The Grindelwald Fluctuation and wild weather events in Bristol
Historians have recently uncovered evidence of extreme weather events in Bristol in the 1500s and 1600s. Eugene Byrne reports.
NOVEMBER the 20th 1607 began a frost which lasted till the 8th February following at which time the River of Severn and Wye were so hard frozen that people did pass on foot from side unto the other and played gambols and made fires to roast meat upon the ice. No long trows etc could come to Bristol and when the ice broke away there came swimming down with the current of the tide great massy flakes of ice which endangered many ships that came up the Channel into Kingroad. The continuance of the frost starved a great number of birds, and made corn sell very dea
The “Grindelwald Fluctuation” isn’t a term that many BT readers will be familiar with, but within it there are some intriguing facts, speculations and stories. If we tell you that an academic paper has recently been published titled ‘Weird weather in Bristol during the Grindelwald Fluctuation (15601630)’ it suddenly sounds more interesting, doesn’t it?
The Fluctuation was a phase of the wider “Little Ice Age”, which extended from the end of the Middle Ages until the mid-1800s. During this time there was a noticeable cooling of the planet, hence all those old paintings and descriptions of people regularly holding fairs on frozen-over British and European rivers – rivers which have never come close to freezing during the memory of anyone alive today.
The Grindelwald Fluctuation (it takes its name from the well-documented advance of the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland) was a distinct phase of this Little Ice Age running about 1560 to about 1630, when a cooling planet got even cooler. It may have been the result of a number of separate volcanic eruptions in South America blocking out sunlight.
During this time England experienced some of the very worst weather in all of recorded history, and thanks to study of extremely fragile chronicle, we now know a lot more about how the Fluctuation affected Bristol. And it wasn’t good.
The hand-written chronicle was acquired by Bristol Archives in the 1930s but it was so delicate that access to it was very limited.
Now, though, the unglamorously-titled 09594/1 has been studied by a team led by Dr Evan Jones from Bristol’s Department of History. Using digital photography, the document has been painstakingly transcribed.
Dr Jones and his team have concluded that 09594/1 was probably not begun until the late 17th century, but was then updated regularly until 1735 by different people – probably all members of the same family. It includes details dating back as far as the 13th century, which would have been taken from older chronicles or manuscripts.
Its immense value to local historians is that it concerns itself exclusively with local history and mentions a number of events which are not covered by other, more famous local chronicles, such as Ricart’s Calendar. About a quarter of the text deals with the late 1600s and early 1700s and was probably written by people who were eyewitnesses to the events they describe.
It includes several descriptions of extreme weather-related events in the Bristol area from the 1560s to the 1620s.
Working with an environmental scientist from University College London (UCL), the Bristol researchers have produced a paper about this discovery, and the impact of this climatic deterioration on the city of Bristol, in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journa Weather..
The chronicle entries describe crop failures, famines, great freezes, floods, unseasonal blizzards, tempests and droughts all feature in the accounts of these ‘strangely altered’ times.
The passage at the start of this article is one of the many mentions of extreme weather events, but there are many others:
» “A great famine in divers places and in the city of Bristol all kinds grain was very dear so that the poor was in very great want…” (1596)
» “The winter proved very hard and stormy that it shook most of the houses in the City of Bristol and caused great shipwrecks in diverse places.” (1610-11)
» “Concerning famine or dearth of corn we stood in much fear this year for all this summer proved
very wet and stormy, that corn could not ripen but was beat down in many places; insomuch that famine must have followed by the judgement of all men, if God had rained down His anger a little longer upon the fruits of the earth.” (1626)
These are just a few of the chronicle’s entries, and the severity of the weather can be corroborated from other sources. Some of the events were even illustrated in news pamphlets - the popular press of the day.
It was not just in Bristol that the weather was extreme. The Freeze of 1607-8 led to the first Frost Fair upon the Thames in London.
In Shakespeare’s England, tempests were well known and the “strange alterations of times and seasons” was noted by the writers of the day. As one 1613 news pamphlet reports: “We have within these few years, as well within this our native country of England as in foreign nations, been most grievously stricken ... by dry summers, and parching heats, droughts ... to cause barrenness with scarcity, then freezing and cold winters.”
Professor Anson Mackay, one of the co-authors of the article from UCL, said: “The Little Ice Age … The cooling period from 1300-1800 was a time of global climatic change, but one that was very different to modern global warming.
“Back then, volcanic eruptions and changes in the world’s ocean circulation all played a role. Today, increases in greenhouse gases are the driving force behind global warming.”
Dr Jones added: “What I love about this chronicle is the vividness of the language. But the author was still trying to be measured and factbased. Contemporary observers didn’t have objective systems of weather measurement, but they made an honest attempt to evaluate these events in relative terms.”
One such episode was the Great Flood of 1607, recorded in the chronicle. The flood is currently being studied by Rose Hewlett, the article’s third author, who notes that the height of the water can still be seen on flood markers in churches around the estuary.
The chronicle states that in Bristol itself “all the lower part were drowned about four or five foot” while the flood “came so fast and high at Henbury that the waters continued a long time a fathom deep that the people were obliged to abide on the trees two or three days.”
» You can read a full transcript of the whole of 09594/1 at https:// tinyurl.com/y4loe92q
Latimer’s Diary will return next week.