The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (24 page)

This period of frenetic activity seems to have been the high-water mark of the political song in Italy. At this moment street singing lay truly on the front line of communication.
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As the century wore on, Italian street singers seem to have withdrawn to safer topical ground. They would celebrate the withdrawal of an unpopular tax, or report a tumbled-down bridge. This may partly have been self-censorship, but it also reflected a more hostile political climate. In the second half of the sixteenth century Italian authorities intervened to bring order to the piazza. The regulation of public space was partly prompted by Counter-Reformation disapproval of anything that besmirched the dignity of public religion (and many of the songs were scarcely disguised satires of religious tunes). But the new restrictions may also be seen as a concerted attempt to draw in the boundaries of popular politics, particularly when set alongside the brutal assault on the writers of the pasquinades and the regulation around manuscript
avvisi
.
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However, at least as regards street singers, this effort at regulation seems largely to have failed. As members of a marginal social group, professionally peripatetic, the news singers had far less to lose than established printers and the owners of news agencies. When in 1585 Tommaso Garzoni published his encyclopaedia of the professions, the street singer occupied a prominent place. Far from being banished by hostile regulation, they had ‘grown like a weed, in such a way that, through every city, through every land, through every square, nothing is seen other than charlatans or street singers’.
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Germany too had a lively musical tradition which could be put to use in the service of popular politics. Martin Luther was a passionate musician and composer of hymns: some of his compositions are still staples of the repertoire. Because the tunes were soon so strikingly familiar, they were obvious candidates
for reuse in a more overtly political context (later French Calvinists would use the tunes of the psalms in exactly the same way).
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The high point of political song in Germany came in the wake of the Protestant defeat in the Schmalkaldic War (1546–7). The victorious Charles V now attempted, by way of the Augsburg Interim, to enforce a partial restoration of traditional Catholic practices and beliefs. Although the settlement was reluctantly accepted by some Protestant cities and theologians, including Philip Melanchthon, much of Lutheran Germany stood firm. Led by the free city of Magdeburg in a heroic four-year resistance, Lutherans vented their anguish in a storm of pamphlets and songs.
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A diligent search of printed and manuscript sources has revealed a remarkable number of songs about the Interim.
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Most of their composers were educated men; this was not, initially at least, the music of the streets. But it clearly became so. The disapproving Catholic chronicler of Magdeburg recalled:

Luther had shown the way with a clever satirical song, ‘Ach du arger Heinz’, attacking the resolutely Catholic Heinrich of Braunschweig. This was to be sung to the tune, ‘O du armer Judas’. Here the resonance of the title added a further layer of insult, as well as providing a familiar tune.
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When exhaustion and military stalemate forced Charles V to compromise, the liberties of Germany Lutheranism were restored. Magdeburg surrendered to Charles's then ally, Maurice of Saxony, on remarkably generous terms. But Maurice made one exception to this leniency: he required that the minister Erasmus Alber be banished from the city. Alber's contribution to the published literature of the resistance, consisting almost entirely of hymns and satirical songs, had clearly hit home. Maurice insisted that because Alber had attacked him ‘coarsely in public and in private writings, with rhymes and with drawings he must be got rid of. Even a peasant would not bear such an attack lightly.’
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Remembering how they had harnessed the power of song so successfully, the Lutheran states were all the more determined that it would not be employed against them. Several cities took action to control or ban the
Marktsänger
and
Gassensänger
, as the singers were known (because they sang in the marketplace or alleyways). As early as 1522, Augsburg had required its printers to take an oath that they would not print any disgraceful book, song or rhyme. When the city finally instituted reform in 1534, the new discipline ordinance specified carefully that it was illegal, not only to print offensive
books, songs and rhymes, but also to write, sell, buy, sing, read or post them; or, indeed to bring them to the light of day in any way.
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6.2 Fighting back in verse. One of the many musical works satirising the Augsburg Interim.

In Germany the control of opinion necessarily worked rather differently from the centralised nation states of western Europe. Most German towns, in principle, established a process for the pre-publication inspection of books and pamphlets. But this would have been far too time-consuming in practice: the designated censors, usually civic officials rather than clergymen, were far too busy with other duties. In any case much of the printed material in circulation would not have been printed within the local jurisdiction. So most German authorities essentially relied on self-regulation, encouraged by harsh punishments when they learned of a particularly malicious or politically dangerous public utterance.

If we examine the management of opinion in one particularly important jurisdiction – the great imperial city of Augsburg – it is striking how often these interventions were prompted not by print but by seditious singing. In 1553 a bookseller got into trouble when he passed around a tavern a song mocking Charles V's recent humiliation at the siege of Metz. If the bookseller was attempting to road-test a potential song pamphlet, the strategy backfired
badly, as most of the drinkers were too shocked to want anything to do with it; further attempts to have the song copied led to his arrest and interrogation.
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Here the city council could rely on the support of local people in enforcing reasonable standards of decorum.

