Medieval climate change by Carolyn Hughes

A couple of weeks ago here in the UK, we put our clocks back one hour from daylight saving time. So now it’s more or less dark by 4.30pm. I know that some people suffer from SAD, seasonal affective disorder, brought on by the shorter days. I’m not one of them but, even so, I do always have a sense of descending gloom at this time of year, which I know won’t be relieved until the spring. 

But I do take pleasure in any splendid sunny days, such as the morning I am writing this, when the sky is utterly blue and the sun is bright, casting a glorious golden light on those deciduous trees in my garden and beyond whose leaves are turning brown. I suspect it is not all that warm outside but, later on, I will don my coat and maybe a scarf and gloves, and go for a reviving walk.

However, as so often when weather is on my mind, my thoughts turn to the folk I write about in my novels, people who lived in the fourteenth century. For us, shorter days may signal the arrival of a period of “hunkering down”, but we can to a considerable extent still get on with our lives without too much disruption. We generally have on-tap heating and lighting in our homes, and even travel and going to work are mostly manageable (in temperate climes like the UK, at any rate). But, for my Meonbridge folk, especially the poorer ones, shorter days meant fewer hours in which to work, especially outdoors. Obviously, rural peasants were farmers, so there would be work to do. They would wrap up as best they could to go out and harvest winter vegetables, fertilise fields, repair buildings and fences, collect fuel for fires and, if they had animals, feed them.

But then they had to retreat indoors, and it is hard to imagine, isn’t it, how restrictive life must have been? With only a wood fire burning in the central hearth, undoubtedly emitting a good deal of smoke but possibly not all that much heat, the long evenings and nights would often have been very cold and “hunkering down” might have meant wrapping yourself in every garment you possessed (which might not have been all that many), and huddling around the fire.

The lack of light too must have severely limited what people could do indoors. Spinning or sewing, or any craft or repair work, would have been difficult to manage by candlelight, or, worse, by rushlight. And, in the depths of winter, when bright sunny days might be infrequent, the days too would offer little opportunity for industrious activity. Windows in peasant cottages were few and small and, if shutters or blinds were closed to keep out the winter weather, it would be dark indoors, even at midday. If outdoor work was not required, then confinement inside must surely have been excessively tedious!

I don’t have any special insight into how such medieval lives would have been lived, or whether indeed people then suffered from SAD, not that they would recognise it, of course. But bringing my imagination to bear, as of course I do when writing my novels, leads me to assume that winter life would have been uncomfortable and dull for them at best. Not of course that they knew any different, so undoubtedly they did simply get on with life as best they could. 

If you’d like a little more insight into winter life in Medieval Europe, this article might be of interest: https://www.medievalists.net/2020/12/medieval-peasants-winter/

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP28, is scheduled to take place at the end of this month (November) in Dubai.  I can scarcely contemplate the difficulties the world faces in tackling the problems caused by centuries of industrialisation, but I won’t comment on that, as I have no expertise to offer on reasons or solutions.

But, again, because I spend my days “living with” people from the fourteenth century, I am bound to think about how their lives might have been affected by particularly challenging weather situations.

Recently, Storm Ciarán battered the southern counties of the United Kingdom. Some countries of the world of course suffer frequent violent storms, with horrendous winds and torrential rain, more or less as a matter of course, but we are less used to it here. As a result of the storm, there was a good deal of flooding, bringing misery and great discomfort to many people, not to say fear at what the rest of the winter’s weather might throw at them, for winter has barely started.

Unusual or extreme weather did not in fact often affect my Meonbridge people, for in the period in which my Chronicles are set, the middle couple of decades of the fourteenth century, the weather was, if hardly benign, not often especially extreme. In the early part of the century, there had been such torrential and unceasing rains, and flooding so widespread, that harvests were dire and animals died, and the Great Famine stalked the land for three years. This was the beginning of the “Little Ice Age”, an extended period of cooling, particularly in northern Europe, which lasted until 1850, with periods of relatively mild weather and others of more extreme cold.

However, frightening weather was not unknown even in the middle part of the fourteenth century. At the end of my book, Children’s Fate, an extraordinary wind that affected not only the British Isles but also northern Europe did cause great disquiet and, in some places, severe damage, disruption and death.

