True Crime
Many of Europe's citizens would have witnessed an execution. This was part of the ritual of community life: that malefactors be put to death in the places where their crimes were committed.29 Most were soon forgotten. Occasionally the details of a particularly heinous or curious crime might be noted by a diarist, or in correspondence. More usually, these cases have their only record in the proceedings of the legal jurisdiction that heard the cases and condemned them. But in the sixteenth century a new type of publication allowed a wider public to experience vicariously the horror or thrill of these villainous acts: the sensational broadsheets.
These illustrated broadsheets became a particular feature of German print culture in the sixteenth century. They are often beautifully designed and crafted. Invariably the top half of the sheet is given over to a woodcut illustration, usually specially cut, describing the event, which is then narrated in text below. Although eminently collectable, these illustrated news broadsheets survive only rarely. Passed around from hand to hand, or posted up on walls, they were often used to destruction. That so many are known today we owe largely to the collecting enthusiasm of one eccentric Swiss clergyman: Johann Jakob Wick.
Wick began collecting soon after his appointment to a position at Zurich Cathedral in 1557.30 Here he would have worked closely with the leaders of the Zurich Church, Heinrich Bullinger and his successor Rudolf Gwalter. Both were important sources for Wick's collection: Bullinger in particular was at the centre of one of Europe's most developed networks of correspondence, and he willingly passed on to his colleague interesting nuggets of news. Wick began collecting in 1560. From then until his death in 1588 he filled one fat volume a year, with reports of great and startling events from Switzerland and beyond. Like all great collectors, Wick was eclectic in his sources. Sometimes he transcribed reports from letters or diplomatic despatches; he took a particular interest in the Huguenot struggle in France. His collection quickly became well known locally, to the extent that visitors would drop by and share notable events and marvels they had seen or heard reported. Wick would carefully transcribe these accounts, along with the texts from news pamphlets he had been loaned. In the scrapbooks many of these manuscript entries are beautifully illustrated with hand-coloured drawings. He would also insert printed items directly into the scrapbooks: a total of 500 pamphlets and 400 broadsheets were interspersed through the pages. An important source for Wick was the Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer, who would bring back material for Wick from the Frankfurt Fair. As a result, and in contrast to the more international character of the transcribed news reports, most of the printed broadsheets in the collection are from Germany.
These news broadsheets constitute an irreplaceable resource for the study of early crime reporting. Stylistically the woodcut illustrations fall into three groups. Some, the smallest number, present a single dramatic moment in the narrative. An example is the tale of an apprentice who murdered a ten-year-old girl and dismembered the body. The woodcut shows the perpetrator surrounded by body parts: an arresting image, although crudely done.31 More often the woodcut presented several scenes from the drama in a sequence that scrolls around the landscape from the crime scene to the place of execution. This format, well known from the Passion narratives of late medieval painting, was particularly well adapted to crime reporting, where the cruelty of the mode of execution was matched to the shocking nature of the crime. Several of these broadsheets show a notorious criminal being tortured on their way to the place of execution, there to be broken on the wheel.32 A variation of this narrative form was to have the drama broken up into separate scenes, in the manner of a strip cartoon. One crime that we find represented in both ways is the shocking case of Blasius Endres, who, on discovering that his wife was stealing money from him, murdered her and their six young children.33 These crimes were committed in Wangen, 150 kilometres north of Zurich. One of the broadsheets was printed in Lindau, the other in Augsburg, 150 kilometres further north. News of the most spectacular crimes spread widely, and also found its echo in the pamphlet literature.
