Wonderful Weather Floods and Foreboding in 17th-Century Britain

When the Bristol Channel flooded on January 30, 1607, pamphlets describing it as God’s warning to a wayward people likewise flooded out of London’s booming presses. Rare weather events of all sorts are ironically commonplace in seventeenth-century news — a century otherwise tempestuous in its frequent, often literal, chopping and changing in church and state. In fact, the two are reflections of each other. True, British weather was consistently inconsistent during the Little Ice Age, a period of prolonged cold and wet that would not end for another two centuries. But the headlines reporting “prodigious” thunderstorms, “miraculous” apparitions, and “terrible” earthquakes were often followed by interpretations of them as moral weathervanes — divine providence, a sign to repent and return to the proverbial straight and narrow.

It is perhaps little surprise, then, that the pamphleteer William Jones rushed to the presses when a storm surge inundated 518 square kilometres surrounding the Bristol Channel. Present scholarship counts 2,000 recorded deaths, making it one of Britain’s worst natural disasters and, according to Jones, a judgement from God.¹

Many are the dumb warnings of Destruction, which the Almighty God hath lately scourged this our Kingdom with; And many more are the threatening Tokens, of his heavy wrath extended toward us: All which in bleeding hearts, may enforce us to put on the true garment of Repentance.²

Like many disaster narratives, Jones starts his account with the truism that the morning of the flood was just like any other: the skies were clear and sunny, ploughmen cut their furrows, shepherds led their flocks to pasture, farmers set about their morning rounds in the yards when, suddenly, “mighty Hills of water” appeared on the horizon, “tumbling one over another”.³ The waters swept away buildings and bridges, inundated granaries and warehouses, and flooded the streets of Bristol; across the countryside, the carcasses of wild animals, drowned cattle, sheep, chickens, and (oddly) ducks dotted the flood waters. Some people managed to flee, some drowned; others sought refuge in trees and church steeples where they endured hunger and cold for days before rescue.

A Protestant, Jones lays some of the blame on the “late Papistical Conspiracy of Traitors”, but the sinfulness is generally all-encompassing.⁴ This is less than surprising. The weight of morality in England was more immediate after the Reformation: clerical and saintly intermediaries between Creator and creation had been removed, innate sinfulness emphasised, and God positioned as a strict schoolmaster meting out punishment and reward. While prodigious events were acknowledged as natural, therefore, they were still thought of as induced by human immorality. Pamphleteers routinely draw on cardinal transgressions, such as adultery and blasphemy, but also charge specific places with specific penchants (Cork, usury; Tiverton, miserliness; Banbury, breaking the Sabbath). This waywardness required God to intervene, to exercise “special” providence to steer humankind along the path of “general” providence, the predetermined course set in stone at creation. Natural phenomena were often interpreted as signs of divine intervention in seventeenth-century print, particularly when preternatural in effect and prodigious in scale.⁵

Jones emphasises the flood’s apocalyptically topsy-turvy nature: the land is turned to water, the rich are made poor, the fertile is laden with salt, and scholars are left dumbfounded. Yet the “merciless” waters also provide a stage for miraculous, divine acts of mercy. In Monmouthshire, a milkmaid stranded on a high bank is eventually saved, “through God’s good help”, when some large troughs are lashed together and two muscly men punt to the rescue.⁶ Moreover, Jones asks us to “mark what befell, at this time, of the strangeness of other creatures”: because, as the tide rose around the bank, the milkmaid found her haven “also covered over, with wild beasts” — dogs, cats, foxes, and rodents — “that thither to seek for succour” and yet, predator and prey mingled, “in this danger of life, they not once offered to express their natural envy: But in a gentle sort, they freely enjoyed the liberty of life.”⁷

In a different account of the flood, A True Report of Certain Wonderful Overflowings of Water (1607), an anonymous author illustrates the miraculous with “tragi-comical” stories that are more eyebrow-raising than hair-raising. The author reports, for instance, that a man planning to travel to a local town to “be merry” had his horse saddled and at the ready when “the wind came about, the point of his compass was changed, his voyage by land was to be made by water, or else not at all.” Instead of fleeing on horseback (as some do in Jones’ account), the man abandons his stead and retreats up his roof, sitting “astride” its ridge. The anonymous author then gleefully describes how the roof is lifted off the house by the flood and begins to float — so “Neptune” could see “how well he could ride” — eventually, lo and behold, taking him to “the very town, where in the morning he meant to take up his inn.”⁸