This is how I describe it in my Author’s Note:

“Plague left England in December 1361, though it was still in Scotland. In Hampshire, I think it would have passed on by the autumn. By Christmas, people were presumably beginning to think the time had come at last when they could move on from horror and disaster.

But, two weeks later, on 15^th January 1362, came yet another cataclysm: the Saint Maurus’ Day storm, a wind – the “Great Wind” – one of the most violent extra-tropical storms ever to hit the British Isles and northern Europe. It was so strong that it toppled church spires, destroyed houses and mills, and caused huge damage to farms and forests across the south of England.

A chronicler of the time said it was “as if the Day of Judgement were at hand… no one knew where he could safely hide, for church towers, windmills, and many dwelling-houses collapsed to the ground”. Norwich Cathedral lost its wooden spire, Salisbury Cathedral was so badly damaged the bishop appealed to the Pope for funds, and St Albans Abbey was destroyed.

The storm was in fact much more damaging in the Low Countries, where the event was called the Grote Mandrenke, the “Great Drowning of Men”. Storm surges caused sea floods that washed away towns and villages, leaving tens of thousands dead.

But, following on from months of plague, one can perhaps appreciate why some people might have thought the end of the world had finally come.”

Storm in the Sea by Pieter Mulier, c 1690. In Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

And here is an extract from Children’s Fate showing my imagination’s take on the Saint Maurus’ Day storm:

“Eudo was humming as he made preparations as usual for the office of Vespers. It was already fairly dark but, chancing to look up at the great window behind the altar, he thought it looked beyond the glass more like midnight than late afternoon, albeit it was the middle of January.

It was then he noticed too that the brisk breeze of earlier seemed to be blowing harder. He could hear the wind quite clearly from the chancel, whereas normally the thick walls of the church stifled any sounds of weather. It was a while yet before the office had to begin, and he hurried to the porch door to look outside.

Unthinking, he lifted the door’s great latch, and was almost knocked off his feet, as the door, heavy as it was, blew open. The edge caught him in the chest and, for a few moments, he was unable to catch his breath. Holding fast to the door, he eased it open sufficiently for him to step out into the porch, then closed it carefully behind him, ensuring the latch had dropped. He moved towards the porch’s front, his feet shuffling through all manner of debris presumably whisked in by the wind.

It was indeed as black as midnight out beyond the building. Yet, as his eyes accustomed to the dark, he realised the churchyard yews were swaying wildly, and small branches of other trees, and objects he could not identify, were being tossed about, spinning through the air. He clapped his hands over his ears to muffle the din of it.

He had surely never heard or witnessed such a wind before.

Eudo turned and hurried back into the church. He had to lean hard upon the door to close it, and he again made sure the latch had fallen, and hoped the iron fastener was strong enough to hold.

He had no intention of trying to get home to the parsonage whilst this storm was raging. He suspected there would be no Vespers congregation now, for surely no one would venture forth in this? Nonetheless, he returned to the chancel to complete his preparations. He would of course recite the office regardless of the absence of any worshippers.

But, as he waited to see if any of his congregation did come, the wind outside seemed to gather force, and it fairly roared around the walls of the chancel. He recoiled as flung debris struck the glass of the great window, just feet away from where he stood at the altar, and his heart raced with anxiety.

When it was clear no one was coming, Eudo did wonder for a moment if he might give Vespers a miss. The wind was so loud, it was likely he would not even be able to hear himself. Yet, God would surely know if he did not perform his duty and, anyway, he really did not want to leave the safety of the church.

[Eudo tries to recite Vespers…]

Yet he made little progress with the office as the roaring swelled, and his heart thudded within his breast. His throat went dry and he could no longer speak the words, even if he could remember them. And his memory was now distracted by a new persistent noise, the clattering of what were surely tiles being torn from the church roof and thrown down onto the ground. Unable to concentrate, Eudo looked up towards the rafters, but the chancel candles cast too dim a light for him to see so high above him. Despite the raw cold inside the church, his face grew hot. What if all the tiles were stripped away? Would the wind then strip away the rafters too and invade the church? Of course he had no way of knowing.

But his efforts were undone when some object, much larger than the debris flung at it already, crashed into the great window, the only glazing in the church, and the glass exploded, showering Eudo with sharp and stinging fragments.

