Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Story is famend for its salacious storyline of sexual misadventure. Set in 14th-century Oxford, it tells the story of John the Chippie, a husband so terrified that any other “Noah’s flood” is coming to drown the arena that he sleeps in a basket within the attic – releasing his spouse to mattress her lover downstairs.
Chaucer’s pilgrims all have a excellent chuckle at John’s expense as they stroll in combination from London against Canterbury, echoing John’s neighbours who “gan laughen at his fantasye” of Noah’s flood and speak to John “wood” (mad). The pilgrims pay attention to this actual story (one in every of 24 Canterbury Stories) as they stroll alongside the south financial institution of the River Thames between Deptford and Greenwich.
That reach of river was once well known to Chaucer. On the time of writing what stays one in every of English literature’s biggest works, he were tasked, in March 1390, with repairing flood injury to the riverbank round Greenwich.
As a poet who swapped his pen for a spade to dig banks and shield the land round Greenwich from inundation, Chaucer knew from enjoy that flooding was once no guffawing subject. He – and later Shakespeare – lived via sessions of peculiar climate now not in contrast to what we’re seeing as of late.
Their converting local weather was once brought about by way of falling relatively than emerging temperatures right through what’s referred to as the little ice age. However the internet impact was once climate extremes like robust winds, storms and flooding – a few of which have been evoked in performs, prose and poems, providing treasured data on how communities had been hit by way of, and answered to, those excessive occasions.
The River Thames and London borough of Southwark, start line for Chaucer’s Canterbury Stories. From The Particuler Description of England by way of William Smith (1588).
British Library by way of Wikimedia
Hull’s medieval flood play
Early within the new yr of 1473, a crowd accumulated outdoor Kingston-upon-Hull’s primary church to observe the once a year flood play carried out. The play itself is now misplaced, however surviving data solid tantalising gentle on how the play was once staged between 1461 and 1531. We all know, for instance, it was once snowing in 1473 on account of a cost that yr for “makyng playne the way where snawe was”.
We additionally know from monetary data that the play was once carried out on a real send, hauled via Hull’s streets on wheels and held on ropes for the remainder of the yr in Holy Trinity church (now Hull Minster). We all know from bills to “Noye and his wyff”, “Noyes children” and “the god in the ship” that the play should have advised an excessively identical tale to that of 2 medieval pageants nonetheless carried out as of late within the neighbouring east coast town of York.
What isn’t instantly transparent from Hull’s data is why the city’s guild of grasp mariners selected the snow and ice of early January as the once a year date for his or her flood play’s efficiency, when biblical performs in York and different northern cities and towns had been staged right through the hotter months of Easter and midsummer. A cost for Noah’s “new myttens” in 1486 speaks to the demanding situations of acting outside theatre in January, most often the coldest time of yr.
If truth be told, Hull’s flood play was once at all times staged on Plough Monday, the primary Monday after the Christian birthday celebration of Epiphany on January 6. This date marked the normal get started of the brand new agricultural yr, and a detailed studying of Hull’s data displays topics of farming woven into the flood play. The advantages of flooding for haymaking, for instance, had been signalled on degree throughout the acquire of agrarian pieces like a “mawnd” (grain basket) in 1487, “hay to the shype” (send) in 1530, and plough hales (handles) “to the chylder” (youngsters) in 1531.
Noah, A Thriller Play by way of Edward Henry Corbould (1858) depicts Hull’s medieval flood play carried out outdoor Holy Trinity Church (now Hull Minster).
Ferens Artwork Gallery by way of Wikimedia
The benefits of flooding meadows had lengthy been recognised within the Humber villages surrounding Hull – and mirrored within the format of its medieval land. Grass grew effectively at the well-drained meadows alongside the River Humber’s banks, and the hay harvested from those floodplains supplied wintry weather feed for cattle together with the oxen that pulled ploughs via arable fields in January, in the beginning of the brand new agricultural yr.
Writing and water control had been as soon as acquainted bedfellows – and the knowledge of establishing raised flood banks and making hay on floodplains is mirrored all through medieval and early trendy literature.
Writing of Runnymede, an historic meadow at the banks of the River Thames, in his 1642 poem Coopers Hill, John Denham casts an approving look at the “wealth” that the seasonal flooding of the Thames brings to the meadows on its river banks: “O’re which he kindly spreads his spacious wing / And hatches plenty for th’ensuing Spring.”
