Elizabethan and early Stuart England saw the prevailing medium for transmitting military news shift from public ritual, through private letters, to public newspapers. Randall argues that the development of written news required new standards of credibility for the information to be believable. Whereas ritual news established credibility through public performance, letters circulated sociably between private gentlemen relied on the honour of the gentle author. With the rise of anonymous pamphlets and corantos (early newspapers) at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a still-existing standard of credibility developed which was based on individuals reading multiple, anonymous texts