Eudo screamed and threw himself prostrate upon the floor before the altar, wrapping his arms over his head. ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa,’ he cried out, weeping. ‘Oh God, forgive me, for I have sinned…’

For surely it was God who had sent this terrible wind…

Perhaps the pestilence had not been chastisement enough. God saw mankind had not learned its lesson, but had simply returned to their old ways… Such a wind as this could wreak destruction across the land, topple great oaks, rip up fields, fling beasts into the air, demolish houses and even bring down mighty churches. God had the power to destroy the Earth, if mankind no longer merited it…

Yet maybe it was not mankind…? Was God chastising only him? For continuing to sin, week in, week out… For promising to fulfil the penance, whilst knowing he would not do so…

Another roar around the chancel walls brought a swirl of flying debris through the shattered glass, small branches, twigs, dead leaves, shingle, and fragments of every substance, all scooped up from the ground and now tumbling down upon his back.

Eudo fell to sobbing, drumming his feet against the cold stone floor.

The Day of Judgement most surely was at hand. But was it for mankind, or for Eudo Oxenbrigge alone?”

The Last Judgement (detail) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1525/1530. In Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA.  Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The priest Eudo is a sinner, and is perhaps justified in his terror (even if his rational mind might realise the storm couldn’t possibly be aimed solely and specifically at him). But I’m sure it wasn’t only sinners who were terrified by the destruction caused by storms. For everyone assumed it was a punishment sent by God; indeed, bishops told them it was His punishment, and bid them to atone for whatever sins they had committed and to pray daily for God’s mercy. Amidst all their fear and agony, they believed what was happening was their fault: they had brought it upon themselves, and prayer was all they had to try to avert the punishment and expiate their guilt.

Coastal areas in particular across the world are today much threatened by climate change, because of rising sea levels. Flood defences are being constructed everywhere to try and mitigate the damage. The east coast of England has always been notorious for suffering from erosion, which has been going on since the end of the Ice Age, when sea levels rose dramatically from the effects of melting ice. Storms, particularly those at sea, can cause devastation to such low-lying areas. Many towns and villages have been lost over the centuries.

A famous one is Dunwich in Suffolk, an example of a once thriving town that almost totally disappeared in the late thirteenth century. Dunwich was a great port of medieval England, with several churches, hospitals and two seats in parliament. The town battled constantly against the sea. In 1328 a great storm blocked up the port and by the 16th century the town and its houses were regularly falling into the sea. Today all that remains is a quaint village with a tiny population, which is still under threat from the sea. In East Yorkshire, there used to be a seaport called Ravenser Odd. It was too a thriving place, with warehouses, and cargo ships and fishing vessels going in and out, customs officials, a market and an annual fair. But by 1346 already two thirds of this busy town had been lost to the sea from the effects of storms and erosion. Then, in that great Saint Maurus’ Day storm of January 1362, Ravenser Odd vanished altogether. 

The erosion of England’s east coast does of course continue, as melting ice at the poles once more threatens sea levels. And our present changing climate will continue to threaten us, even here in the temperate isles of Britain, with more storms, more floods, more grief for many.

Much like our ancestors, we know that we – aka mankind – are (at least partly) to blame for what is happening to the world’s climate. But even if we too have “brought it upon ourselves”, our accountability is obviously not the same as theirs. We do not believe our sinfulness is at the root of our culpability, nor that the change in the weather has been instigated by some wrathful divine being. Moreover, we have options other than prayer to alleviate our present situation, for we do understand its causes and have some notion of the sort of remedies required to try to mitigate its worst effects.

Yet, as always, what I find so thought-provoking is to recognise the differences between our medieval forebears and ourselves, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the similarities and connections.

 

The Deluge by Francis Danby c. 1840. In Tate Britain, London. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Deluge by J. M. W. Turner, 1805, Tate Britain, London. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Seasons

The history of seasons isn’t always what we think it is. Using the Australian summer as a baseline, when I was a child the Christmas cards all had snow on them. The pavement melted with heat and yet we were expected to believe that snow was going to fall. 

 

During the last forty years, Australia has finally come to expect that summer falls when summer falls, and that Christmas and New Year are warm. An interesting effect of this is that some people have asked “How were the seasons described in Australia prior to European settlement?” In my region, there were six seasons and those six seasons changed when certain plants bloomed, or when rivers filled, or when animals and insects were on the move. 