It is difficult to know how much credence a contemporary reader placed in these reports. But that there was wariness of spurious news is evidenced, if anything, by the lengths to which their writers went to assert their credibility. Some are, granted, no more than lip service: the author of the “tragi-comical” accounts above simply says they include “none but those that are true”.⁹ While a third account of the Bristol flood, entitled Lamentable Newes Out of Monmouthshire (1607), makes a more concerted effort, the author saying they initially refused to write on the disaster because “of the usual unfaithfulness of men ordinarily in reporting of such accidents”.¹⁰ More strident authors list the names and addresses of eyewitnesses. To prove his account of a miraculous rain shower of wheat, the author William Averell lists, among others, a clothier “Master William Geffreyes dwelling in Ipswich” and “John Bull, servant to Justice Germaye”.¹¹ A True Relation of the Wonderful Apparition of a Cross in the Moon name-drops none other than the Lord Chancellor of Ireland.¹² Generally, the higher up the social ladder a witness was, the more credible they were thought to be.

The pamphlets were immensely popular, questions about their veracity notwithstanding. Overall, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an “early modern vogue for the preternatural”, to quote historian of science Lorraine Daston, a passion for anything whiffing of oddities, the occult, witchcraft, or exotic news from beyond the horizon.¹³ The skies above Britain were no different. This fascination was partly academic: unusual natural phenomena of all sorts stood out in the prevailing scientific paradigm of Francis Bacon as providing a better window into the natural world than simply observing its smooth, quotidian ticking over. But there was also a millenarian culture of moral crisis — tensions between Catholics and Protestants, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Puritans and everyone — that left the public searching for omens. The apogee of the pamphlet and broadside, “true” and “certain” reports of marvels, wonders, and prodigies of all sorts flooded the market, sold from shops around St Paul’s Cathedral, London, huckstered outside of theatres and alehouses, or carried by peddlers into the countryside.¹⁴

Not all prodigies, however, were immediately accepted as true signs from on high.¹⁵ Jones argues for the providential nature of the flood in Gods Warning by underscoring its preternatural quality — how animals that would usually fight like cats and dogs did not “express their natural envy”. But other pamphleteers employ historical analogy or theological argumentation to assert that the lightning, hail, or winds they report are more than just bad weather. The author of A True Report, for example, pairs his description with an account of a flood that happened in 1570, “that comparing the one with the other, God’s justice and mercy may both be seen”.¹⁶ A similar approach is taken by Averell in his report of the rain shower of wheat, prefacing a laundry list of sundry omens, ranging from “the noise and sound of trumpets from the skies” to “showers of blood.”¹⁷ In Lamentable Newes, readers eager to learn about the “great many” who were “utterly undone” advertised on the title page may have been disappointed to first wade through eleven pages of theological exegesis on God’s power, tracking from Adam and Eve through to Noah and the flood.

Separating the showers of wheat from the showers of chaff had real importance at a time when there was widespread acceptance of omens as a true sign of divine judgement. The church and state, as those primarily responsible for upholding a moral society, faced roundabout critique in claims that God was signalling displeasure. A typical response to poor weather, throughout the period, was to order penitent self-humiliation, prayer, and fasting in church and at home as a plea for divine mercy.¹⁸ But the politics of weather could be particularly pointed when they correlated with specific events, as when a violent thunderstorm shook London immediately after the coronation of Charles II. Breaking an extended period of consistently pleasant weather, the storm’s timing was striking enough for the diarist Samuel Pepys, otherwise a sceptic of omens, to admit that it was “strange”. In a case of seventeenth-century spin, Charles’ supporters tried to frame the storm as celebratory.¹⁹ Prodigious storms seem to have been more likely to confirm existing biases than lead to groundswells in public sentiment or piety.

As it stands, Jones’ account is comparatively light on theological argumentation or political point-scoring; his is an argument for moral reform that relies more on rhetoric, drama, and, unsurprisingly, fearmongering. In concluding his account, he turns to a description of the area around Barnstaple, Devon, and heightens the drama by bringing the reader into the present tense:

There is little now remaining there, to be seen, but huge Waters like to the main Ocean: The tops of Churches and Steeples like to the tops of Rocks in the Sea, Great Reeks of fodder for cattle, are floating like Ships upon the Waters, and dead Beasts swimming thereon.

This “merciless Water breaking into the bosom of the firm Land”, he continues, “hath proved a fearful punishment” to all creatures great and small. A punishment so great, Jones writes, that it could have easily been mistaken for end times had God not promised Noah to never destroy the Earth again with water, conveying this promise with the sign of the rainbow.²⁰