ABSTRACT
For most of the twentieth century historians accepted that the press in Tudor and Stuart England laboured under a system of strict censorship. In the last 20 or so years, however, it has become commonplace to question whether the state possessed any effective tools to enforce its will upon the press in the early modern period. Crucially, Sheila Lambert has claimed that the Stationers' Company—the trade guild responsible for regulating the press—was nothing more than a ramshackle commercial grouping of several hundred squabbling tradesmen. This paper focuses on a chaotic period during the late 1640s in the wake of the English Civil War, when the Stationers' Company was riven by serious internal disagreements over religious, political and commercial matters. During these years authors from a range of religious and political backgrounds were relatively free to produce a large range of libellous, seditious or scandalous items. The state responded angrily to the appearance of this material and finally managed to tame the press in the month after the passage of the draconian Printing Act of September 1649. Although the records of the Stationers' Company contain no references to this battle for control of the press, other contemporary printed and manuscript sources testify to the central role which the Company played in the Cromwellian regime's brutal but ultimately successful campaign to strangle the opposition press. I also show that the state could call upon a whole host of other institutions and individuals (such as constables, justices of the peace, city officials) to enforce compliance upon the press, and will explore the ways in which these groups worked with each other. This essay is, in other words, an attempt to use a close study of a short chronological period to say something about the theory and practice of censorship during the early modern period [1] .
