They Were Catastrophising the Climate in the 17th Century

Written by Guy De La Bédoyére on April 22, 2024. Posted in Current News

A long time ago I became fascinated by the obsession people have that the time they live in is of epic, overwhelming significance.

I hunted around for a word that would sum this up. There isn’t one, so I invented my own: chronocentricity. It’s a form of egocentricity, a solipsistic fixation with the notion of one’s own implicit importance by living in a time of importance.

One of the curiosities of chronocentricity is that it is almost always predicated on the belief that the present is self-evidently of especial badness, replete with disasters and an imminent catastrophe of some sort, while what went before was much better.

The present is the worst of times, the past was the best of times. Nothing could sum up today’s climate catastrophising better since, as we all know, apparently the 1830s were paradise when the world was in a perfect state of equilibrium (but see the quote that ends this piece below).

Climate catastrophising is part of the human condition. It’s always been there because it’s a mechanism we use to distinguish one day from another and because it can have a dramatic impact on our survival. One can go back to Roman times and even earlier for various accounts and explanations, but they are scattered and don’t admit the creation of an organised list.

In the year AD 16, for example, the Roman General Germanicus had his fleet scattered and wrecked by a massive storm that left the survivors claiming they had seen whirlwinds and fantastic beasts (Tacitus, Annals 2.22–24, see here). The Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder supplied the invaluable information that hailstorms and whirlwinds are driven away by exposing menstrual fluid to lightning flashes, along with some other bizarre claims that a menstruating woman walking round a cornfield would lead to pests like caterpillars, worms and beetles dying (Natural History 28.76–8, see here).

Proper, coordinated climate catastrophising kicked off when early modern records and diary-keeping began, and that wasn’t really until the 17th century.

In 2023 I wrote a piece for this site about the weather described by the diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706). He was not alone.

In the Companion volume to their 1970 edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary (written 1660-9), the editors Robert Latham and William Matthews included a section about weather, providing an excellent resource for anyone wishing to find out about conditions in 17th-century England, which, as any modern sceptic knows, comes before ‘modern records began’ (The Diary of Samuel Pepys vol. X, p. 470ff).

I thought I’d take a look, because in the half century since that edition of Pepys’s Diary was published some of the texts of the time to which Latham and Matthews refer have become easily available online.

Interestingly, Latham and Matthews added an observation about those 17th-century records that resonates very well today: “As always, phenomena such as storms are amply reported, if sufficiently disastrous, in pamphlets and newspapers.” (ibid. p. 471)

These extracts are from the Diary of Ralph Josselin (1616-83), Vicar of Earl’s Colne, Essex, which featured sporadic entries from 1644-82. I’ve modernised the spelling. You’ll see right from the start that Josselin was clear the weather was a divine punishment for the sins of humanity. None of these people thought of suing the Government for breaching their human rights by failing to protect them:

1647: Among all the several judgements on this nation, God this spring, rye in the latter end of April, when rye was earing and eared, sent such blasted, terrible frosts, that the ear was frozen and so died, and cometh unto nothing: young ashes also leaved were nipped, and blacked, and those shoots died, as if the Lord would continue our want, and penury, we continuing our sins.

June 28th. Summer: Lord goeth out against us in the season, which was wonderful wet; floods every week, hay rotted abroad, much was carried away with the floods, much inned but very dirty, and dangerous for cattle; corn laid, pulled down with weeds; we never had the like in my memory, and that for the greatest part of the summer ; it continued to August 14th when it rained that it made a little flood, and commonly we had one or two floods weekly, or indeed in the meadows there was as it were a continual flood.

August 16th. A very great flood with the great rains last day and night. The season sad and threatening. Daily rains, but especially this morning, we found it exceeding August 24th wet; it caused a very great flood, abundance of hay rotten, much corn cut and not cut groweth, and yet men repent not, to give glory unto God.

September 1st, it was very wet and hindered men in the harvesting; we feared it would cause a flood.

August 31st 1649. The summer past… great inundations in Flanders, and of the Seine by Paris doing great hurt; these signs portend something.

Note Josselin’s “we never had the like in my memory”. This is a common type of phrase deployed in these older descriptions. It purports to be a factual description of how the writer personally could not recall anything similarly disastrous.

However, the real function of the phrase and others like it is to be metaphorical and suggest that nothing so catastrophic had ever happened before since the dawn of time. On June 25th 1652 Evelyn had described a storm so ghastly “as no man alive had seen the like in this age”.

