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entered the Dark Ages - a term that has long fallen out of
favour with historians. One thing is for sure, this
Game
of Thrones
millennium, all pelt-clad Goths & Vandals,
wasn’t a great time for being famous. Alaric the Visigoth?
Otto the Great? It warms up a bit with Charlemagne and
Alfred the Great is maybe as famous as it gets. This was
a period when the most efficient way for news to travel
was via the clergy and so it was that in the 12th century
news of the martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett travelled
across Europe by word of mouth and in letters between
a literate clergy. The very lucrative industry of
pilgrimage was promoted with a flurry of hand copied
pamphlets and souveniers to take home with both Beckett
and Canterbury Cathedral becoming star attractions.
In the late 1300s Geoffrey Chaucer writing about fame
spoke of
blowing your own trumpet
. Chaucer achieved
a measure of fame in his lifetime but as he wrote his best
known work
The Canterbury Tales
about fifty years
before the invention of the printing press and at a time
when still very few people could yet read and write his
fame was limited. In the 1500s Shakespeare became
famous in his own lifetime but although printing was
now widespread he cared little about seeing his work
on the page. Unscrupulous and avaricious printers
however were quick to cash in on his fame with
plagiarised and poorly written versions of his plays often
cobbled together from being in the audience.
The point is the extent of your fame relies on the means
available to spread the word about yourself. Alexander
the Great had an empire full of subjects who could carry
the word and physically erect the statues and mint the
coins that would show his likeness to a vast number of
people. If you hadn’t got your own empire the next best
thing was a printing press - and ideally someone whose
job it was and in whose interest it was to write about you.
The Media Arrives
In 1641 Samuel Pecke, an innovative scrivener peddling
his services writing legal documents from a little stall in
Westminster Hall, began to use small type and narrow
margins to produce an eight page weekly newspaper.
In his day he was called
A bald-headed buzzard, constant
in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking
but today
we call him the father of British journalism. It would
take another century or so for the transport infrastructure
to improve significantly enough for publications to
become national rather than parochial. This would be
necessary for the first real revolution in the fame game.
One hundred and twenty five years after Sam Pecke the
Scrivener cranked his newsheets out on a similar scale
to a 1960s school secretary with a trusty Gestetner in the
alcove Kitty Fisher would ride the crest of the first wave
of mass media publishing with all the verve of a modern
celebrity. Kitty would manipulate the press with staged
