Liam Byrne

From the eighth century, the most active traders with England were probably the Frisians of the northern Germanic coast, who bought and sold wine, timber, grain and fish from towns like London and York and, from at least the late seventh century, traded a certain amount of English cloth, known, appropriately, as Frisian.

the colonists, while exporting their tobacco, but it neglected

The first of the vessels paid for with ship money set sail in a nineteen-strong fleet in 1635, by which point the Venetian ambassador was warning of rising tension in Charles’s realm: ‘the situation daily becomes worse and more embittered... unless it ends in some honourable composition there is manifest danger of it resulting in a troublesome rising’.59 He was right.