Last Friday (18 February) saw Storm Eunice batter most of the UK, with speeds reaching upwards of 120mph on the Isle of Wight, significant damage done to hundreds of houses, over a million houses losing power, and at least four people losing their lives.
Despite the tragic cost of the cyclone, and the severity of the destruction, some of the most popular news stories to emerge from it were humorous. There was ