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 159. Let's trade with Iceland. There's definitely an exclamation point at the end there. Let's trade with Iceland.

Basically, Iceland is my favorite place on the planet.

I've been going there for a decade now.

And it's basically the perfect place for an introvert who loves being alone in nature,

books, and baths.

There's no better place if you like those three things.

But I was interested in how our tutor friends would

have interacted with Iceland if they even would have. Obviously, there was trade with Iceland

during the period when the Danes were living in England some six or 700 years before. But what about

during our period? Well, as I started to dig into it, I found some really interesting connections with

Iceland during the 15th and 16th century and some changing relationships that had to do with,

as everything else seems to have to do with in this century, the Reformation. But let's go back a bit.

The whole thing starts with fish. And I read recently that DNA testing on the bones of food found on the Mary Rose showed

that some of the fish on the ship came from the North Sea and in waters just off the

south coast of Iceland, showing that there was an element of globalization going on in Tudor England that we don't

often think about. We know that Henry VIII expanded the English Navy. I did a few episodes

on the Tudor Navy, including an interview with Benjamin Redding, a tutor naval expert back in 2016.

And the growth of the Navy was supported by large stores of salted fish, namely cod.

The growth in the fishing trade really made possible the growth of the English Navy.

And then of course the Navy also helped to grow the fishing trade.

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