Town Crier

Before the printed page reached ordinary people, the news had a voice, a uniform, and a bell. The town crier, or bellman, was the official mouthpiece of the market square: he rang a heavy handbell to gather a crowd, called out “Oyez! Oyez!”, and then read aloud the proclamations of the Crown, the orders of the local authorities, the times of markets, the announcements of sales, and the plain news of the day. In a society where most people could not read, the crier was not merely a herald of information; in a real sense, he was the news.

The office was old, traceable in Britain at least to the medieval period, and it carried genuine authority. The crier spoke in the name of the monarch or the town, and that borrowed authority was protected by law: to assault or obstruct a crier, who might be delivering unwelcome news of taxes or conscription, could be treated as an offense against the Crown itself. He wore a distinctive livery, often a coat, breeches, tricorn hat, and white gloves, marking him as a figure of office rather than a mere shouter in the street, and his cry, accompanied by the bell, was a recognized legal act of publication.

The related practice of “posting” survived alongside the spoken word. Notices were nailed to the door of the church, the market cross, or the inn, the physical ancestor of the modern term to “post” a message. But for the majority who could not read those papers, it was the crier’s voice that mattered, and the same words were both cried in the square and posted on the door.

The trade was undone by literacy and cheap print. As schooling spread and the cost of newspapers and broadsheets collapsed through the 19th century, especially after Britain abolished the newspaper stamp duty in 1855 and a flood of penny papers followed, the crier’s monopoly on reaching the public dissolved. People could now read the news for themselves, in their own time, and later the telegraph and broadcasting finished the job. The crier did not vanish so much as retire into ceremony, surviving today purely as a civic and festive figure rather than a working channel of information.