The men who supplied the newsheets gathered their news mostly by spending their days going the rounds of the London Taverns and Coffee houses. Shirley, in Love Tricks, wrote of them: 'They will write you a battle at an hours warning and yet never set foot out of a tavern, describe your towns, fortifications, leaders, the strength of the enemy, every day's march'.
In the 18th century, Laurence Sterne, 1713-68. that clergyman of most unclerical disposition, informed the public, by way of a notice in a grimy window in Cornwill, that he could supply 'on reasonable terms epigrams, anagrams, monograms, epitaphs, prologues, epilogues, madrigals, interludes, advertisements, letters, petitions, memorials on every occasion, essays on all su