archives; in some instances, it is not clear whether an office-holder was simply a civic musician or was charged with the duty of making official proclamations.
Overall, we can categorise five common secondary functions that were undertaken by town criers: the organisation of sales and auctions; the regulation and supervision of market spaces; the playing of civic musical instruments; the affixing of placards; and assisting officers of the law in prosecuting and summoning citizens. These were all aspects of civic regulation or government that mapped directly onto the principal duties of criers in making official and commercial announcements. They often involved the oversight of urban spaces where criers would perform their cries, and in the case of affixing placards or playing instruments to accompany proclamations, making the exact same rounds as for oral announcements. The public profile and oratorical skills of criers meant that they were also naturally suited to organise or lead auctions.Footnote 42 The demands placed on criers by large cities nevertheless ensured that many municipal authorities split up the core functions of criers that might be combined in small towns. In France, of particular note were the offices of the crieur de vin and the crieur d’enterrements, who respectively announced the prices of wine and the funerals of citizens (and extended invitations to attend the latter). Originally combined in the office of crieur de corps et de vin in 1415, these functions were separated in 1690, when Louis XIV ordered the creation of no fewer than twenty positions for crieurs d’enterrements in Paris and two in each larger town.Footnote 43
It is noteworthy that almost nowhere in Europe did town criers rely solely on political announcements: the only exception was the crieur public in Paris.Footnote 44 The performance of commercial and personal cries was deemed an intrinsic part of the crier’s function in society. As the statutes of Friedrichstadt put it, the crier must be available to citizens to cry ‘what is available for sale here or there, or any other matter that they wish to make known’.Footnote 45 These types of cries could range extremely widely and were again largely conditioned by local traditions and commercial or industrial activities. In the Dutch Republic, the most commonly regulated type of announcements that criers could expect to perform related to the sale of fish, with different types of fish sales warranting different rates of pay.Footnote 46 Throughout Europe, criers were frequently hired to announce the loss or theft of goods as well as to receive information about such goods.Footnote 47 In Prato, a large town under Florentine jurisdiction, criers routinely announced not only political communications but also sales, auctions and estate sales. However, they would only be involved in these sorts of commercial cries if either the beneficiary or the initiator of the sale was a public figure or institution, such as one of the charitable organisations active within the city or another official. These announcements were not considered to be part of the regular duties of criers and they were paid separately for them.Footnote 48 All evidence points to the notion that most criers would have taken on commercial or private commissions in order to make a reasonable living. In late sixteenth-century Milan, a list of civic employees and their salaries even explicitly stated that more than three-quarters of the crier’s income would be generated from non-official announcements.Footnote 49
Allowing criers to take on commercial work was not necessarily at odds with their function as agents of the state. The crier’s office represented an ideal means to regulate information flows in early modern society. Given the extent to which authorities feared the spread of unbridled rumour and prosecuted those who were found uttering seditious speech, concentrating private or commercial and public announcements in the voice of a single individual was a shrewd political act.Footnote 50 The instruction given to the crier of the Dutch town of Wijk bij Duurstede in 1715 specifically mentioned that the crier had to report to the magistrates the content of all privately commissioned cries that appeared suspect.Footnote 51 Indeed, in many Dutch and French towns, the authorities closely regulated private cries, including their cost.Footnote 52 City councils often chose to remunerate criers more for proclaiming ordinances than they were allowed to charge their fellow citizens for private announcements.Footnote 53 This suggests that the authorities wanted criers to offer an affordable service to their citizenry, but that they also aimed to keep criers loyal by cultivating their gratitude for receiving official business.
Political cultures of proclaiming
There can be little doubt that criers were closely tied to political authority and acted as representatives of state power. This was epitomised by their frequent performance of judicial duties. In Spanish towns, for instance, criers were commonly tasked with leading convicted criminals through the town, and announcing their name, crime and punishment.Footnote 54 Their principal political duty, nevertheless, was the proclamation of laws, either municipal decrees or edicts received from higher authorities. The communication of important news (of royal successions, victories, days of prayer, an outbreak of plague) was also a critical part of the state-commissioned information that criers would disseminate in their community. Incomplete archival records can make it difficult to determine exactly when particular towns began to employ criers for the purpose of official communication, and in what circumstances.Footnote 55 However, there is clear evidence from across Europe that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented a moment in time when town criers were commissioned to proclaim laws and other political announcements more regularly than before.
In Cologne, as in many other cities in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries, the proclamation of ordinances was habitually performed by the magistrates, from the balcony of city hall.Footnote 56 From 1484 onwards, the city fathers of Cologne occasionally began to employ criers to tour the streets to repeat their proclamations, but this only became common in the seventeenth century, when the effectiveness of a single proclamation from city hall was deemed insufficient.Footnote 57 By the late sixteenth century, the authorities in Bologna began to issue bandi on average more than 100 times a year – the publication of virtually all of these ordinances required the services of official criers.Footnote 58 Around the same time, the magistrates of Leiden increased the number of annual proclamations from around thirty to seventy and laid down extremely detailed regulations for their criers in 1633 to assist in the oral dissemination of these proclamations throughout their rapidly expanding city.Footnote 59
The nature of the institutions and political authorities responsible for disseminating new legislation shaped how criers were used. Across Europe, publishing edicts and ordinances was commonly the privilege of the local magistrates who employed town criers. In the Italian states and the Low Countries, many towns and cities exercised undisputed municipal authority over the office of the crier. However, depending on the situation, criers could be tasked with communicating the law by various state as well as municipal institutions. In Rotterdam, the Admiralty made use of the privileged municipal town crier ‘according to established practice’ to publish its ordinances.Footnote 60 In France, the town crier served the local municipality and courts, as well as the crown and the superior courts of the Parlements. In the French kingdom, where jurisdiction was highly fragmented, there were often disputes between different authorities over the right to appoint criers or over the monopoly that criers held on official announcements, as we shall see.
However, larger shifts or ruptures in political authority seem to have had relatively little effect on the employment and function of town criers. The Parisian crieur public during the mid-seventeenth century, Charles Canto, continued to proclaim new laws before, during and after the civil conflict of the Fronde (1648–53), even when the royal family fled from Paris and the Parlement temporarily took over the governance of the capital.Footnote 61 While a change in ruler could potentially affect the employment of a specific crier, there is no evidence that it altered broader practices of communicating the law. The Italian city of Urbino relied on a town crier to make official proclamations by the sixteenth century, and this did not change once the city moved from being an independent duchy to becoming part of the Papal States in 1631. Similarly, the city of Mantua steadily employed town criers, even during the disruption caused by the War of the Mantuan Succession (1628–31).Footnote 62
Nonetheless, there does appear to have been a division between European regions where town criers were the primary agents of state communication, and where they were ancillary to broader communication efforts by the authorities. In Italy, France and Spain, criers were in general solely responsible for the proclamation of laws. Thousands of bandi from numerous Italian towns in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contain specific notices that indicate that the ordinance was read out by a named crier. This was usually a simple note, such as ‘Cried by me, Benedetto di Simone, on 24 July 1563’.Footnote 63 Such notices were also common in French cities (see Figure 1) and in Geneva, whose legal and print culture had much in common with that of France.Footnote 64 Manuscript ledgers registering the publication of edicts in French and Italian archives also attest to the fact that town criers were chiefly responsible for the communication of the law in these regions.Footnote 65 By contrast, in the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and Poland-Lithuania, the initial, ritual announcement of new laws remained the responsibility of the magistrates (often the city’s secretary). Criers were instead used as secondary agents, disseminating the news throughout the town after the first proclamation had been made.
A 1677 Marseille placard on wine, featuring a handwritten note at the end confirming its proclamation by the town crier, following the printed exhortation noting that the regulation was to be ‘read and published at all the usual places and streets of the city’. Municipal Archives, Marseille: 1 BB.
Figure 1 Long description
A formal printed placard from 1677, issued by Monsieur de Pilles, Governor of Marseille, regarding wine regulations. The document features a centred coat of arms at the top, followed by large uppercase title lines: ′DE PAR MONSIEUR DE PILLES GOUVERNEUR VIGUIER ET MESSIEURS LES ESCHEVINS DE LA VILLE DE MARSEILLE.′ Below the title, dense paragraph blocks detail the ordinance, including words like ′DEPUIS′ and ′COMME.′ The text has a formal tone, typical of government proclamations. At the bottom, handwritten notes and signatures confirm the proclamation by the town crier, emphasizing the regulation′s importance to be ′read and published at all the usual places and streets of the city.′ The layout includes prominent visual features such as the coat of arms, large title text and handwritten elements, providing a clear organizational structure.
While it is possible that not every bando issued in early modern Italian cities was proclaimed by town criers, given that some decrees only applied to specific parts of the city, trades or issues, it seems highly likely that the great majority were publicly read out. Archival evidence from seventeenth-century Palermo, Genoa and Prato suggests that every single ordinance issued locally was proclaimed by a crier.Footnote 66 In places such as Florence and Palermo, even guild regulations carried a town crier’s notice.Footnote 67 In France, the crier occupied a role that was almost as important. The act of crying was so bound up with the law that a successful late seventeenth-century handbook on lawmaking and legal disputes could be marketed as a Nouveau Traité des Criées (New Treatise on Crying), though it did not actually discuss the performance of proclamations.Footnote 68 Unlike in Italy or Spain, however, some measures that did not need to be immediately distributed for wider consumption were only read aloud in the symbolically public chambers of the Parlements.Footnote 69
Similarly, in much of northern Europe, the use of a crier to announce an ordinance was highly dependent on the context of the legal subject and the urgency of informing the entire community. Not every ordinance would necessarily have been entrusted to a crier, given that some, like regulations related to specific trade guilds, could more easily have been handed out to all guildsmen, or read out at a guild hall.Footnote 70 Dutch criers remained in sufficiently common use for political announcements, however, that in seventeenth-century Harderwijk, in Gelderland, the crier was instructed to present himself to the city hall every Saturday morning to receive potential edicts to announce.Footnote 71 This suggests that in this Dutch town of fewer than 7,000 inhabitants, the crier might be employed by the magistrates on at least a weekly basis.
How much work state communication generated for the crier depended not only on the governing institutions of a particular town, but also on periods of economic crisis or political uncertainty. In a typical year, the seventeenth-century crier of Paris might be expected to proclaim ordinances around fifty to sixty days a year (just over once a week). But in 1652, the final tumultuous year of the Fronde, Canto was employed on eighty-two days.Footnote 72 In many Italian cities, town criers would have been required even more frequently: in 1734, the civic authorities of Bologna issued 233 bandi, most of which would have been publicly cried. While this was a year of unusually frenetic legislating, there were sixty years between 1601 and 1796 when the city issued more than 125 edicts. In these years, the citizens of Bologna would have been exposed to their crier announcing bandi on at least every third day.Footnote 73
Another striking regional variation is that in the towns of the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederacy and Scandinavia greater use was made of the clergy to proclaim ordinances. In the Scandinavian kingdoms, town criers do not seem to have been employed at all for regular political messaging. This made particularly good sense in these more sparsely populated regions, where audiences were more likely to gather in parish churches than on market squares. For this reason, ministers were regarded as the principal agents of state communication.Footnote 74 In Sweden, pastors from the Lutheran state church were duty-bound to announce royal and civic edicts, and evidently looked upon this obligation as an enhancement of their status in the community. Many pastors were asked to retain copies of ordinances and instructed to read the same text on three successive Sundays.Footnote 75 During the 1670s, Swedish clergymen issued regular complaints about bailiffs who encroached on their duties by proclaiming ordinances on church grounds and in parish halls.Footnote 76 This was in stark contrast to seventeenth-century France, where the clergy looked down upon the duty of announcing secular ordinances and for the most part successfully resisted demands to proclaim them in church.Footnote 77
Around 1700, in Swedish Livonia, preachers were also specifically asked to translate ordinances in order to make them accessible to Estonian and Latvian parishioners.Footnote 78 This practice was also common in Ducal Prussia, where German edicts were read out by ministers in Polish or Lithuanian, and in the Scottish Highlands, where Protestant preachers rendered English texts into Gaelic.Footnote 79 We have not found evidence of similar multilingual practices of communication conducted by town criers, but it is possible that it took place: across Europe, authorities are known to have issued ordinances in multiple languages, often to target communities of foreigners or because their territories were inhabited by linguistically diverse subjects.Footnote 80 It is not unreasonable to presume that criers working in towns with a strong multilingual political culture, such as Spanish Milan or Naples, would have been required to proclaim edicts in both Italian and Spanish.
In England, Scotland and Poland, royal messengers typically delivered documents with instructions for civic officials to have them proclaimed; in other instances, decrees were announced in towns by a royal or district herald, rather than a local crier.Footnote 81 While town criers certainly existed throughout the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, Britain and Poland-Lithuania, they were less likely to be called upon by the civic authorities with the regularity of their colleagues in France, Italy and Spain. Criers in these places were therefore more reliant on commercial crying to make a living. The town crier’s political profile and importance in the community was largely conditioned by regional practices, which themselves were influenced by different legal traditions and the size or density of urban populations. Yet, despite these variations in their role, the early modern crier was never an apolitical or unproblematic figure.
Jurisdiction and privileges
Given their prominence in the urban community, town criers could readily invite controversy or conflict. The income, status and responsibilities of the office of crier evidently made it worth contesting. Most towns appointed a single privileged crier, with the motivation of maintaining tight control over the soundscape of their community. In large towns or cities, however, this exposed the crier to potential challenges from rivals, who could exploit the significant burden of covering an entire town by taking on commissions for their own cries. Given the ubiquity throughout early modern Europe of itinerant hawkers and pedlars, who loudly advertised their wares, it is not difficult to imagine that some vendors would have been eager to take on an illicit commission on the side, crying political, commercial or private news that technically fell within the town crier’s remit.Footnote 82
This is demonstrated by the case of Leeuwarden, in the northern Dutch province of Friesland. On 11 October 1578, Jacob Roeper (Jacob the Crier) submitted a petition to the magistrates of the city. For more than thirty years, he explained, he had served the magistrates dutifully as their town crier and official drummer, but recently, a man named Syurdt Hylckez, a former drummer, had also taken to performing throughout the city with his drum, as well as ‘crying certain things’ (otherwise left unspecified). This, Roeper argued, was in clear contravention of his monopoly on drumming and crying. The magistrates of Leeuwarden agreed, and prohibited Hylckez and ‘all other drummers’ from crying or drumming without their permission.Footnote 83 Enterprising individuals could also intrude on the town crier’s privileges by seeking to publicise official acts that concerned them personally. In 1628, Marguerite Jacquet, the Parisian widow of a cooper, was fined 45 livres, payable to Simon Le Duc, the city’s crier, as well as the official trumpeters, for commissioning a person other than Le Duc to proclaim a decision handed down by the Church of Paris in her favour.Footnote 84
In complex and composite states with multiple overlapping jurisdictions, such as France or the Holy Roman Empire, the right to appoint town criers – and, as a result, the right to restrict other officials from making proclamations – could itself become a point of contention.Footnote 85 Invariably these squabbles resulted from a desire to demonstrate political authority or privilege, but they also show the importance that was placed on controlling the communication of official information. This mattered even more when authorities were at loggerheads with one another. In sixteenth-century Emden, there were numerous disputes between the city council and the Count of East Frisia over the appointment of town criers, a conflict that was part and parcel of the regular jostling for political authority between towns and princes in the Empire. In 1566, for example, Count Edzard II nominated his chosen candidate, Ludwig von Barsebank, for town crier. However, the municipal authorities decided that Von Barsebank was unsuitable for the position and refused to appoint him, to Edzard’s apparent displeasure.Footnote 86
In France, conflict over the appointment of criers erupted most frequently between local or sovereign courts and municipal or royal authorities. A royal edict of 1571 had made the office of the town crier a monopoly in each French town, but the Parisian Chambre de Justice and the Chambre des Comptes repeatedly claimed the right as sovereign courts to announce their own decisions, and began doing so in 1624.Footnote 87 When the crier, Le Duc, laid a complaint about this infringement of his rights, it took six years to be resolved by the king’s council, the Conseil du Roi. Initially, the Conseil found for the bailiffs of the Chambres and awarded them the same right as the town crier to be accompanied by trumpeters. Upon appeal, though, the Conseil confirmed Le Duc’s monopoly on the publication ‘to the sound of trumpets and in public cries’ of the ordinances and judgements of all authorities in Paris, including the sovereign courts, with a fine of 1,000 to 2,000 livres to be levied on those who contravened it.Footnote 88 An arrêt (decree) of the Parlement of Paris issued in 1668 gave Le Duc’s successor, Canto, permission to pursue litigation against anyone usurping or interfering with his duties.Footnote 89
Power struggles and jurisdictional questions over crying were also a recurring issue in Lyon. In 1572, King Charles IX created a second office of town crier for the city, despite objections from the existing crier and the local magistrates.Footnote 90 It was more common, however, for attempts by local judicial and civic authorities to circumvent the privileges of the town crier to trigger conflicts with the central authorities. During the 1640s, the Conseil du Roi issued an arrêt overruling the Sénéchaussée of Lyon’s decision to proclaim its own judgements. The Conseil determined that the current occupant of the office of town crier should have the sole monopoly over the publication of edicts and declarations and warned other officials not to prevent criers from going about their business.Footnote 91 Similarly, the town crier of Lyon, Jacques Catouard, appealed to the Parlement of Paris in 1658 to enforce his right to proclaim the decisions of the Tribunal de la Conservation (a local court with exceptional jurisdiction), and received a favourable ruling from the superior court.Footnote 92
The frequency of disputes concerning the crier’s office demonstrates that control of the position and its functions was highly prized. The command that criers exercised over the public soundscape made them influential agents in the enactment of law and the representation of authority. The establishment of monopolies in most towns, including large cities like Paris or Amsterdam, was therefore a natural course of action for many authorities. Monopolisation could backfire, however, when a political authority was challenged and the crier decided to change with the wind. In late 1688, as King James II’s control of England crumbled in the face of a Dutch invasion led by Prince William III of Orange, the crier of Nottingham ended a common commercial cry for the sale of fish not with the habitual phrase ‘God Save the King’, but ‘God Save the Prince of Orange’. We only know of this incident because it was recorded by the Puritan diarist Roger Morrice in London, as part of a broader narrative of the breakdown of royal authority.Footnote 93 Its place in this narrative is highly suggestive of the symbolic importance contemporaries attached to the role of the crier in communal politics.
A spatial and political ritual: performing the law
The act of reading the law out loud was a ritual performance designed to bring a visual and acoustic manifestation of the authorities’ powers into the streets of the city.Footnote 94 Scholars have argued that controlling the urban soundscape was an important part of politics and governing in early modern Europe.Footnote 95 Town criers played a vital role in this soundscape, as the main embodiment of political authority for subjects and citizens who might never meet their rulers.Footnote 96 In most jurisdictions, laws became effective only after their publication orally or in writing. The presence of the public was thus a key component of the proclamation process (see Figure 2). In Venetian territories, edicts began with a preamble in Latin specifying that they had to be read ‘out loud’ in front of a ‘multitude of people’.Footnote 97 On a practical level, the spectacle of official proclamations also worked to capture the public’s attention. In busy cities, criers had to compete with a cacophony of noise and sights, including vendors, pedlars and charlatans who sang the news and satirical verses or advertised their wares aloud.Footnote 98 Given the critical importance of crying to the communication of the law, it is worth investigating exactly how these public performances, or ‘information ceremonies’, as Fogel has termed them, functioned.Footnote 99 The source material is especially plentiful on this topic because where, when and how town criers made their announcements were some of the most heavily regulated aspects of their role.
A Dutch town crier holding forth to an attentive crowd. Gerard II ter Borch, Omroeper op een marktplein, c. 1630–5. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: RP-T-1887-A-824.
The performance of the law was highly dependent on a relationship of trust and recognition between the audience, the authorities and the crier. Citizens needed to be able to recognise and rely on criers in the performance of their duties and to trust the accuracy of their announcements. The authorities similarly placed a great deal of trust in criers to perform their duties adequately, including reading out ordinances in a ‘clearly enunciated voice’, and not forgetting to proclaim them at stipulated locations.Footnote 100 Good oratory was therefore an essential requirement of the job, ensuring that the law was made accessible and easily comprehensible. In Spain, town criers were warned to perform their proclamations ‘in a loud voice, slowly, and with good enunciation’.Footnote 101 A Genoese edict from 1626 describes how ‘We made known the above written proclamation with the sound of the trumpets and by me Marc’Antonio Siano, public crier with a loud and clear voice’.Footnote 102 In 1648, crier Esken of Deventer, in the Dutch Republic, was reprimanded by the magistrates for crying with poor enunciation.Footnote 103
Three further aspects of the town crier’s performance helped cement this relationship of trust as well as the recognisability of the crier: uniforms, musical instruments and the duration of the crier’s employment. Prolonged contracts functioned to establish criers as the voice of the law and to build a close and trusting relationship between them and the authorities. As we have seen, many town criers occupied their position for life, and in some towns, families monopolised the office for generations. Equipping criers with uniforms and instruments also enhanced the display of magnificence that they created as they went about their rounds, reinforcing their status as official representatives of the political authorities.Footnote 104 In most parts of Europe, town criers wore distinctive livery, which made them immediately recognisable.Footnote 105 In France, criers were generally required to have the emblem of the town embroidered and visible on one of their items of clothing. In Bourges in 1619, we find master embroiders promising the local authorities that they will ‘make in handsome and good satin and embroidery’ the robes of the six sergeants of the town, including the crier and the trumpeter.Footnote 106 In Albi in 1665–6, the authorities paid 12 livres to have the coat of arms of the town embroidered on the flag attached to the trumpet of the town crier and purchased red cloth for his cloak.Footnote 107 In Florence, criers were obligated to wear a uniform and to use a silver trumpet, both of which they were responsible for purchasing and maintaining.Footnote 108
