ABSTRACT
Looking back on his experiences during the civil wars Richard Baxter, the Protestant divine, remembered that wherever you went, whatever the time, virtually the first question anyone asked someone else was, ‘do you have the news?’1 In wartime, as in all moments of crisis, people thirst for news. Today communities group around television sets, or huddle about shortwave radios to hear the latest. In the seventeenth century they avidly wrote to each other, or read news-sheets (invariably entitled A True Report…etc.) to learn what battles had been lost and won. ‘Buy me all the latest news books and send them to me’, wrote Henry Oxinden to his cousin Elizabeth in London.