Because the seasons were described by set events rather than by fixed dates, they're a lot more precise than the European seasons translated to Australia. Some of our more recent popular beliefs work with the six season description, too. For instance, in Canberra, we say that heaters go on every year on ANZAC Day (25 April). Winter doesn’t begin until June: the imported seasons don’t match the calendar, so local customs act as a corrective. 

Jump back to England in the Middle Ages and this kind of discrepancy abounds. Chaucer describes April showers, but one of the key moments in the year isn’t in April, but on 25 March. The key dates for new year, tax, in fact, for most things were linked to key religious moments in the Christian calendar. One has to look at records of weather to find when the seasons changed, and one of the records of weather patterns is in literature. 

I should sit down and look at the studies of weather patterns for a region, and compare the literary and other documentation that show how people saw seasons, and compare them with that Christian calendar and the way it shaped peoples’ lives. Then I can see just what the differences are between the way I live the seasons and how they are described for my own life and compare that to the Middle Ages. 

I don’t have time for this, unfortunately. My research is in quite different fields right now, and I don’t even have the excuse that it will help my next novel. I suspect that this post is my reminder to myself that, one day, when I have time, I want to do this. It’d take a week, for I already have the resources and… I really want to know. What gaps were there between the documented seasons and the way people lived in the seasons in, say, thirteenth century England? 

This post was brought to you by a long summer’s night in the middle (of course) of a heat wave. January is not a cold month where I live.

Baby, it's cold outside by Julie Summers

Seventy seven years ago today Great Britain was paralysed by the most dramatic cold snap of the twentieth century. Winter 1947 was cold. Very cold indeed and there was a lot of snow for a very long time and people who lived through it will assure you it was the worst on record. But the end of January 1940 saw weather of such severity that even at the time the forecasters predicted it would be considered, in the future, the weather event of the century.

London, 28 January 1940

On 28 January 1940 there was an ice storm which Virginia Woolf described in her diary: ‘Everything glass glazed. Each blade is coated, has a rim of pure glass. Walking is like treading on stubble. The stiles and gates have a shiny, green varnish of ice.’ The cause of the weather was a warm Atlantic front meeting continental high pressure over England. The rain fell on ground already frozen and covered with drifting snow and was engulfed by the freezing air. 

Bolton under feet of snow, January 1940

Antony Woodward and Robert Penn published a book in 2007 called The Wrong Kind of Snow. As a keen weather-watcher I cannot recommend this delightful book highly enough. It charts the extremes of British weather day by day over the last 350 years. Of that fearful ice storm they wrote:

On impact, the rain turns instantly to ice: plants turn to glass rods, machines become ice sculptures, trees are split in two, wild ponies in the mountains of Wales are entombed in ice. In Kent, birds die in flight when their wings lock solid. Roads are like skating rinks, railway points cannot be change, thousands of telegraph poles collapse. The country is paralysed.

Birds on the Thames at Oxford, December 2016
I could not bring myself to show frozen birds or ponies!

What a sight it must have been and how miserable to wake up to towels frozen solid in bathrooms, no running water anywhere, ice on the inside of bedroom windows and a complete lack of any transport for essentials such as bread, milk, coal. The ice storm lasted for five days and left a deep impression on those who lived through it.

My friends in the USA or continental Europe raise their eyes to the (weather bringing) heavens when I talk about the weather. 'You British are fixated by it!' they laugh. It is true. When I lived in Germany in the 1980s we had snow on the ground in my village south of Munich from December to April and I was once caught in a full-blown ice storm in Philadelphia which made a strong impression on me but those were both weather events that occur quite regularly and in countries that are used to dealing with them.

Enjoying the British weather at an outdoor concert, Summer 2016

Watching the weather is a national pastime. I have never been able satisfactorily to explain to people living on vast continents why we talk about it incessantly. In The Wrong Kind of Snow I think you might find the answer. It is the lack of extremes and the minute variability which we cherish. Woodward and Penn point out that London gets less rain that many places in the USA, and Paris for that matter. But it gets it in drizzle form. Britain is, on the whole, damp, mild and benign. They point out that overcast skies and persistent drizzle have given Britain the best grass in the world and helped us to become one of the most advanced economies in the world from wool.