Trumpet fanfares, drumbeats, clashing cymbals or bellringing usually preceded the reading out of ordinances and edicts, signalling to people within earshot that they should assemble to hear an important official announcement.Footnote 109 Yet despite the existence of this shared aural culture across Europe, methods of proclamation could vary significantly. In German and Dutch towns, the use of drums and cymbals seems to have been more common than trumpets, and criers were expected to walk, rather than ride a horse. By contrast, in Florence, town criers proclaimed ordinances with the aid of their trumpet and had to maintain two horses in good condition because every proclamation was to be made while mounted (walking was expressly forbidden). Similarly, in Paris during the seventeenth century, criers performed their duties on horseback, accompanied by three separate mounted trumpeters. On exceptional occasions, this number could be increased. Canto was assisted by no less than five trumpeters when he announced the French declaration of war on the Dutch Republic on 6 April 1672.Footnote 110 Even within the same country, however, such practices were not uniform and depended on factors like the size of a municipality. In most French provincial towns, criers used drums rather than trumpets.Footnote 111
Although local customs dictated varying modes and routes of crying, town criers throughout Europe were instructed to perform their duties in prominent, strategically chosen locations.Footnote 112 In many cases, the crier’s notice in printed edicts from France, the Dutch Republic, Italy, Geneva and Scotland contained standard formulae about where they had been or should be cried. They commonly included a provision like the following: ‘this ordinance was read and published to the sound of trumpets and public cries, and posted at the ordinary and extraordinary crossroads of this city and the faubourgs [neighbourhoods] of Paris’.Footnote 113 Bandi in Ferrara used similar phrasing: ‘[this edict] has been made public and posted in all the usual places, and [we want this] to have the same value as if we had personally told it to everyone’.Footnote 114 This emphasis in printed decrees on the practices of proclaiming and affixing is further evidence of the complementary relationship between writing and orality in the communication of the law, as well as the interaction of town criers with the legal text itself.Footnote 115 Criers were not sidelined by the growing use of print to disseminate edicts but in fact played a vital part in this process; the placards that they posted in streets and squares reinforced their oral pronouncement long after they had departed and allowed the public to refer more easily to measures that had been proclaimed.Footnote 116 The close interdependence of printing, crying and affixing thus worked to create an effective communication strategy for official information. Announcing and posting edicts publicly was not just a means of reaching as many people as possible, however. The inclusion of proclamation clauses in these texts expressed the legal principle that because a law had been published at notable civic, political and commercial sites it was valid and ‘none can claim ignorance’ (a commonplace statement in edicts and ordinances throughout Europe) (see Figure 3).Footnote 117
A 1660 Ferrara edict with a printed town crier notice at the end, confirming that it was proclaimed the day after the edict was formally issued by the Cardinal-Legate. Archivio Storico Municipale, Ferrara: Bandi e Rotuli, vol. vi.