4.3 True crime. A graphic representation of the murder of a young woman by a German apprentice.
The exemplary character of crime and punishment was not diminished by distance, nor particularly by time. The London printer Thomas Purfoot published in 1586 an account of a triple murder committed by a Frenchman in Rouen, the victims being an innkeeper, his wife and child.34 Readers would be chilled at the predicament of a family slaughtered by a stranger in their home – it did not matter that in this case the events occurred abroad. The recitation of shocking and unnatural deeds, decorously clothed in a narrative of horror, discovery and signal justice, catered to many tastes, godly and ghoulish, and ensured a steady market for these sorts of news pamphlets.35 In such cases cruel and exemplary punishment was seen as a necessary part of the fight between good and evil. The world was full of danger, and many lived a life of quiet desperation. In a society where only very limited resources were available to the state for preventative policing measures, it was widely believed that only the fear of a gruesome death could act as a deterrent. In the literature of crime, most of those apprehended went to their deaths sorrowful and repentant. To die a good death was an important part of the healing process.36 In his diary Wick records the case of a young thief who went to the place of execution cracking jokes along the way. He died with the words, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my soul’.37
This last case was not sufficiently memorable to merit publication. The broadsheets concentrated on the most arresting cases, such as the man who allegedly disguised himself as the Devil to commit his crimes.38 Cases like this shaded easily into the wider literature of sensational and supernatural events that were the stock in trade of the news broadsheets. Publishers and woodcut artists turned out a steady diet of monstrous births, strange animals, unusual weather events and natural disasters.39 Earthquakes and floods were chronicled with some care. By far the most popular with the buying public were tales of celestial apparitions. These could be meteors or comets, or the vision of an armed man, a flaming cross, or horsemen riding through the sky. Wick chronicled these events assiduously and without scepticism. Comets and other heavenly perturbations were widely interpreted as portents of future calamities. A spectacular showing of the Northern Lights in 1560 was associated with an extraordinary number of different events over the following decade. Wick possessed a magnificent, if not particularly authentic representation of the Aurora Borealis from a later manifestation.40 In 1571 he transcribed into his notebooks an excerpt from a French pamphlet written by Nostradamus describing a comet seen in the sky over Langres. Wick returned to this page some time later to add a further sober reflection: ‘I believe this apparition could be seen as a warning and presentment of the terrible murders that occurred the following year on St Bartholomew's day in Paris, and other places in France.’41
The news prints showed a particular fascination with the crimes of women. This was partly because they were exceptionally rare. A comprehensive survey of German legal documents for sixteenth-century Württemberg finds that only about 5 per cent of crimes concerned women.42 Spectacular cases, such as the English pamphlet account of a woman who incited her lover to kill her husband, were thus all the more newsworthy. They also spoke to society's deepest fears of attacks on established social and gender hierarchies. Particularly shocking were crimes by women against their own children. One particularly wrenching broadsheet from 1551 illustrated the case of a woman who had murdered her four children before committing suicide.43 In common with many of the broadsheets, the text narrative is in verse: the starving woman had seen no other way out of her predicament. Such a story spoke to the most dreadful anxieties of a society where many lived on the edge of subsistence, and where a sudden change of fortune, the death of a breadwinner, adverse weather, the incidence of war, could plunge them into destitution. Such anxieties help explain the popularity of a very different tale of providential deliverance,
in which a starving family is saved by a shower of corn. This marvellous example of divine inspiration was the subject of several broadsheets and pamphlets, and even turned up in an English collection of God's marvellous wonders at the very end of the seventeenth century.44 The morbid fascination with hailstorms and extreme weather also speaks to the same nagging anxieties about the food supply.
Most of the crime pamphlets and broadsheets were published without naming the author of the accompanying text. But where the author is known, a significant number were clergymen. This is less surprising than it might seem. Such dramatic narratives offered the opportunity for a living sermon: a story with a lesson to teach. Horrid crimes confirmed the ministers’ theological sense of the utter depravity of human nature and the ceaseless activity of the Devil. The success of the 1551 broadsheet describing the murder of four children by a starving mother owed a great deal to the skilful writing of Burkard Waldis, a Lutheran pastor. Waldis was a prolific writer of fables, plays and anti-papal satire, and he was able to wring every drop of pathos from the terrible scene, as when the young son, cornered in the cellar, pleads for his life:
He said, ‘O dearest mother mine
Spare me, I'll do whate'er you say:
I'll carry for you from today
The water the whole winter through.
O please don't kill me! Spare me do!’
But no plea helped, it was in vain;
The Devil did her will maintain
She struck him with the self-same dread
As if it were a cabbage head.45
4.4 Raining corn. Johann Wick was equally keen on these tales of inspiring miracles.
This was a story that would tell itself. In other prose accounts the moral was more overtly drawn. For pastor Johannes Füglin of Basel, the horrible murders committed by a young weaver, Paul Schumacher, was a classic tale of descent into vice, from Godless idleness into the clutches of the Devil. But it was also part of a larger pattern of moral decay: ‘In the shedding of human blood, such shocking and horrifying cases have sometimes also occurred in the past, but more and more in the present day.’46
It is no surprise that these sensational cases attracted the most attention in print, sometimes far away from the location of the crime and long after it had occurred. Waldis's broadsheet text was printed three times in 1551, and once more over twenty years later. Given the common assumption, voiced systematically from the nineteenth century, that such sensationalism panders mostly to the tastes of the lower classes, it is instructive to note that its status in early news reporting was far more respectable.47 The authors were clergymen, the readers mostly members of comfortable burgher households. This is not inherently surprising. These were the sort of citizens who had most to fear from servants and apprentices who turned bad or greedy, and attacked their employers or vulnerable family members. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century societies were inherently dangerous and risky; it required boldness and fortitude to claw one's way through the multiple hazards to security and prosperity. The irony is that the most avid consumers of these crime pamphlets were those who had achieved a measure of stability and material success. They served as a reminder that even in the most orderly households danger lurked unpredictably around every corner; the peace and order so painstakingly constructed could be overturned in an instant. The sixteenth century was not the only one in which crime was most feared and retribution most actively supported by those least likely to be directly affected.