The 'perfect lawn', Trinity College Oxford

It has given us perfect turf for cricket, lawn tennis, hockey and bowls and it nurtures the English Garden to be the envy of the world. Dr Johnson once said: 'In our island every man goes to bed unable to guess whether he shall behold in the morning a bright or cloudy atmosphere.' With modern weather-forecasting we do a little better than that but I still like to think that the unpredictability of our weather brings us something worth talking about. One extreme weather event such as that of 77 years ago is a blip, something stupendous and unimaginable. Well worth remembering but as for tomorrow... I'm expecting light rain all day, winds of 11 miles per hour, north veering north westerly and a temperature of around 9 Celsius. Hm. Might even get out into my garden...

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A Blustery Obsession by Julie Summers

Like many of my fellow countrymen and women, I am fixated by the weather. The shipping forecast can fill me with overwhelming excitement when there are gales in all areas. The poetry of the Beaufort Scale and the thought of rugged Rockall, stuck out in the Atlantic, battered by storms nearly all year round, seems to me a perfectly beautiful juxtaposition of nature versus man. So you can imagine my delight when I chanced upon a brilliant book entitled The Wrong Kind of Snow. Published in 2007, it is written by two weather enthusiasts who are anything but armchair boffins. Robert Penn developed his passion for the weather while riding a bicycle around the world and Antony Woodward was born in the back of a Landrover in the middle of a snowdrift in 1963, a notoriously hard winter, he adds. I know. I remember it. My mother had a car crash just up the road from my grandparents’ house and it made a very big impression on me, aged 3. I recall the car skidding on the ice and careering into a car coming up the hill in the opposite direction. It was my first memory of a drama and it was caused by the weather.

Penn and Woodward’s study covers every type of weather event and describes the British Isles as the most weather-affected place on earth. I was not sure I was ready to believe that until I plunged deeper into this fascinating book, which gives a daily account of the weather, drawing statistics from the last three hundred years and anecdotes from the last two thousand. Given the unseasonally warm, damp British December of 2015 and early January 2016, I was amused to read that Sydney Smith, a nineteenth century clergyman, complained on 7 January 1832: ‘We have had the mildest weather possible. A great part of the vegetable world is deceived and beginning to blossom, not merely foolish young plants without experience, but old plants that have been deceived before by premature springs; and for such, one has no pity.’

Daffodils flowering near Wittenham, Oxfordshire 26 Dec 2015

I too felt bewilderment and little sympathy that daffodils were flowering in late December. Yet on that same date, in 1982, the temperature recorded in Braemar in Scotland was -22.6C. Extremes of weather indeed.

Unable to resist a childish urge to see what happened on my birthday, I looked up 3 October and was not disappointed. ‘After weeks of storms and heavy seas in the Channel, a far southerly wind carries the massive invasion fleet of William, Duke of Normandy, to England in 1066. He lands at Pevensey completely unopposed.’ Why unopposed? Because King Harold had concluded that the long delay and roaring northerly gales had put William off and the invasion would be postponed until the spring. How wrong he was, and how extraordinary to think that 1066 might never have happened, or even become 1067.

William the Conqueror, October 1066 (C) Bayeux Tapestry

The weather is the backdrop to our lives, affecting everything we do and often the way we feel. A wash-out in June can pour misery onto a barbecue party while a bright crisp day in October can lift the spirits for me in a way that no spring day can. I am frequently struck by how much weather is used both in fiction and non-fiction. Indisputably one of the most famous weather events launches Bleak House: ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. . .’ and so on. Such a brilliant evocation of the literal and literary meaning of fog. Many authors of fiction, historical or contemporary, use the weather to describe moods, feelings and portents. In Wuthering Heights a powerful storm strikes on the night that Heathcliff runs away: ‘…the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof, and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of stones and soot into the kitchen-fire.’

But what of the non-fiction writers? The weather has an impact on events for us too and I usually take note of extreme examples. When in April 2014 I was asked to help out with developing a storyline to turn my non-fiction book Jambusters about the Women’s Institute into the drama series, Home Fires, for ITV I was cross-questioned on every possible aspect of the early months of the Second World War. It is a topic I know well, having written six books about the era. The script writer was teasing me, trying to catch me out, and on one occasion he thought he had won: ‘What day did it start snowing in 1940?’ he asked. I replied immediately, January 28th. 'How on earth did you know that?’ he asked. Well, it’s quite simple really. There had been plans to hold a big agricultural meeting in London on 31^st January but it had to be cancelled because of the ice storm and extreme snowfall that had led to travel chaos. Trains were stranded all over the country, their points frozen solid, birds died on the wing and wild ponies on the hills in north Wales were entombed in ice. There were 12 foot snow drifts in Lancashire and Bolton was almost completely cut off. How could I possibly have overlooked a weather event like that? 

