This is not, as might appear, an early food advertisement to the public. Caxton, as the "History of Advertising" explains, had printed "Pyes," or clerical rules telling how the clergy at Salisbury dealt with the changing date of Easter; and as the clergy could read he was bold enough to print advertisements of his "Pyes." Indeed, for two centuries after it was introduced printing, which should have boomed advertising—if advertising depended primarily upon printing—had little or no effect upon the medieval advertising. The public had to be reached by the rebus over the shop, the public criers in towns, and by boys in front of stalls calling, "What d'ye lack, Master? What d'ye lack?"
Even public notices posted in cathedrals and other frequented places were seldom printed. So few copies were required for the few readers that they were cheaper handwritten.
And even the newspapers, when the civil wars in England in the seventeenth century brought them forth and they began to develop readers, had an extraordinarily small effect in developing advertising.
Book notices, rewards for the arrest of runaway servants and thieves and the announcements of quacks began to appear about 1652. And a little later the germ of modern advertising began to develop in the Mercurius Politicus,