Witches
It is perhaps not surprising, given the strong theological undertow exhibited in the crime reporting, that news publications also reveal an increasing concern with witchcraft. There can be no doubt that print played a large and malignant role in fuelling the witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.48 Up to this point Church leaders had retained a degree of sceptical distance from demands to pursue witchcraft prosecutions. The Austrian Inquisitor Henry Kramer, an early enthusiast of witch-hunting, had a chilly relationship with the local bishop, who threatened to expel him by force if he remained in the diocese. Kramer turned the tables by having his witch-hunting manual printed. Although the Malleus Maleficarum failed to win approval from university theologians, it was an instant publishing success.49 The Malleus Maleficarum took its place in libraries as a handbook of persecution; alongside a contemporary rival publication by Ulrich Molitor it established an important and popular new genre of learned publication.50
The manuals taught people how to search out and prosecute witches; news pamphlets enthusiastically reported the consequences. We can reconstruct in some detail the emergence of witch trials as news events through the notorious case of a woman who was executed after having set fire to the town of Schiltach in the Black Forest in 1533. An account of her trial appeared in print little more than a week later, to be reprinted in Leipzig, on the other side of Germany, within a few weeks. The case acquired its greatest notoriety when the Nuremberg publisher commissioned a woodcut from the artist Erhard Schön, which was then issued as a broadsheet. Obviously the text had to be greatly simplified, but this only added to its sensational impact. It was this version that Wick obtained, years later, to paste into his scrapbooks.51
According to Christopher Froben, by this time the ‘devil of Schiltach’ had become proverbial throughout Germany. If this was so, it could only have been due to the success of the case as a media event. Not everyone approved. When in 1535 a Strasbourg printer applied for a licence to print another account of these events, the magistrates refused. At this point they were prepared to say of their illustrious and serious-minded city, ‘We don't do devils.’52 But the tide of history was running against them. The Protestant Reformation certainly intensified the sense of an intense conflict between God and the Devil; books describing the Devil and his cohorts poured off the presses, and filled the sermons of the Lutheran pastors. Predictably, the resulting trials and executions created work for the news prints.
Some intellectuals continued to call for restraint, led notably by the Dutch physician Johann Weyer.53 But if the learned texts left room for doubt and qualifications, this was seldom true of the pamphlets, and even less so of the broadsheets. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, news broadsheets were reporting mass executions of witches in various parts of Germany and Alsace. One described how the Devil had summoned an assembly of witches to the castle at Colmar, to which five hundred flew on cats or calves.54 On this occasion over one hundred witches were executed. In such reports the notion of the suffering individual was wholly lost in the sensation conveyed of horrific threat and massive retribution. These pamphlets added yet one more layer of blood-curdling insecurity to the anxieties articulated in other tales of wonder, sensation and crime.
The sixteenth century had demonstrated that print could be a vital tool of state-building. Used with subtlety and care, the news prints allowed Europe's rulers to take the wider political nation into their confidence, and marshal patriotic loyalty to their dynastic ambitions. Printed ordinances enabled the state to extend the range of government functions, and make known to all levels of society the need for regulation or taxation. This was one of the most impressive and effective ways in which the culture of news was exploited for the shaping of society. But the people of Europe were far from passive recipients of this news. They had their own views; they could compare what was expressed officially in print with what they heard on the streets. Increasingly they developed their own news values, stoking a commercial market that could, if unrestrained, threaten the delicate order that the state had sought to promote. It was a harbinger of dangerous times.
CHAPTER 5
Confidential Correspondents
BY the middle of the sixteenth century the development of printing had had a profound impact on the availability of news throughout Europe. Those who wished to keep abreast of current events now had access to a profusion of printed pamphlets and broadsheets. These news prints were among the cheapest books for sale, many retailing for a
penny or its equivalent. For those privileged groups who had been the principal consumers of news in medieval Europe these developments were in many ways unsettling. In the old world, news had been essentially a private and intimate transaction, exchanged between trusted individuals. Because you knew your correspondent, you knew how to weigh up the value of his news: his reputation stood behind it.1 But how could you say that of a news pamphlet published often by an unknown printer in a faraway place, and now spread promiscuously around the marketplace? News was now a commercial transaction. Did this not undermine the credit of the information? How could one know what to believe from these unknown anonymous correspondents? Were they exaggerating for effect, or just to make money?
Questions of this sort were particularly pertinent for the traditional clients of news in medieval society: Europe's rulers and merchants. They might study pamphlets to take the temperature of public debate, but they needed their own sources of news for more precise intelligence. For those in positions of power, the confidential despatch remained the touchstone of reliability. Among Europe's elites, the exchange of news continued to rely on tried and tested systems of information gathering: through conversation, observation, and, where all else failed, espionage. This tradition of news gathering was not superseded by the birth of commercial news print; indeed, in many ways the networks of confidential correspondence strengthened and intensified as postal networks improved and it became easier to maintain regular connections across national boundaries. Private citizens continued to rely on their friends to send them the news. In troubled times governments leaned heavily on their resident ambassadors for information and informed advice.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Page 12
