Trigger warning: Post contains brief mentions of historical animal cruelty and death (animal and people), including drowning, blood sports, and hypothermia.
Curatorial and Outreach Assistant Jake Gentry breaks the ice with a fable of festivals, frost, and an infantile ice age.
“…it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of flute and trumpet the courtiers danced” (Woolf 36).
With midwinter approaching, the instinctive urge to retreat into the warm indoors for a hot drink (hot cocoa, anyone?) or hibernation under a cozy blanket is all too tempting. There is still merriment to be had in the snow and ice, however. What about a festival on a frozen river, complete with food vendors, bowling, skating, printing presses, and an elephant? If any of these could entice you into the cold, this jaunt into Jolly Old England’s frost fairs on the River Thames is for you!
Before we go to the fair, let us first explore how these frosty celebrations came to be, and why folks cannot frolic on a frozen River Thames today. Most all frost fairs occurred during the Little Ice Age (LIA), an intense and regional cooling period that began approximately in 1300 and ended around 1850. The cause(s) of the LIA is a highly debated topic among climatologists, with some of the purported instigations being changes in solar radiation output and oceanic circulation, variations in Earth’s axial tilt and climate, heightened volcanic activity, major acts of deforestation/reforestation, and even a decrease in global population linked to Genghis Khan’s massacres and epidemics like the Black Death. While the true culprit will probably never be known, the almost ice age (the LIA didn’t quite span the globe) gave rise to some rather nippy winters.

Frigid Firsts: The Great Frost of 1608
During the Little Ice Age, legendary cold snaps called the Great Frosts occurred in Europe in the years 1608 and 1683-84. Thanks to a wider and slower water flow that was also impeded by the nineteen piers of the medieval Old London Bridge, the River Thames could (and did) thoroughly freeze during the Great Frosts. Although festivals on the frozen river date back to 695 AD, the first chilly celebration that actually utilized the name “Frost Fair” was the Frost Fair of 1608. During this momentous occasion, vendors took to the ice, such as fruit sellers and shoemakers, who kept warm by lighting fires in their tents. Barbers and pubs set up shop as well, catering to the mass crowds visiting the solidified tideway. If you weren’t in the shopping or drinking mood, never fear– this frost fair also consisted of numerous activities, such as football, nine-pin bowling, and even some illegal gambling! As the first official Frost fair, this festival paved the way for the rest of our icy events, and earned a remarkable reputation, even appearing in the initial chapter of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. In Woolf’s novel, the titular Orlando– who serves as a page for Queen Elizabeth I and eventually King James I– falls in love with a visiting Russian princess named Sasha and partakes in a rather steamy ice-skating date with her at the fair. Woolf describes the Great Frost as:
“The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground…The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road…The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood” (Woolf 33-34).

Frosty and Famous: Frost Fair of 1683-84
The Great Frost of 1683-84 already had a lot going for it– dubbed the harshest freeze in England’s history– it completely froze the River Thames for two months, with the ice reaching a depth of a foot (30 cm) in London. The freeze wasn’t contained to just the Thames, however, as the nearby River Aire froze for a month, and solid sea ice obstructed miles of the southern coastline of the North Sea, affecting shipping and cutting off harbors in England, France, and the Netherlands. This extended icy occasion enabled history’s most celebrated frost fair– the Frost Fair of 1683-84. During this frost fair, a full-fledged carnival unfolded. Among the available activities on the ice included horse and coach racing, puppet-plays, sledding, ice-skating, football, and nine-pin bowling. Tragically, some more unsavory, abusive activities popular at this time in history also took place at this fair, including fox hunting, bull-baiting (a deplorable form of bull and dog fighting that often resulted in the death of the bull), and cock-throwing (another blood sport; a poor rooster was bound to a post and bludgeoned to death).

Besides the animal cruelty, the fair of 1683-84 was quite the spectacle, and some of its celebrations had lasting effects, long after the ice thawed. For example, Chipperfield’s Circus, a British traveling circus, began at this fair in 1684, and continues today, some 300 years later! Another boon from this fair is the introduction of printing on the frozen river. This tradition was begun in 1683 by a British printer named George Croom, who printed lithograph souvenir cards. Although the Lilly Library does not have any of Croom’s cards, we do have some of his other printed works, included a folio broadside from the same year as the fair that contains his imprint statement “LONDON, Printed by George Croom in Thames-Street over against Baynards-Castle.” Reportedly, Croom made five pounds a day printing these cards, which was ten times the average laborer’s weekly wage. Croom’s souvenir cards garnered enough attention that even King Charles II bought one of his cards while visiting the fair.
Polar Printing: The Frost Fair of 1740
Croom’s capitalization of printing on the ice became a reoccurring fixture of subsequent frost fairs. In the winter of 1739-40, the River Thames froze for 9 weeks, beginning on December 24th up until February. During this time, printers created ephemeral products, like broadsheets and cards, in like manner to Croom. The Lilly Library is lucky to have two of these souvenirs– which are both believed to be the only copies of these specific items. The first is a broadside entitled “Advice to the ladies: written and printed on the Thames,” which was printed by an unnamed printer on February 5, 1740 for a Mr. John Lyell, which contains a 36-line poem about the frozen River Thames and a two-line quotation from Virgil’s Georgics which reads “Undaque iam tergo ferratos sustinet orbes,puppibus illa prius, patulis nunc hospita plaustris” (which translates from Latin to ‘welcome once to ships, but now to broad wains! Everywhere brass splits, clothes freeze on the back‘).


The Lilly’s second piece of the Frost Fair of 1740 is a small card-sized broadside printed for Mrs. Jane Streatly on January 14, about halfway through the fair’s tenure. Mrs. Streatly’s broadside, in the same manner as Mr. John Lyell’s above, were personalized with their names and the date by the printer resetting a portion of the printing press’s type. Type, which are small metal castings of letters and symbols, would indent a blank piece of paper or parchment when it was pressed in the printing press. The indentions allow for ink to transfer and color-in the letters and symbols on the page. This process, which was laborious and often complex on solid ground– would have no doubt been a bit trickier on ice.
The Final Freeze: The Frost Fair of 1814
The last incarnation of the frost fair took place during the frost of 1813-14, which was described as “A frost of almost unparalleled severity” which began on December 27, 1813 and lasted until February 7, 1814. To say the frost fairs went out with a bang is an understatement– as this celebration would blow just about every record any previous frost fair had under their belts. Beginning officially on February 1st and lasting four days, the fair consisted of many booths bookended by the London Bridge and the Blackfriars Bridge. During the festival, food vendors sold roast mutton, beef, gingerbread, hot apples, coffee, black tea, and hot chocolate. They also sold an plethora of alcohol, such as Brunswick Mum (an early black beer), purl (a wormwood ale), and Old Tom gin. A wide-range of merchants sold goods from booths, while peddlers waded through the crowds. In a spectacular display of animal endangerment, an elephant was led across the frozen river below the Blackfriars Bridge to showcase the strength of the ice. Other exciting activities including dancing, nine-pin bowling (a staple of frost fairs, apparently), and printing– with almost a dozen printing presses set up on the ice selling printed, celebratory poems. Among the printers was George Davis, who typeset and printed an entire 124-page book entitled Frostiana, or, A history of the River Thames, in a frozen state in his printing stall on the frozen river. Frostiana, as one could assume, is an in-depth account of ice, snow, frost fairs, cold weather, and skating.

Hibernal Hazards: The Great Thaw
The Frost Fair of 1814 came to its end when the ice began to break apart on February 5, 1814, officially ending the saga of the fairs on the frozen Thames. Tragically, several people drowned thanks to the thaw, and they were notably not the first victims of frost fair-centric perils, either. Given the fleeting nature of our freezing fairs, the festivities commonly began during dangerously harsh weather as the ice solidified, and rarely ended before thawing commenced. Thus, fast-melting ice was a dangerous finale to frost fairs. A deadly example occurred during the Frost Fair of 1789, when thawing ice displaced a ship moored to a riverside house, causing a structural collapse that claimed the lives of five people. Whether the merriment of the fair was worth risking a life for wouldn’t be a long-lasting conundrum, however, as the demolishing of the Old London Bridge in 1831 and a milder climate emerging from the end of the Little Ice Age brought a definite end to the frost fairs. A frost fair almost occurred in 1881, but the River Thames simply couldn’t freeze as it had in the past, upsetting many who dreamed of the fair’s resurgence.
A Fair to Remember: Lasting Legacies
Unsurprisingly, frost fairs– whether through fame or infamy– became quite legendary, especially in England. Today, frost fairs commonly appear in fiction, such as the Frost Fair of 1814 appearing multiple times in BBC’s Doctor Who and in The True Confessions of a London Spy by Katherine Cowley, a 2022 historical mystery novel. In London, Richard Kindersley, a sculptor from Southwark, created a frieze in the pedestrian tunnel under the Southwark Bridge which depicts a frost fair, complete with an inscription lifted from handbills printed on the ice.
Thanks for braving the cold with me through this tour of frost fairs through the ages! If you are still interested in some inclement activities, do be sure to check out Bloomington’s Freezefest! Between January 23rd to the 25th, you can enjoy ice sculptures, a cooking competition, and plenty of food vendors. If you are interested in Bloomington’s very own frost fair, please check out their website here: https://www.visitbloomington.com/freezefest/
About the author: Jake H. Gentry is a 25-year-old gay writer, artist, and graduate student. He received his Master of Library Science with a specialization in Rare Books and Manuscripts at Indiana University Bloomington, where he is now also pursuing his MA in Curatorship. He is a curatorial and teaching/outreach assistant at the Lilly Library. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his partner and his two cats, Poe and Jiji.
Works Consulted
“Frost fairs, sunspots and the Little Ice Age” by Mike Lockwood et al.
“The Thames Frost Fairs” by Ben Johnson
“Printed ‘Frost Fair’ ephemera in the University Library” by Liam Sims
Leave a Reply