The Oxford Gazette AF ed@oxfordgazette.info First Publication for Public Notice: Tuesday 14 November 1665

The Oxford Gazette was the first real newspaper, other than a newsletter, to be published in England. It appeared in Nov. 1665, the court being then at Oxford owing to the great plague, and was started by H. Muddiman under the direction of his patron Sir Joseph Williamson. It became the London Gazette in 1666. It still survives, not now a newspaper, but a record of official appointments, notices of bankruptcy, etc., having passed in 1923 into the keeping of the Stationery Office. See P. M. Handover, A History of the London Gazette 1665-1965 (1965), in which she describes its slow evolution to its present form, and describes its anomalies and eccentricities as 'relics of ancient pride and state'. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, � Margaret Drabble and Oxford University Press 1995