I wrote last month about my great uncle, Sandy Irvine, who was last seen close to the summit of Mount Everest in 1924. He disappeared in cloud at 12:50, probably the result of a dramatic storm high on the mountain, and was never seen again. That weather event almost certainly accounted for his demise. At the opposite end of the spectrum, moonlit nights during the Second World War spelled danger of a different kind. The ‘Bombers’ Moon’ meant that the terrifying menace of aerial bombardment was at its most dramatic when the pilots could see their targets. Every diary I have ever read that spoke about bombing talked of the terror of moonlight.

Far, far away from Britain, in the jungles of Thailand on 3^rd September 1944 prisoners of the Japanese stared up at the sky in horror as the Royal Air Force bombed the railway sidings just 100 yards from their camp on the Death Railway. The bombers came back again and again and the prisoners could hear the bombs whistling overhead not knowing whether they would fall in or outside the camp.  Splinters tore through the flimsy bamboo and attap of the huts. ‘The earth shook and shivered as we lay in the shallow ditches, not knowing whether the bombs were in or only around the camp,’ wrote Lieutenant Louis Baume. Once it was over and the dust settled, the moon offered them a view of a hideous scene, bathed in ghostly silver: ‘in front of the hospital lay rows and rows of corpses, broken and bloody.  Around the huts, in the grass and on the paths lay others, killed as they ran for cover.  Alone, with his sword trailing in the dust behind him and with tears in his eyes, the Japanese guard drifted and paused, helplessly saluting the dead.’ The power of that image haunted me when I visited the site of the camp in 2003. Yet the strongest voice I heard in my head was that of Louis Baume insisting that nothing could break the men's spirit. Their first concern was how many men they could get to the hospital hut to be saved by the new miracle drug that had been delivered to them by the Red Cross earlier that week: penicillin. 

A hospital hut at a camp on the Thai-Burma Railway
drawing by Stanley Gimson, 1943

How extraordinary that on that September date sixteen years earlier, Alexander Fleming had returned home from his holiday to discover that the unseasonably cold, damp weather had caused piles of culture dishes smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria to grow greenish-yellow mould: penicillin was discovered. Without that damp spell the injured men in the steaming rain forest in Thailand might not have survived. So, for good or for ill, I continue to be fascinated and obsessed by the weather.

Now, where is my radio? I need to listen to the shipping forecast.

'Whether Weather Matters' by A. L. Berridge

I write historical fiction, which means I get paid for being an Anorak. People understand it’s my job to care when the sun set in Paris on June 15th 1639, what phase the moon was in, or the time of high tide. The only time they seem to stare is when I explain I'm trying to find out about the weather.

Captain Mercer in the rain at Waterloo (Cranston Fine Arts)

I can understand that. It somehow sounds so British to be writing about world-changing history and to care whether it was raining at the time. Yet weather itself is world-changing, and history would have taken a completely different course had its effects been otherwise. Who would have won the Battle of Waterloo if it hadn’t rained? Who would have won at Mons if it had? What would have happened at Trafalgar if the wind hadn’t dropped? Would Captain Scott have survived without that last blizzard?  Would we…could we…what would…? We’re talking Alternative History here, because History is what History did, and what history did depended hugely on the weather.

And that can be a problem – because surely it’s my characters and plotting that should determine what happens, rather than an outside force that’s completely beyond my control. It can also be extremely frustrating (in every sense) when a planned romantic romp in a cornfield has to be replaced by a grope in a dingy barn because of an accident of historical weather.

To some extent I can work round it by craftily scheduling scenes to occur in the right seasons, but we don’t always have that flexibility. For my hero’s return to Paris at the end of ‘In the Name of the King’ I wanted a bleak and leafless day to contrast with the hopeful sunshine of the beginning – only to find I’d boxed myself into a corner with the unmoveable date of the Battle of Rocroi, and that my Autumn Scene would have to be played in June.

