Given that technology changes but people don't, and given that we have Internet trolls, we probably had trolls before the Internets. We did. Tom Standage observes this in his A History of the World in Six Glasses, and this section will remind you of his The Victorian Internet.
News traveled fast across this coffee-powered network; according to one account published in the Spectator in 1712: "There was a fellow in town some years ago, who used to divert himself by telling a lye at Charing Cross in the morning at eight of the clock, and then following it through all parts of town until eight at night; at which time he came to a club of his friends, and diverted them with an account [of] what censure it had drawn at Will's in Covent Garden, how dangerous it was believed [to be?] at Child's and what inference they drew from it with relation to stocks at Jonathan's." (p. 154)
Awesome, except for the "they are trolls" part.
