We are in a season of protest. Taking to the streets or the picket line is an ageless method for communicating our disapproval. But everything else about protest in the digital age is quite new. Try taking a stand without a Twitter account. Four hundred years ago another radical development in communication technology introduced a culture of protest so new that it fuelled the Civil Wars. The printing press created a public sphere in which the vociferous and sneering drowned out the measured and questioning. The printed pamphlet and sermon were some of the period’s least elegant forms of argumentation, but they reached a wide audience and succeeded in whipping up national hatred for the king. Print was also a Protestant form. Few English Catholics would ever see their work in print except via clandestine continental presses. However, hiding beneath the chatter of print was a form of British protest that survived from the Catholic past. Festive and local, pre-Civil War protesters belonged to the illiterate realm of the folk hero. Many were working-class poets or performers, all sharper in wit than their betters. In 1619 Penny of Wisbech refused to lie down for the rich landowners of Essex bent on draining the fens. Fen folk lamented the disappearance of a unique way of life dependent on the water. Penny’s protest ballad adopts the voice of a fish bewailing the transformation of wetlands into arable fields and calls on local men and women to take up arms against the King’s men. Penny is recorded as leading “a rowdy crowd of nearly 2,000 people of the common sort”. Shaking their stilts and skatches they stood in the centre of town reciting the song of the fish: