Oyez, oyez, oyez. That is the traditional opening — three times, from the Anglo-Norman for "hear ye" — and it is roughly all that most people today know about the town crier. A man in a tricorn hat, ringing a handbell, reading something out loud in a square. A piece of pageantry.
For several hundred years in England, and in much of Europe, the town crier was not pageantry. He was the news.
Before printing was cheap, and for a long time after, most people could not read, and most people did not own anything written. A proclamation from the mayor, a change in a tax, a new law, the date of a market, the schedule of an execution — none of it reached the general population through paper. It reached them through a person, standing in a public place, shouting it out. The crier was the distribution system.
The role arrived in England with the Norman conquest in 1066 and the French term criour, and it settled into a standard shape. Town criers were appointed by the town, paid by the town, and given both a bell and a licence. They were usually required to be literate, which put them in a small minority of the population, and to have a carrying voice and a good memory — because a crier who mangled a proclamation could cause real damage. The bellow and the handbell were practical tools: the bell told people to stop and come closer, and the volume carried the message across an open market square with no amplification.
The economics were modest and often in kind. A crier might be paid a small stipend by the town, and earn the rest by being hired privately for local announcements — a lost dog, a shop opening, a funeral — a model that survives today in the shape of the paid announcement. Some towns paid partly in ale. The position carried enough standing that it was sometimes held by the same person for decades, and fathers occasionally passed the bell to sons.
From the eighteenth century onward, many criers began carrying printed handbills as well, reading the text and then distributing it, so that the message could survive the moment. This was the beginning of the end of the job. Print got cheaper, literacy spread, newspapers arrived, and a printed broadsheet could reach more people more accurately than a shouting man. The crier did not vanish immediately. Towns liked the ritual of it, and he kept a ceremonial role long after the information function had gone.
There is a close relative of the crier who is often forgotten, and who had a harder job: the bellman, or night watchman. Where the crier worked the market square by day, the bellman worked the streets after dark, ringing a bell, calling the hour, and reporting conditions — "past ten o'clock and all's well," with variations warning of fire, weather, or anything else residents needed to know. The bellman also announced deaths, which gave him, in small towns, a permanent and slightly grim social position.
What all of these roles share is a single job description: to be the point at which information entered a community. Everything else about them — the bell, the hat, the volume, the literacy — was in service of that. And when the printing press, then the newspaper, then the radio, and then the screen each took over the function, the person was left holding the props of a job that no longer needed doing.
The job does still exist, in a specific and honest form. Many towns in Britain, and some in the United States, Canada, and Australia, keep a ceremonial town crier, and there are competitions — the British National Town Criers Championship has been running since the middle of the twentieth century — that reward volume, clarity, and the ability to deliver a cry in a way that holds a crowd. It is a performance of a lost profession, which is a strange category of job: the work is gone, but the shape of the work is preserved on purpose, by people who never did it for a living.
The last town crier to hold the office as a real information channel, in any given town, is usually impossible to identify, because the role faded rather than ended. There was no final proclamation. The announcements simply got shorter, and then they were notices, and then they were notices that people read instead of heard.
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