Piers Mucklejohn
I created Early Modern Scribbling in late 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to turn my undergraduate history research into something which might be interesting to a non-academic audience. Since then, the site’s content has broadened to include all kinds of interesting historical stories from the Tudor and Stuart periods — particularly those which involve books, plays, poems, and other forms of popular literature.
I have a BA in History from the University of Exeter and a master’s degree in Early Modern History from the University of Oxford.
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5 Ridiculous News Stories From 17th-Century England That Prove Clickbait Has Been Around Forever
From farting atheists to venomous dragons, publishers have been dishing out fake news since the dawn of Europe’s earliest newspapers.
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A History of Shorthand Writing: How It Shaped Shakespeare’s Plays and Powered Victorian Journalism
Whether jotting down a sermon or taking notes in court, the art of speedy writing has a long history — from Tudor ‘characterie’ to modern Teeline shorthand.
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How a Marooned Sailor Became the 18th Century’s ‘Gay Robinson Crusoe’
Leendert Hasenbosch died after being abandoned on the uninhabited Ascension Island for the crime of sodomy in 1725. His diary account of the horrifying ordeal became a bestseller.
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Did England’s Final Court Jester Have the Last Laugh?
Flamboyantly dressed and equipped with an arsenal of jokes, Muckle John was the clown of Charles I’s royal court. Civil war and the King’s execution made him England’s last.
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Two 16th-Century Physicians Disagreed on the Use of American Medicine. They Turned to God for Help.
In rival medical texts, Timothy Bright and Nicolás Monardes invoked religion to determine whether plants from the New World should be used in European remedies.
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“The face is the dial of the mind”: Samuel Butler and the Science of People Watching
In dozens of brief essays, the 17th-century poet and satirist wittily catalogued and lampooned the personalities of Restoration England.
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How England’s Sale of Dunkirk to France in 1662 Helped Shape the US Constitution
Charles II courted scandal by pawning off the territory only four years after its stunning capture. The Founding Fathers recalled this cautionary tale when debating the powers of presidency.
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The Zealous Book Collector Who Chronicled the English Civil War
Between 1641 and 1661, the publisher George Thomason compiled more than 22,000 pamphlets, newsbooks, and ballads covering the tumultuous politics of the English Revolution and Interregnum.
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The Unsavoury History of England’s Pancake Day Protests
We’ve been feasting on pancakes on Shrove Tuesday for more than 500 years — but London’s apprentices, armed with cudgels and hammers, once gave the day a reputation for violence.
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Were People Really Better at Writing in the Past?
The prose of bygone years was more florid, wordy, and syntactically unconventional than our own. Does that really mean it was superior?
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Jailing Santa Claus and Plum Pudding Riots: 17th-Century Puritans’ War on Christmas
Forget today’s faux outrage over “Happy Holidays” and Starbucks’ festive cups, England’s godliest Protestants launched a proper attack on the holiday nearly 400 years ago.
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The Dramatist Who Dared Document England’s Forgotten Plague of 1625
Forty years before the Great Plague of London, the pestilence killed tens of thousands in England’s capital city — and was documented in grisly detail by Thomas Dekker.
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How Boozy Church Ales Brought Tudor and Stuart Communities Together — Before Tearing Them Apart
Merry feasts, lavish drinking, and colourful pageants put England’s church ales on a collision course with miserable Puritans. Things came to a dramatic head in Somerset in 1607.
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Ram Alley: The London Passageway That Was a Notorious Criminal Refuge in the 1600s
An obscure legal loophole meant an inconspicuous lane on Fleet Street became a criminal sanctuary, loved by overdue debtors and feared by London’s constables.
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Claiming to Know Fairies, a Fake Fortune Teller Became Tudor England’s Most Notorious Scammer
Judith Phillips humiliated a rich farmer in Hampshire by riding him like a donkey, conned a wealthy widow out of her fortune, and became a scandalous celebrity in Elizabethan London — inspiring ballads, pamphlets, and possibly a play.
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What Was Life Like for a Pamphleteer in Elizabethan England?
Early professional writing was a poorly remunerated, creatively restricted, and generally disreputable career. How on earth did it produce some of England’s greatest minds?
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This 17th-Century Handbook Promised to Satisfy All Curiosities, From Magic Tricks to Firework Dragons
John White’s instructive 1651 pamphlet offered readers guidance for all kinds of experiments, illusions, and eccentric contraptions.
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Dressing up as the Devil Was the Strangest Lie Detection Technique in Stuart England
How do you ensure a key witness in a murder case is telling the truth in an age before polygraph tests and body language analysis? You may need the help of fancy dress.
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A Guide to Tudor England’s Criminal Underworld (And the Writers Who Invented It)
Was Elizabethan London really the site of an active, dangerous, and highly organised criminal underworld complete with its own ranks, cryptic dialect, and conventions?
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Should We Pay More Attention to Shakespeare’s Contemporaries?
More than 400 years since the publication of the First Folio, there is no English writer quite so ubiquitous as Shakespeare. But some academics and creatives are asking a scandalous question: is it time the Bard’s contemporaries got a voice of their own?
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England’s First Printed News Report Was About Its Triumph Over the Scottish at the Battle of Flodden
The earliest known news pamphlet to be published in England was an eyewitness account of the violent clash which cost James IV of Scotland his life in 1513.
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Three Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern England, From a Ghostly Lawyer to a Flying Devil
England saw much change between the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the Civil War, but its bookshops remained reliably stocked with reports of black magic and ghostly goings-on.