However Denham distinguishes between two varieties of flood: the benevolent, seasonal sort that brings wealth to the meadows, and the “unexpected Inundations” that “spoile the Mowers hopes” and “mock the Plough-mans toyle”. Floods can convey crisis if they’re surprising (for instance, in the event that they happen right through the rising season in spring and summer season) or misplaced (flooding arable fields relatively than meadow floor). However literature reminds us they may be able to additionally convey advantages – if communities learn how to reside with water and adapt their lives to the emerging tide.
Sadly, in spite of renewed hobby in nature-based answers to flood alleviation, floodplain meadows declined sharply within the Twentieth century and few exist as of late. Downstream of Runnymede, at Egham Hythe, is Thorpe Hay Meadow. As soon as a part of a thriving medieval economic system of haymaking on floodplains, its web site proclaims it’s now the “last surviving example of unimproved grassland on Thames Gravel in Surrey”.
Long past too are Hull’s meadows and its flood play, which as soon as celebrated some great benefits of flooding for farming on this stretch of north-east English sea coast. One of the crucial meadows within the village of Drypool, immediately to the east of Hull, had been constructed on as early because the 1540s for Henry VIII’s new defensive fortifications. A lot of the rest was once absorbed into this business town’s city sprawl from the seventeenth century onwards. Lately, the Humber’s banks in city Hull are closely defended by way of a £42 million concrete frontage, protective all of the houses and companies at the floodplain past.
The Thames or the Triumph of Navigation by way of James Barry (1791) includes a couplet from the poem Coopers Hill by way of John Denham.
Royal Museums Greenwich by way of Wikimedia, CC BY-NC
Shakespeare’s storms
Shakespeare was once born in 1564 into some of the coldest a long time of the ultimate millennium. Temperatures plunged throughout northern Europe within the 1560s, and the wintry weather of 1564-5 was once particularly serious.
The little ice age introduced shorter springs and longer winters to northern Europe. Reconstructed temperatures display the local weather was once on moderate between 1 and 1.5°C less warm right through Shakespeare’s lifetime than our personal. But it surely was once additionally an age of climate extremes, bringing warmth and drought along snow and ice.
The elements diary of Shakespeare’s virtually precise recent, Richard Shann (1561-1627), now housed within the British Library’s manuscripts division, is a useful witness to those fluctuating extremes. Writing from the village of Methley in West Yorkshire, Shann describes “a could and frostie winter” in 1607-8 “the like not seene of manie yeares before”. Certainly, the frost “was so extreame that the Rivers was in a manner dried up”.
At York, Shann writes, folks “did playe at the bowles” at the river Ouse, and in London “did builde tentes upon the yse” (ice). Temperatures soared that summer season, with July 1608 “so extreame hote that divers p[er]sonnes fainted in the feilde”. However the chilly briefly returned. “A verie great froste” was once reported as early as September 1608, with Shann reporting that the River Ouse “would have borne a swanne”.
The local weather disaster has a communications drawback. How can we inform tales that transfer folks – now not simply to concern the long run, however to believe and construct a greater one? This newsletter is a part of Local weather Storytelling, a sequence exploring how arts and science can sign up for forces to spark figuring out, hope and motion.
As the elements changed into extra variable, with cold and warm spells extra excessive, so the past due sixteenth and seventeenth centuries noticed an building up within the frequency and depth of storms – such that this period has been dubbed “an age of storms”.
On Christmas Eve 1601, Shann describes “such a monstrous great wynde” in Methley “that manie persons weare at theyr wittes ende for feare of blowinge downe theyre howses”. After the typhoon reasons the River Aire at Methley to flood, he writes of his neighbours that the water “came into theyre howses so high, that it allmost did touch theyre chambers”.
In London, in the meantime, historian John Stow (1525-1605) data extremes of warmth and chilly resulting in storms and floods all through the 1590s. In his Annals of England to 1603, Stow reviews “great lightning, thunder and haile” in March 1598, “raine and high waters the like of long time had not been seene” on Whitsunday 1599 – and in December 1599, “winde … boisterous and great” which blew down the tops of chimneys and roofs of church buildings. The next June, there have been “frosts every morning”.