But in the end it didn’t matter, and the time of year even gave me the final image I’d been looking for – the gleam of sunshine on the blade of a sword as it spun above the smoke of Paris into the blueness of the sky. The truth is that my first plan was dull and obvious, but being forced to deal with reality gave me something that was better than my own imagining.

It’s actually rather worrying how often that happens. ‘In the Name of the King’ has a horrible scene of an amende honorable, when one of my characters is forced to humiliate himself by parading in the Place de Grève dressed only in a shirt – but it was research, not imagination, that made me see how much worse it would be in the freezing slush of recent snow. My latest novel, ‘Into the Valley of Death’, deals with the battle of Inkerman – but it was reality, not my own idea, that the whole thing should have taken place in thick fog. Fog! The confusion of it, the muffling of sound, the moisture in the air and in the powder – could there be a greater gift to a writer? My story involves a mysterious figure whose identity grows more elusive as my characters try to hunt him down – and could there be a better setting for the denouement than the shifting of shadow into substance in the drifting of mist? Mess that one up, Berridge – I dare you.

From 'The Battle of Inkerman' by Louis-William Desanges

But even if the weather works against my story rather than for it, there’s still a pleasure in playing it for real. My characters aren’t my puppets, they’re real people at the mercy of the elements of their own time, and so (of course) are we. We have electricity to make us independent of sun and moon, and our shipping can ignore both wind and tide, but even the famous Weather Modification Scheme can’t really protect us from weather. Clever as we are, we’re still the ‘bare forked animal’ that Lear was when Nature decides it wants a storm, a hurricane – or a tsunami.

The novel I’m working on at the moment begins with that. This is the sequel to ‘Into the Valley of Death’, and picks up the Crimean War after Inkerman when the British forces were left encamped outside Sevastopol to endure the horrors of winter without proper clothing, shelter, food or transport, and with months to wait before relief could reach them. They were dying of cold, of cholera, dysentery, and frankly of starvation – and then the hurricane came. Weather isn’t just the background to this story – in this case it is the story, and if I care about history at all then that’s the one I want to tell.

But no-one would complain about my including a real-life hurricane in my story - the Nerd Factor only really comes in when I’m trying to find out about weather that had no obvious effects on the story. Yet I think that matters too. Weather always makes a difference. Consider even the wedding of Charles and Diana as a historical event – and see how different it would have been if it had rained. What about our own weddings? Our daughter’s graduation? Our first date? If the weather had been different, then the day would have been so too, and probably our mood right along with it.

That’s true of our characters too, and when I write a scene with ‘real’ weather then I’m that much closer to sharing what it was like. In ‘In the Name of the King’ my characters go on the march with an army – and how could I write this without knowing the weather? As the cavalry horses ride past, is that dust in my characters’ faces – or mud? Are they wet? Hot? Thirsty? Historical writers are expected to know what kind of food our characters eat, what clothes they wear and what homes they live in, so shouldn’t we know these other things too? Weather’s like any other part of research – it tells us what it was like to be there.

The problem, of course, is that it’s even harder to find out. There’s a terrifying lack of meteorological data available for previous centuries, and an internet site promising ‘historical weather’ might easily refer only to last week. A few show weather patterns of major significance (like this one on British Winters) but if anyone out there knows a good, reliable source of detail I would be desperately grateful to learn of it. In the absence of official records, scientists at Old Weather.Org are trying to recreate the past through examining old ships’ logs, but otherwise they have to work just as we do: picking up clues from the informal accounts of ordinary people – the letters, diaries, memoirs and court transcripts that tell future generations far more than their writers could ever have imagined.

Diary entries of Richard Hall, Oct 1784 http://georgiangentleman.posterous.com/77052293

As our own would. Looking back at my father’s diaries, I’m struck by how regularly he mentions the weather, and also by how immediately those descriptions recall the whole day. And that, to me, is another reason why I want to use weather in my novels. Readers don’t necessarily know what it’s like to be tortured, to fight a duel, to flounce around in a crinoline or make a fire with flint and steel, but we all know weather. If I read that my Crimean characters are wet and cold then I know how they felt and can make sure my readers know too. These are universal things, easily recognizable, and they can draw us together across the span of hundreds of years.

I’ll be thinking of that as I start writing the Crimean winter, and am rather glad I’ll be doing it just as the January cold begins to bite. Except that I’m not really an Anorak, or at least not a total one - and I intend to leave the heating firmly switched on.

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A.L. Berridge's website