Mapping these areas can give us a good sense of the political topography of different towns and cities.Footnote 118 Some of the places where town criers proclaimed the law, like the Loggia dei Banchi in Genoa or the Place de Grève in Paris, were inherently political because they were the sites of notable governmental buildings. In the Low Countries and Holy Roman Empire, the crier’s route often began at the town hall, after laws were proclaimed by officials directly from the balcony.Footnote 119 Town criers were also active in the more ordinary spaces of everyday life, such as market squares, gates, crossroads, bridges and churches.Footnote 120 The richest documentation that we have found of criers’ routes comes from the Netherlands, Italy and France. Often, in smaller centres such as Urbino, the marketplace was the only location where proclamations were made.Footnote 121 In contrast, in Leiden in 1633, there were fifty-one locations where the multiple criers of the city were required to stop, including major commercial streets such as the Breestraat and the grain and cattle markets. However, most proclamations were made on the bridges over Leiden’s canals. Bridges were well suited for this task: they were naturally busy thoroughfares, but they also elevated the town crier physically, and the sound of their oration would carry over the water. The use of elevation to make criers more visible and ensure that their voices carried was common across jurisdictions. In addition to making announcements from horseback, officials in England sometimes stood on stools, while Scottish proclamations were made from the raised platforms in the market square offered by the ubiquitous ‘mercat crosses’.Footnote 122 In Venice, the comandadori made their announcements from stone columns, one of which can still be seen today in the Piazza San Marco, at the south corner of the Basilica.Footnote 123
Collectively, the fifty-one locations for proclamations in Leiden offered comprehensive coverage of the cityscape, and ensured that there would be approximately one cry for every thousand inhabitants.Footnote 124 The number of locations in Leiden, divided between several town criers, was not unusual for major cities. Florentine town criers were required to read the law in forty-four different locations.Footnote 125 Yet even smaller towns might have extensive routes. The magistrates of Leeuwarden, a Dutch city of around 15,000 inhabitants, gradually increased the number of stops from forty-one (1644) to forty-eight (1720). This was a particularly demanding circuit as there was only a single crier, who also acted as municipal drummer and affixer.Footnote 126 But even in some smaller municipalities, ordinances were proclaimed in multiple places. In Murano, criers were required to perform on each of the three bridges within the city’s limits.Footnote 127 In Great Yarmouth, in England, the mounted clerk who performed the duty of crying began at the Banner and then proceeded to read proclamations at the market cross, Haven’s mouth (the harbour entrance), the Crane and Bridgefoot.Footnote 128
Conversely, we can also find instances in very large cities where the number of crying locations was limited to key sites of symbolic and practical value. A 1556 French royal ordinance on coinage specified only ten places where it was to be proclaimed in Paris, a city with a population of around 300,000. This itinerary nonetheless took the town crier on a route through the judicial, commercial, educational, printing and bookselling quarters of the city.Footnote 129 The crier proceeded from the Palais de Justice that housed the Parlement on the Île de la Cité, where the edict would have been drafted. From there he crossed to the Right Bank and ‘the main business districts of Paris’, which contained the city’s ‘major ports or markets’. This allowed him to ‘target a large number of merchants and their customers’ at the ‘main places of unloading, distribution and consumption of goods’. The crier then zigzagged back across the Seine to the Left Bank, south of the river, to perform his duties among ‘the intellectual élite in the university quarter’ and at the ‘home of all the main printing houses and over 160 booksellers crammed into 80 houses, the location par excellence of the literate classes’. Finally, the crier returned to the Palais via one of the city’s crowded bridges, where he could also count on a ready audience.Footnote 130
Clearly, around a dozen crossroads were considered important for the dissemination of information in sixteenth-century Paris.Footnote 131 Other descriptions of the routes taken by Parisian town criers in seventeenth-century ordinances confirm that they could target a relatively small number of places, depending on the ordinance and its subject matter. The crier would often repeat the same announcement for several days, taking a different route each day. In some cases where a law had wide application, efforts were made to cover a much larger area of the city. In 1638, the crier, Jehan Meignen, made a total of sixty-nine stops over the course of four days to proclaim the establishment of a new tax to fund the paving of Paris’s streets, a measure designed to keep the city clean.Footnote 132 The locations where town criers were called on to perform their duties were not necessarily fixed and immutable. Criers’ routes could be altered if an ordinance targeted particular people or goods. For example, a Neapolitan broadsheet from 1706 on new taxes and exchange rates for goods and coinage coming into the city through the port was read out at several key stops that were directly connected to the port, both geographically and commercially.Footnote 133
Because the town crier was the symbolic voice of the authorities and their most visible representative, proclaiming the law was a potentially perilous exercise. Criers could easily become targets for members of the public who objected to particular edicts and sought to disrupt the proclamation process.Footnote 134 According to the sixteenth-century writer Tommaso Garzoni, Venetian comandadori habitually ‘went back bruised to the government office which had charged them with their task’.Footnote 135 Although we have not yet uncovered a cohesive body of sources that would allow us to analyse this phenomenon in greater depth, it is abundantly clear that proclamations were regularly contested.Footnote 136 In some instances, misinformation could provoke a negative public reaction. In September 1691, a demonstration broke out in Montauban, in France, after some artisans misread a placard posted by the town crier.Footnote 137 In other cases, violence was triggered by the unpopularity of a specific measure, such as a new tax. In France, criers who were tasked with announcing fiscal impositions sometimes faced gunshots. A tax on milling similarly sparked a riot in Cenedà, in the Veneto, in 1619. Rioters ‘spat on the tax-decree, tore it off the column on which it had been posted, ripped it to pieces and then splattered fresh dung over both the paper and the column’.Footnote 138 In 1503, a town crier from Padua was beaten when his audience disagreed with the contents of his proclamation: ‘Without hesitation, [they] grabbed the poor town crier and strung him up on a pole with his trumpet around his neck.’Footnote 139