Today, in our supposedly scientific age the phrase ‘since records began’ serves the same purpose. Purportedly factual, it is no more than a piece of melodrama. Neatly obscuring exactly when that was, the underlying implication is that whatever-it-was is totally unprecedented – ever – thereby ensuring the observation is worth making.

The General History of the Air by the early scientist, friend of Evelyn and co-member of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle (1627-91) was published posthumously in 1692. It included a transcript of the Register of Weather kept at Oxford by the philosopher and physician John Locke (1632-1704) between 1666 and 1683, the first serious attempt at making a statistical record, which included some of these memorable observations:

March 8th 1667: Very hard frost, Thames frozen, carts went over.

July 1673: Memorand. That from the beginning of May, till the middle of July, there was scarce one dry day, but so great rains, that produced greater floods than in the memory of man.

May 20th 1681: Cloudy, no rain from hence. till June 20th, the driest spring that hath been known, there having been no rain from the end of March to the end of June.

May 1682. Memorand. That fitting my new barometer, here the mercury was raised by addition of more in the receiver about 2/10 inch, which is almost two of my degrees, which are eight(h)s, though I suspect it still by reason of included air, a degree or two too low.

This is a particularly fascinating observation since it shows that Locke was aware his instruments were prone to error.

Boyle included other disaster stories. Here’s a letter from Fort St. George in Madras, dated January 23rd 1668, describing a storm that took place on November 22nd 1667:

The like hath not been known here in any man’s memory. The tempest of wind and rain was so exceeding violent, that nothing could stand before it; men and beasts carried into the sea by the violence of the winds and floods: the generality of the houses in this and the neighbour towns were ruined:

scarce any trees left standing in gardens or elsewhere: the wall of this town laid flat in several places… no place in the fort where we could keep our persons, books or papers free from the wind or rain: nor scarcely any doors could stand against the violence of it:

and we hourly feared the falling of the fort down upon us, it was so exceedingly rocked: and yet abroad we could have no shelter, nor were able to stand against it. The repairing of the damage will necessarily require a great charge.

As for Pepys himself, he threw in occasional weather reports. On May 20th 1660 he was in Holland, a member of the fleet that had sailed across to bring Charles II home:

But through badness of weather we were in great danger, and a great while before we could get to the ship, so that of all the company not one but myself that was not sick. I keeping myself in the open air, though I was soundly wet for it. This hath not been known four days together such weather at this time of year, a great while.

The following year, on June 2nd 1661, Pepys mentioned:

It began to rain (as it has done of late, so much that we begin to doubt [i.e., suspect] a famine).

Two years later it was worse. On June 26th 1663, Pepys and his cousin Roger:

walked into the King’s Bench Court, where I never was before, and there stayed an hour almost, till it had done raining, which is a sad season, that it is said there hath not been one fair day these three months, and I think it is true.

Which reminded me of a BBC News story the other day about the effect of our current endless rain on crops. I don’t doubt that farmers in this country are under considerable duress right now, but the plain fact is that such circumstances are not new – as both Josselin and Pepys demonstrate.

Two years later, though, on June 7th 1665:

…it being the hottest day that ever I felt in my life, and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England in the beginning of June.

It got worse. By July 11th 1665 it was “very hot beyond bearing”, which was odd because six months earlier on February 6th it had been “one of the coldest days, all say, they ever felt in England”. And then the night of July 7th-8th 1666 “proved the hottest night that ever I was in in my life, and thundered and lightened all night long and rained hard”.

Like an endless parade of modern tabloid headlines, the weather catastrophising of the 17th century provided content for diaries, pamphlets and newspapers and an excuse to point the finger at the evils of mankind.

The main effect of all this catastrophising is to obscure the truth, whatever that truth really is, and make it more likely whatever the problems are the panicked solutions either do no good or make things worse. At least back in the 17th century no-one was foolhardy enough to think the state had an obligation to protect them from the weather, and could be sued if it didn’t, or that anyone was able to change it. By 1710 John Gadbury had come up with astrological explanations for disasters in his Nauticum Astrologicum.

One thing is for certain though. Change, and adapting to it, is what we have always had to do:

“My dear Louisa must be careful of that cough,” remarked Miss Tox.

“It’s nothing,” returned Mrs Chick. “It’s merely change of weather. We must expect change.”

“Of weather?” asked Miss Tox, in her simplicity.

“Of everything,” returned Mrs Chick. “Of course we must. It’s a world of change. Anyone would surprise me very much, Lucretia, and would greatly alter my opinion of their understanding, if they attempted to contradict or evade what is so perfectly evident. Change!” exclaimed Mrs Chick, with severe philosophy. “Why, my gracious me, what is there that does not change!”

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