The storminess of this era additionally seems to seep into Shakespeare’s paintings. A number of of his later performs use storms at sea as plot units to shipwreck characters on islands (The Tempest) or far away shores (12th Evening). In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Shakespeare (the co-author, with George Wilkins (died 1618)) tosses his hero relentlessly around the japanese Mediterranean in a play that includes no fewer than 3 storms at sea.
Whilst a lot of Shakespeare’s storms happen in far away places and at sea, King Lear units the typhoon which rages all through its central scenes in Kent, at the English east coast. Lear describes “the roaring sea” and “curlèd waters” that threaten to inundate the land. This can be a play formed by way of the east coast’s lengthy enjoy of residing with the specter of flooding from the North Sea.
King Lear within the Typhoon by way of John Runciman (1767).
Granger Historic Image Archive/Alamy
Crisis pamphlets
Surviving reviews of coastal flooding brought about by way of a sequence of North Sea surges in 1570-71 describe dramatic inundations within the coastal counties of Norfolk, the place “people were constrained to get up to the highest partes of the house”, and Cambridgeshire, the place a number of “townes and villages were ouerflowed”. In the meantime, the Lincolnshire village of Bourne, at the fringe of the Fens, “was ouerflowed to [the] midway of the height of the church”.
Those vibrant accounts of cities and church buildings below water had been accumulated and published in some of the first “disaster pamphlets” in London in 1571. It bore the long identify: A Declaration of Such Tempestious and Outragious Fluddes, as hath been in Diuers Puts of England.
Herbal screw ups had been under no circumstances confined to the east coast. Two pamphlets – William Jones’s Gods Caution to his Other folks of England, and the nameless A True File of Certaine Wonderfull Ouerflowings of Waters – reported on one in every of Britain’s worst herbal screw ups, the Bristol Channel flood of January 30 1607.
Depiction of the Bristol Channel flood of 1607 at the entrance of a crisis pamphlet.
Cardiff College Particular Collections, GW4 Treasures by way of Wikimedia
Their quilt illustrations depicted scenes of struggling and survival, with submerged church buildings and steeples that includes prominently. Inside of, writers knitted in combination statistics recording the selection of miles of land flooded and farm animals drowned with eyewitness accounts of native gents and landowners, who described church buildings “hidden in the Waters”, the “tops of Churches and Steeples like to the tops of Rockes in the Sea”. Certainly, so top had been the floodwaters, Jones wrote, that “some fled into the tops of Churches and Steeples to saue themselves”.
Nevertheless, references to crisis pamphlets lived on in poems equivalent to Jean Ingelow’s Top Tide at the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571 – revealed in 1863 – which drew on the main points of A Declaration to recreate the east coast floods of 3 centuries previous from the standpoint of a husband who loses his spouse to the emerging tide.
The idea that of local weather alternate was once unknown to Shakespeare’s technology, but the converting local weather of the little ice age presented anxieties into the reporting of peculiar climate in crisis pamphlets. Their authors would most often sofa the reasons of native floods as a countrywide factor – as stirrings of divine anger on the sins of the English country or of its Church.
Misplaced communities
The English east coast possesses one of the crucial fastest-eroding cliffs in Europe. In East Yorkshire, the Holderness cliffs from Bridlington to Spurn Level are eroding at an astonishing 1.8 metres in step with yr. Whilst erosion has been going down alongside this sea coast because the finish of the ultimate (complete) ice age roughly 11,700 years in the past, it’s as of late being speeded up by way of the emerging seas and extra widespread storms of local weather alternate.
We will measure flooding or erosion in some very alarming numbers. Consistent with the Flamborough Head to Gibraltar Level Coastline Control Plan of 2010, the Holderness coast retreated by way of round two kilometres over the last thousand years. Within the procedure, 26 villages named within the Domesday Ebook of 1086 disappeared below water.
A demonstration of Previous Kilnsea church in 1829, now swallowed up by way of the North Sea.
Henry Gastineau
However literature is going additional – revealing the stories of those that lived at the fringe of the ones crumbling clifftops, holding fast-vanishing communities and coastlines for long term generations.
Within the early Twentieth century, histories of the Holderness coast’s misplaced villages had been painstakingly pieced in combination from previous footage, maps and archival data by way of Thomas Sheppard, whose Misplaced Cities of the Yorkshire Coast (1912) features a map holding the names and previous places of those shipwrecked villages: Cleton, Monkwell, Monkwike, Out Newton and Previous Kilnsea, to call 5. What should it had been love to reside in those villages? How does their loss hang-out as of late’s coastal communities, who’re themselves dealing with a sluggish however certain retreat from the advancing sea?