These carnivalesque acts hint at the ambiguous status of the town crier. As citizens from the middling or lower levels of society, criers were transformed through the solemn pageantry that accompanied their performance into authority figures ripe for mockery and subversion. Disrespecting the crier was not just a way of symbolically defying the law; a failed proclamation could lead to the ‘temporary invalidity’ of an edict, thereby undermining the power of the government.Footnote 140 In times of political upheaval or conflict, these methods of resistance might even form part of a broader challenge to the legitimacy of the state. In January 1645, for example, a sergeant who came to distribute an ordinance in the rebellious village of Abjat in the Périgord was forced to flee after being shot at.Footnote 141
Conclusion
In 1692, a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet delivered a significant blow against their French adversaries at the battles of Barfleur and La Hougue, off the coast of Normandy. The engagement saw the destruction of fifteen major French warships, effectively impairing France’s navy in northern European waters and halting a French attempt to invade England. Widespread celebration followed in England and the Dutch Republic, and to commemorate the victory, a Dutch artist, Joost Danckerts, produced a satirical engraving with parallel French and Dutch texts: Le Crieur de Versaille / De Omroeper van Versailles (see Figure 4).
The satirical crier of Versailles. Joost Danckerts, Le Crieur de Versaille / De Omroeper van Versailles (1692). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: RP-P-OB-50.041.
With this disastrous naval scene in the background, a decadently dressed French crier holding a bell and a scroll calls out in the name of the king (‘De par le Roy’): ‘Hear, gentlemen, hear, if anyone can deliver any of the ships mentioned on this list to French ports, then they will each enjoy 100,000 guilders as a reward.’ Below the figure, a caption explains further that with his ‘gloomy sound’ the crier ‘calls great and small together’ (in Dutch) or ‘assembles everybody’ (in French), to share news of the terrible fate that has befallen Louis XIV’s navy.Footnote 142
This satirical print evidently resonated, as other artists soon issued their own versions of Danckerts’s engraving, including a German translation. The use of the town crier as a satirical trope to mock France and its king was aptly chosen. Criers were an instantly recognisable embodiment of political authority as much as of wider news culture. They announced to ‘great and small’ alike on the market squares and streets of European cities, and their multiple official, commercial and private roles further added to their visibility within the urban landscape. The plurality of criers’ duties did not diminish their political role, but it did add a degree of ambiguity to the performance of the law: every time a crier strode or rode forth through a town, and the sound of musical instruments marked their arrival, their audience did not know whether they would be informed of new measures against the plague, an increase in the duty on beer, a great military victory, the loss of a roll of fabric or the sale of an estate. This uncertainty could equally be a source of tension or of humour.
Our examination of the crier’s role in early modern Europe suggests that they were ubiquitous figures who occupied a crucial position in civic and political culture as official mediators of information. It is clear that their exact profile differed across the continent: criers were certainly relied on to a greater extent as communicators of law in France, Italy and Spain than in other parts of Europe. But the crier did not diminish in relevance as a political agent over time. The increasing quantity of laws being issued prompted an expansion in the use of criers by authorities along with greater regulation of their office. As more information began to be printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in many places, the crier also took on the role of official affixer of placards and other posters. It is only from the late seventeenth century onwards that we begin to find evidence of the appointment of specific municipal affixers (afficheurs, aanplakkers, affissore) in cities in France, the Dutch Republic and the Italian states.Footnote 143 Even then, the crier did not disappear until long into the nineteenth century, and in some cases, as late as the twentieth century.Footnote 144 In an age of rapid information growth, the need for trustworthy oral communication became ever more pressing. The town crier was uniquely positioned to occupy that role, serving the state as much as the general community.
With this contribution, we have attempted to underscore the importance of the town crier to understanding how political information and decision-making interacted with broader news flows in early modern Europe. The crier deserves to be studied further as a figure who can illuminate the structures of information culture and the overlaps between orality, writing and print in the past, as well as the complex and often contested relationship between rulers and ruled. While town criers’ voices are long lost, enough of a trace of their activities remains in the archives to allow us to reconstruct something of their world.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding received by the UKRI as part of its Frontier Research Grant programme for the COMLAWEU (Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500–1750) project as well as the financial support of the University of St Andrews School of History.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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