Handbills and Placards

Abstract

Chapter 6 examines the handbills that were passed around on the streets and the notices that were posted up in Scottish communities during the early modern period. In particular, it looks at government proclamations and civic ordinances, topical publications and newssheets, elegiac poetry and satirical squibs, commercial advertisements and playbills, together with other ephemeral items printed on a single sheet. It indicates the ways in which public places in Scotland would have been filled with a variety of flyers and posters that made up the textual environment of everyday life. The fragile nature of such material has ensured its limited survival and made its contemporary significance easy to overlook, but it made a fundamental contribution to the cultural ambience of the urban Lowlands in these centuries.