Origins of Free Speech

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Free speech is today more contested than ever before. In many places, differing views about politics, sex, and religion are suppressed and punished. In the West, debates rage over its limits and meaning. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by Dr. Fara Dabhoiwala to trace the roots of this conflict back to the 18th century, when America embraced the First Amendment, while most of the world adopted a different principle: rights balanced by responsibilities. Together Suzannah and Fara explore the surprising and often troubling origins of free speech, from medieval punishments for slander and Henry VIII’s treason laws to the American Revolution’s selective embrace of liberty.

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Presented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Max Wintle, audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.

All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,
0:08.0	the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenose,
0:14.6	from Shakespeare to Samarise, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.
0:21.2	Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
0:31.8	In 2015, Salman Rushdie said this.
0:35.2	The moment you limit free speech, it is not free speech.
0:39.0	This is the absolutist libertarian approach embodied in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
0:45.7	Although this constitutional right to free speech, as my guest today points out, applies only to government control and not any non-governmental public space.
0:54.5	This idea derives from an early 18th century argument made in Britain that freedom of speech
0:59.6	is the great bulwock of liberty.
1:01.8	And yet, my guest today proves that there are problems with the source of this idea.
1:06.4	The first proponents were not the sincere philosophers they appear.
1:10.2	And at the time the choice was made to frame the right to freedom of expression in this way by the Revolutionary American States,
1:16.6	there was another definition of free speech that they could have chosen,
1:20.6	the one that has in fact entered the law in every other corner of the globe that upholds the right to freedom of expression,
1:30.6	and that is that with rights come responsibilities.
1:34.5	These late 18th century developments have a history.
1:37.9	Speech was routinely policed in medieval society, and the early modern period was, if anything, an age in which this was only further imposed.
1:43.4	Women were punished as scolds for hateful speech.
1:46.3	Cases of slander went before the church courts,
1:48.8	and under Henry VIII, words became treason.
1:52.2	So how did this change?
	...

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