Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Lowry in Salford.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin,
and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week,
my fact is that in 17th century Europe, people used to sing each other the news.
That's how they got the news, it would be sung at their face.
There's been a theft, like that, that kind of thing.
This is the thing,
in the 17th century illiteracy rates were so high that
if they did publish newspapers no one was really buying them because they couldn't read them,
so what they ended up doing was they were taking classic ballads of the time,
but then applying just the news of the day to them,
and so people would go on the streets and they would start singing the news,
and people would memorize the songs that they were singing, and they would pass it on and pass it on,
and that's how the news got around,
and so it was for everything from political news to sentimental stories, religious news, royal rumours, medical advice.
They do like an and finally at the end with a dog on a surfboard or something.
They did have a paywall, so people plugged the ballads, so there were guys going around selling the ballads,