In the last years of the sixteenth century this social consensus became increasingly frayed, as Lutherans reacted with mounting alarm to the resurgence of Catholicism. The expulsion in 1584 of Augsburg's popular Lutheran minister during the controversy following the imposition of the new Gregorian calendar led to a barrage of songs critical of the city council and supportive of the exiled clergy.
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Some were printed but others circulated widely in manuscript copies, or by word of mouth. These were tough times economically, and discontented weavers became heavily involved in the agitation. Abraham Schädlin confessed that he had written ‘Wo es Gott nit mit Augspurg helt’ ('When God does not stand by Augsburg'), a political song based on the Lutheran psalm ‘Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält’ (taken from Psalm 124, ‘If the Lord had not been on our side'). Because Schädlin had turned himself in, he was treated leniently. Jonas Losch was not so lucky, and two extended interrogations under torture extracted the story of a song he had adapted from a printed original and then sung on the streets. These interrogations (still preserved in the Augsburg town archives) reveal a busy world of singing and cheap print.
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Losch made extra money singing at weddings before turning to politics; the printer Hans Schultes sold 1,500 copies of an image of the expelled minister Georg Müller; two women caught up in the agitation made money selling on the copies. The intersection of political dissent with this lively culture of singing and pub-going was a potential powder keg, and the Augsburg authorities clamped down hard.

The newly resurgent religious orders, the Capuchins and Jesuits, became particular targets for Lutheran anger. ‘A new song about the Capuchins’, circulating in Augsburg around 1600, alleged the alms they collected went to fund liaisons with prostitutes. It was sung, rather indecorously, to the tune of the Lutheran hymn ‘Lord keep us steadfast in thy word’.
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The following year Jacob Hötsch was prosecuted for singing defamatory songs about the Jesuits. This followed a neighbourhood contretemps, in which a Catholic boy punched a Lutheran girl for singing a song about Hell being full of priests.

The Council tried doggedly, but in vain, to restrain this inter-communal anger. In the difficult years before the Thirty Years War these provocative compositions had the potential to destroy the fragile public peace. In 1618, on the very eve of the fighting, the Council ordered its officers to root out the news-sheets and songs circulating in the city. This seems to have been precipitated by the discovery and confiscation of an illustrated news ballad,
A True
new News Report from Bohemia on the siege, taking and conquest of the Catholic city of Pilsen
.
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This was not, by any means, an objective piece of reporting. According to the song, the revolt in Bohemia was entirely due to the machinations of the Jesuits, the ‘spawn of vipers’, acting at the Pope's instigation. In bi-confessional Augsburg this went far beyond what would be tolerated in news reports. But despite its vigilance, the Council found it almost impossible to control what circulated largely by word of mouth. Print provided the smoking gun that led directly to the responsible printer. Seditious singing disappeared on the wind. To a frightened, angry and increasingly alienated religious minority, it was a potent weapon indeed.

The second half of the sixteenth century was also the first great age of the English street ballad.
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It has been estimated that by 1600 over four million printed song broadsheets were in circulation. This was the visible remains of a vast and participatory culture of song; and although the printing of broadsheets implies interest among the literate, their appeal was not limited to those who could read. In 1595 the minister Nicholas Bownde noted people who ‘though they cannot read themselves, nor any of theirs, yet will have many ballads set up in their houses, that so they might learn them, as they shall have occasion’.
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Those who could not read might still remember the tunes, and memorise the new words. Exasperated ministers noted the speed with which their congregations committed ballads to memory, contrasting this with their inability to retain knowledge of Scripture. According to Bownde, at every market or fair one or two persons could be observed ‘singing or selling of ballads’.
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The ballads covered a wide range. The ever diligent Samuel Pepys organised his very considerable collection according to his own patent, though very logical, classification scheme. ‘States and Times’ (that is, politics and current affairs) made up about 10 per cent – a good deal less than ‘Love – Pleasant’ or even ‘Love – Unfortunate’. One may speculate, however, that political songs were far more likely to circulate only by word of mouth. Occasionally we have evidence of this, when pointed adaptations of popular songs turned up in libel cases. It was far more difficult to commit to print political satire than rollicking humorous tales or pious devotional ballads. Only in times when the political controls were seriously loosened were political ballads printed in large numbers. In France Pierre de L'Estoile heard and then transcribed from memory a good number of political songs circulating in Paris during the 1590s.
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None of them survives in print. This was an angry time in French politics. The capital city, a stronghold of the Catholic League, seethed with indignation at the treachery of Henry III, the murderer of their hero the Duke of Guise. When the king was assassinated in turn, in 1589, Paris reacted in revulsion at the prospect of a Huguenot successor. The city's printers erupted
with a tumult of vitriolic prose; so it is interesting that, even at a time when it was safe to print opposition pamphlets, scurrilous verse still circulated largely by word of mouth. L'Estoile, whose sympathies were privately royalist, kept his head down. Joining a circle copying loyalist tracts and circulating them in manuscript was already, in the circumstances, quite courageous.

The balladeer was a potent force in the sixteenth-century communications network. Part of the great Pepys collection came from another early enthusiast, John Selden, and Pepys transcribed into the first volume an observation of Selden's on the importance of ballads (which he equated with ‘libels'). ‘Though some make slight of libels, yet you may see by them how the wind sits. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times as well as ballads and libels.’
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