Licensing

If one wanted to publish a text, usually a license was needed. Getting a license also meant: submitting the text to be published to censorship. In the Civil War and Commonwealth, there was a heated debate about whether this should be continued. John Milton argued in Areopagitica (1644) that "who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye".

During the Exclusion Crisis, due to the inability (or unwillingness) of Parliament to vote on anything else but Exclusion, the Licensing Act lapsed (i.e. it was not renewed). The result was a spate of pamphlets, books, ballads, poems. The Licensing Act was renewed in 1685 and lapsed again (this time for good) in 1695. Jürgen Habermas and others see this as the beginning of a critical public sphere in England.