Living with the ice
By the middle of the seventeenth century the glacial encroachment across Northern Europe had led to the abandonment of farms and smaller towns in the Alpine regions of Switzerland, Austria, and the Italian Tyrol. In the usually more temperate British Isles, which are warmed by the Gulf Stream despite their northerly location, winters grew increasingly severe, with rivers and canals freezing solid, and the freezes setting in earlier in the fall and lasting later in the spring. Since the flow of water was the main source of power to drive gristmills to produce flours from grains, flour and other millage became scarce and more expensive to buy.
The Thames river tidal raceway at London froze over, either solidly or very nearly so, 26 times during the period known as the Little Ice Age, helped in some degree by the slowing of the current caused by London Bridge. During the Winter of 1683-84, the coldest in the history of England, the Thames was frozen solidly from bank to bank for a period of two months. In London the layer of ice atop the frozen river was nearly one foot thick. Several of England’s harbors and ports were unusable, threatened by ice which extended into the North Sea for several miles and disrupted navigation between British ports and across the Channel to the Low Countries and France.
The Thames had frozen over before, though never for so long a period of time, and the Londoners had begun the celebrations of ice fairs, with the first taking place in 1608. During the ice fairs, people set up tents on the frozen river and enjoyed the entertainments of the day, including ice skating, games of bowls, jugglers and acrobats, and being British, beers and ales. They called the events the Thames Frost Fairs, and walking across and along the river to enjoy what the fairs offered was a popular, though chilly, entertainment. The frost fairs would continue into the nineteenth century. At times revelers would encamp on the river.
In 1536, Henry VIII traveled on the river on the ice in a sleigh drawn by horses. He traveled from his residence in central London to Greenwich. His daughter, while on the throne as Queen Elizabeth I, was a frequent user of the ice as a place of winter resort. At the first formally organized Thames Frost Fair in 1608, a printer sold souvenir cards of the event, with the name of the customer and an acknowledgment that the card was printed in a shop erected on the surface of the Thames. One of his amused customers was Charles II, then King of England.
During the 1683-84 frost, which began in late December, streets were laid out on the river and populated with shops. Carriages wended their way through, including the large Hackney coaches, sharing the streets with sleighs and pedestrians. The bitter cold impeded the rise of smoke from the many fires of wood and coal, and breathing, difficult enough in the frigid air, was made even more so. Thousands of deer in the Royal Parks died of the cold, as did waterfowl and other animals. On February 2 1684 (Candlemas Day) a whole oxen was spit roasted on the Thames, with both the King and Queen present for its serving in tents erected for the purpose, near Whitehall Steps.