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Why the Pickaxe Murder of a Wealthy Miller Sparked a Media Frenzy in 1614
When Edward Hall was killed by his own servants, one of England’s most prominent news publishers set to work capitalising on the public’s morbid curiosity.
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Shop Signs in Early Modern England Were Much More Interesting Than You’d Think
The crude illustrations on wooden signposts which marked out pubs and shops often came to adopt identities of their own.
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Why the Ghosts of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey Haunted England’s Civil War
The Tudor monarch and Catholic statesman both appeared as restless spirits in revolutionary London, if polemical pamphlets of the time are to be believed.
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The 17th-Century ‘Flying’ Ship Which Sailed Over a Church Tower
William Bush built a pinnace in 1607 which climbed a steeple in Berkshire, rode like a tricycle across the nearby countryside, and sailed down the Thames to London — all under the command of a single man.
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Griffin Flood: The Murderous Snitch Who Terrorised Stuart London
A corrupt informer in early 17th-century England harassed, extorted, deceived, and persecuted those who stood in his way. It was only a matter of time until he took a life.
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What Can a Crude Woodcut of a 17th Century Family Tell Us About Domestic Abuse in Early Modern England?
Adorning a ballad sold by a popular publisher in 1638, this wholesome picture of a family at the dinner table in is not all that it appears to be.
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Why the Duke of Buckingham’s 1627 Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré was a Stuart PR Nightmare
When George Villiers’ siege of a French island didn’t go to plan, he turned to England’s printed news to salvage his image.
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Corrupt Cooks and Troublesome Tapsters in Early Modern England
Two humorous 1641 pamphlets shed light on the deceptive practices of tapsters, cooks, butchers, and brewers.
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Anthony Nixon: 17th Century Writer, Journalist, and Plagiarist
Anthony Nixon was one of England’s first professional writers. He was also a brazen plagiarist.
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A Possible Author or Inspiration for Ralph Harford’s Widecombe-in-the-Moor Thunderstorm Pamphlets of 1638
A borrowed phrase may shed light on the origins of a fascinating series of pamphlets about a deadly thunderstorm which struck Devon in 1638.
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Widecombe-in-the-Moor’s 1638 Thunderstorm: A Case Study in 17th-Century News Reporting
When a devastating and deadly thunderstorm struck Devon in 1638, it prompted a flurry of printed news reports.
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Joseph Swetnam and (Early) Modern Misogyny
A misogynistic pamphlet lambasting women became a best-seller and sparked a literary battle in early Stuart England.
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Handguns in Early Modern England: Crime, Class, and Social Order
Firearms in Tudor and Stuart England not only posed a threat to life but also signified boundaries of class and gender.
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Tracing the Seventeenth-Century Roots of ‘Journalism’
Audiences of today turn to the internet, social media, and news outlets to get their news. Things weren’t so different 400 years ago.
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Radical Ideas in English Cheap Print
The early modern period is often seen as conservative and backwards — a place where gender hierarchy was rigid and dissenting voices were silenced. But two 17th-century pamphlets suggest more radical attitudes occasionally bubbled to the surface.
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Windy Weather, Divine Providence, and Spire-Toppling Devils
Viewing storms as divine punishment for human wrongdoings is an unpopular view today, but 400 years ago it was the norm.
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Three Christmassy Woodcuts
These three woodcut illustrations from early modern England show that joviality, danger, and snowball fights came hand-in-hand during the winter.
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Rationalising a 17th-Century Ghost Story
How can we make a fantastical tale of the supernatural from Restoration England make sense?
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Ostrich Inn: The Pub That (Never) Saw Dozens Boiled Alive
Dozens of rich travellers allegedly lost their lives in a Berkshire pub at the hands of a murderous medieval couple. The only problem is that every single death is made up.
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Plague, Trade, and Sin in Dekker’s ‘A Rod for Runaways’ (1625) and Other Works
For some writers of the early Stuart period, fears around illness and death were inseparable from commercial anxieties and the fragility of human goodwill.
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Pamphlet Wars, Graphic Satire, and Metacommentary: Anti-Laudian Cheap Print, 1641-5
If there’s one mantra which remains as true today in the age of tabloids and social media as it did in a Civil War London dominated by cheap pamphlets and ballads, it’s that drama sells.
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What Did Early Modern London Sound Like at Night?
Histories of sound can be difficult to research and reconstruct, but literary sources from the 16th and 17th centuries present an England that was far from quiet at night.
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The Murder of Sir John Tindall
When a lawyer was murdered outside his London chambers in 1617, a couple of enterprising publishers quickly tried to secure a scoop.
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Witchcraft, Demonism, and Agency in ‘The Witch of Edmonton’ (1621)
Staged in the same year it was set, this play’s selling point of supernatural horror acts as a veneer for a much more nuanced view on the nature of witches.
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The Witch of Edmonton, Ballad-Mongers, and Early Modern Fake News
The term ‘Fake News’ may have been popularised by Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, but the deliberate spread of misinformation under the guise of ‘news’ has existed for much longer
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Woods and Witches: Two Unexplained Deaths in 17th-Century London
Two pamphlets from the 1680s recount the discovery of two bodies in London. But how did they die?
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Early Modern UFOs
Looking towards the heavens is no new phenomenon. Neither is thinking something strange is happening in the sky overhead.
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‘In The Burning Flames of Fire I Should Fry’: Mariticide in Two Early Modern Execution Ballads.
Anne Wallen and Alice Davies were both executed for murdering their husbands in the 17th century.