FROZEN
When winter enveloped Britain in its icy embrace in January 1684, temperatures didn’t just dip, they plummeted. “Frost . . . more & more severe, the Thames before London was planted with bothes [shop stalls] in formal streets as in a Citty,” recorded the diarist John Evelyn. “The very seas so locked up with yce, that no vessels could stir out, or come in.”
The cold snap that John Evelyn reported was no flash in the pan. Far from it. Frost fairs in the heart of London, ruinous crop failures, cattle and sheep freezing to death in the fields… all occurred with increasing regularity as Britain shivered in what we now call the Little Ice Age.
Today, this period of weather is often associated with a 200-year timeframe stretching from the mid-17th to mid-19th centuries. But the climate had begun changing more than 350 years before John Evelyn described stranded ships in the frozen Thames – and the result wasn’t always extreme cold.
A period of unusually warm, mostly dry, summers was brought to an abrupt end in 1315 when an unprecedented deluge began shortly after Easter. Sheets of rain descended on the sodden countryside. Freshly ploughed
