Good people, I am come hither to die the death whereunto I am a judged.

Those are the first words of Anne Saunders' confession, printed in 1573, as part of a brief

discourse of the late murder of Master George Saunders, written by Arthur Golding and printed by

Henry Binman.

Tudor England didn't have newspapers,

but it did have cheap print that served the same purpose. Broadsides and pamphlets sold by street hawkers filled with crime, gandle, and warnings about moral decay. Oh no. These printings were not neutral accounts. They didn't have

journalistic standards of neutrality or anything like that. They mixed news with sermonizing and

presented each story as a lesson wrapped in something sensational enough to sell quickly on the

streets of London. If you wanted updates on shocking crimes,

household betrayals, or grisly executions, this, my friend, was how you got your news.

Welcome back to the YouTube channel for the Renaissance English History podcast. I am Heather,

and I am just doing a little audio mini-cast today,

just dropping in to share this fun story with you about Tudor newspapers and broadsheets.

I've actually been wanting to do a full episode on Tudor newspapers, so I've been digging into it.

Of course, the Tudors didn't have newspapers the way we know them, but they did have broadsheets on various things like true crime.

And that is what we are going to talk about today. So crime pamphlets usually came as small quarto booklets or single sheet broadsidesides quickly printed on uneven paper and sold for a penny

or less. Their popularity surged under Elizabeth I when the London presses expanded and the

appetite for true stories of vice and punishment grew. They covered real events, murder trials, confessions on the scaffold,

and household tragedies framed as divine warnings. The tutors loved true crime just like we do today.

They always claim to be true reports, in quotes, and the writers insisted that their purpose

was moral instruction, even as they leaned

into the lurid details that readers wanted.

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