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period of this “little ice age” was the 1590s (when the
women of Berwick came a cropper) and the years
between 1680 and 1730. Just a two degrees
Fahrenheit drop in temperature was large enough
to leave Iceland completely surrounded by ice and
to regularly freeze the Thames.
The Big One
Within living memory when people talk about
“The
Big One”
they are usually thinking about the winter
of 1947 or 1963 but there was one winter that
knocked both into a cocked hat. That was the winter
of 1683-84. The frost began in December here in the
UK and throughout Europe. The whole country was
affected – this is the savage winter described in
Lorna Doone
by R.D. Blackmore. By January the
Thames had frozen all the way up to London Bridge.
Wider and slower flowing than today and much
impeded by the many arches of Old London Bridge
the river froze to a depth of almost a foot and it stayed
frozen for two months. All the fun of the famous frost
fairs held on the frozen river at various times during
the little Ice Age rather masks the misery these
savage winters brought to the poor; not just the cold
but also the hunger caused by crop failure and rising
food prices. The last of the Thames Frost Fairs was a
four day affair in February 1814 when the ice was
thick enough for an elephant to be led across the
frozen river below Blackfriars Bridge. After 1814 the
weather became milder and after old London Bridge
was demolished in 1831 the river too fast to freeze.
Witches and storms weren’t always such a bad
combination though; Scandinavian witches, it is said,
sold to sailors bags of wind to release if they were
becalmed in the Horse Doldrums. Horse because if
the ship became becalmed for long enough for water
supplies to run low livestock including horses would
be thrown overboard. Coleridge wrote about getting
stuck in the Doldrums in The Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, no breath no motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
In 1590 the Berwick Witches of Scotland were found
guilty of summoning a storm to kill King James VI
when he sailed to Copenhagen to marry Anne of
Denmark for whom he would ask Inigo Jones to
build the Queens House in Greenwich when he
became King James I of England. Emily Oster, an
economist at the University of Chicago wrote an
interesting paper called
Witchcraft, Weather and
Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe
that
shows how the number of witchcraft trials rose and
fell as the temperature rose and fell. The colder it
got, the more women were charged with witchcraft
with trials peaking in the period known as the Little
Ice Age. Temperatures began to drop around the
beginning of the fourteenth century following a 400-
year “mediaeval warm period” and didn’t start
warming up again until the early 1800s. The coldest
Market day in Yakutsk