Literature may give what nature creator Helen MacDonald, in her choice of essays Vesper Flights (2020), calls the “qualitative texture” to complement the statistics. It will possibly expose the tactics of existence and conduct of concept of people that lived in those communities, and who tailored to the hazards and advantages of residing “on the edge”.
Juliet Blaxland’s The Easternmost Area (2019) describes a yr residing in a “windblown house” in coastal Suffolk, “on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track that leads only into the sea”. The home – now demolished – was once as soon as Blaxland’s house. She wrote the ebook as “a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone”.
However Blaxland conjures greater than bricks and mortar. She speaks to the mindset of coast-dwellers who tempo out the gap between their properties and the advancing cliff edge, and who in finding solace, in addition to unhappiness, within the inevitability of coastal loss. “Everyone has a cliff coming towards them, in the sense of our time being finite,” Blaxland writes. “The difference is that we can see ours, pegged out in front of us.”
From Noah to Now. Video by way of the College of Hull.
From Noah to now
Coastal communities have learnt over centuries to reside with uncertainty, and to proceed their tactics of existence in spite of the hazards. This “living with water” mentality shapes east coast communities simply as without a doubt as banks, boundaries and rock armour form the east coast’s cliffs, river mouths and seashores. It’s in literature that we see this internal existence printed, and listen to the voices of the previous making a song out to the current.
Making a song was once how we engaged younger folks with the previous at the Noah to Now challenge. Throughout six months in 2024-25, colleagues from the College of Hull’s Power and Surroundings Institute labored with singers, musicians and greater than 200 younger folks in Hull and north-east Lincolnshire to rehearse and carry out Benjamin Britten’s mid-Twentieth century youngsters’s opera, Noye’s Fludde, at Hull and Grimsby minsters.
The opera tells the biblical tale of Noah in tune, the usage of the textual content of 1 surviving medieval flood play from Fifteenth-century Chester as its libretto. Our refrain of faculty youngsters carried out because the animals within the ark, and had been joined by way of different younger individuals who took on solo roles or performed within the orchestra.
Youngsters elevate umbrellas right through the finale of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, carried out in Hull Minster, March 2025.
Anete Sooda, College of Hull., CC BY-NC-SA
Rooted within the medieval previous, the opera presented collaborating colleges to the misplaced flood play from medieval Hull, and to that play’s connections with the longstanding tradition of residing with water within the Humber area. One in every of our venues, Hull Minster, was once the church through which Hull’s medieval mariners used to hold the send (or ark) that they hauled via Hull’s streets each and every January, some 500 years in the past.
Britten’s opera additionally resonates with newer histories of east coast flooding. Noye’s Fludde was once first carried out in 1958 close to the composer’s coastal house of Aldeburgh in Suffolk – a the city devastated 5 years previous by way of the disastrous North Sea flood of 1953.
Water swept into greater than 300 properties in Aldeburgh in a while ahead of middle of the night on January 31 1953 – forcing Britten to desert 4 Crabbe Boulevard, his seafront house. It was once days ahead of he may just go back to the home to put in writing letters mentioning that “we expect to feel less damp to-morrow”, and that “I think we’re going to try sleeping here to-night”. It was once any other week ahead of Britten may just record that “most of the mud’s gone now, thank God!”
The occasions of 1953 affected the entire Aldeburgh neighborhood, and the chance for the city to return in combination 5 years later to sing and carry out an opera about flooding should have gave the impression particularly poignant to all concerned.
It was once within the spirit of that first Aldeburgh efficiency that we concerned different east coast communities in Hull and north-east Lincolnshire – each and every with their very own lengthy histories of flooding – within the staging of an opera that folds medieval and mid-Twentieth century tales of flooding to handle topics rooted prior to now which are nonetheless related as of late.
Lecturers from the collaborating colleges spoke in their youngsters’s enthusiasm for finding out throughout the medium of reports and songs a few severe subject like flooding.
“[They were] so enthralled and so wanting to pass the message on of what they’d learnt,” a trainer from north-east Lincolnshire recalled in regards to the youngsters’s enthusiasm on coming back from some of the workshops. “They came back just full of it – and full of the stories they’d been told as well.”
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