Writers, Translators, Printers

Abstract

Traditionalists sometimes used manuscript bills to promote their cause. Bills abusing Protestant preachers were posted in London in Edward’s reign. Exeter saw the circulation of ‘seditious bills’ attacking iconoclasm and the King in Henry’s reign; the fixing to doors, and scattering in streets, of ‘most slanderous and seditious bills’ in 1547; and the posting of bills in support of mass and the Pope in 1561. In 1536 and 1549 the northern and southwestern rebels issued manuscript copies of their demands, though government control of the press ensured that they were never printed.¹