Traffic, Trade, and the Exchange of Manners

What crosses the Narrow Sea is rarely dramatic. It is cordage, assay glass, wine, timber, coal, letters, apprentices, priests, rumour, and money. The dramatic things — fleets, hosts, plague, exiles — cross rarely and are remembered for centuries precisely because the ordinary traffic is so relentless. A realm that receives four hundred packets a season builds its whole administrative temper around the four hundred and not around the one bad year.