The ''Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing'', also known as the Licensing Order of 1643, instituted pre-publication

censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...

upon Parliamentary

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. Milton's ''

Areopagitica ''Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parlament of England'' is a 1644 prose polemic by the English poet, scholar, and polemical author John Milton opposing licensing and censorship. ''Areop ...

'' was written specifically against this Act.

Abolition of the Star Chamber

Parliament, by the Habeas Corpus Act 1640, abolished the

Star Chamber The Star Chamber (Latin: ''Camera stellata'') was an English court that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from the late to the mid-17th century (c. 1641), and was composed of Privy Counsellors and common-law judges, to supplement the ju ...

in July 1641, which led to the de facto cessation of censorship. The loosening of controls led to an immediate rise in publishing. Between 1640 and 1660, at least 300 news publications were produced..

The Licensing Order of 1643

The abolition of the Star Chamber and the severe 1637

Star Chamber Decree A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth ...

, however, did not indicate Parliament's intention to permit freedom of speech and of the press; rather it indicated a desire on the part of Parliament to replace the Royal censorship machinery with its own. Motivated by a desire to eliminate chaos and piracy in the printing industry, protect parliamentary activities and proceedings from its opponents, suppress royalist propaganda and check the widening currency of various sects’ radical ideas, Parliament instituted a new state-controlled censoring apparatus in ''An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing'' of 14 June 1643. The Licensing Order reintroduced almost all of the stringent censorship machinery of the 1637 Star Chamber Decree, including: * pre-publication licensing. * registration of all printing materials with the names of author, printer and publisher in the Register at Stationers’ Hall. * search, seizure, and

destruction Destruction may refer to: Concepts * Destruktion, a term from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger * Destructive narcissism, a pathological form of narcissism * Self-destructive behaviour, a widely used phrase that ''conceptualises'' certain kind ...

of any books offensive to the government. * arrest and imprisonment of any offensive writers, printers and publishers. The Stationers’ Company was given the responsibility of acting as censor, in return for a monopoly of the printing trade.

Milton's ''Areopagitica''

In protest, English poet and political writer,

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and politica ...

published the ''

: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parlament of England'' in November, 1644 (16 months following the Licensing Order).

Censorship during the Restoration

After the Restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, even tighter controls were imposed on the press. A single individual was given the authority to publish an official newspaper along with the responsibility of serving as censor for all other publications.

1695: the Licensing Order lapses

With the

Glorious Revolution The Glorious Revolution; gd, Rèabhlaid Ghlòrmhor; cy, Chwyldro Gogoneddus , also known as the ''Glorieuze Overtocht'' or ''Glorious Crossing'' in the Netherlands, is the sequence of events leading to the deposition of King James II and ...

of 1688, William and Mary were invited to ascend the throne on the condition that they agree to the terms spelled out in the Declaration of Rights. This came to be understood as part of the British "constitution" that American patriots cited as the source of their own freedoms as "Englishmen". The Licensing Order was allowed to lapse on 17 April 1695, when the House of Commons declined to renew it and stated its reasons, beginning with "Because it revives, and re-enacts, a Law which in no-wise answered the End for which it was made"."Appendix G: Refusal of the House of Commons to Renew the Licensing Act (1695)", ''Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Ccensorship in Tudor and Stuart England'', by Dorothy Auchter (Greenwood Press, 2001) p. 389 One historian observes that the act was allowed to lapse "not because it infringed on the liberties of Englishmen but because it conferred a monopoly on the crown and a very limited number of booksellers" and that the reasons for allowing the lapse "were commercial, not constitutional." Alvin B. Kernan, "Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print" (Princeton University Press, 2021) p. 59 Although most accounts stipulate that "the Licensing act expired in 1695", the "expiration" was not the result of a simple lapse of attention on the part of the government. Instead, the freedoms established by the Declaration of Rights created a more open society, and an explosion of print was the result. The number of printing houses in England grew in thirty years from 20 in 1695 to 103 (75 in London alone) by 1724. In England, the emergence of publications like the ''

Tatler ''Tatler'' is a British magazine published by Condé Nast Publications focusing on fashion and lifestyle, as well as coverage of high society and politics. It is targeted towards the British upper-middle class and upper class, and those interes ...

'' and the '' Spectator'' are given credit for creating a 'bourgeois public sphere' that allowed for a free exchange of ideas and information. In the American colonies, the end of the Licensing Act also sparked the creation of new publications and set the stage for the battle of words that would lead to the

American Revolution The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revoluti ...

in the second half of the eighteenth century.

References

External links

"The Evolution of Freedom of the Press" - Assumption College
{{UK legislation 1643 in law 1643 in England Book censorship English Civil War English laws John Milton