Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network.

I'm your host, Heather Tesco, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe

it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch

with our own humanity. This is episode 144, and it's on the freezing of the Thames and

frost fairs.

It's not particularly apropos of the lovely spring weather that many of us here in the

Northern Hemisphere are appreciating, but it's a fun thing, and I like fun things.

So there we are.

To shorten winter sadness, see where the nymphs with gladness.

I recently read a book about the Little Ice Age.

I'll link to it in the show notes this week at Englandcast.com slash frost.

And it talked briefly about frost fares.

And I'd heard of frost fairs.

And the most famous ones happen that you see in the very evocative paintings

again i'll put some of those of the show notes they happened after the tutor period so it wasn't

something i really thought of that much but i did decide to dig into it a little bit and i found out

that of course the thames has been freezing over from time to time since England first separated from the rest of Europe and the Great River Thames became its own river instead of the tributary of the Rhine that once it was millions of years ago.

Those of you who listened to the episode on London Bridge that I did back in, I think, like December, will remember that I talked about the arches of the bridge and how it caused these massive rapids to form because it moved a huge amount of water into a very small area.

And people wouldn't actually go under the bridge on the water if they could help it.

They would disembark on one side, walk across, and then get back on the boat again on the other side of the bridge. Well, those same

forces meant that the arches and their support bases would almost dam up the river. And so whenever

there was a little bit of ice, what would happen is it would get

...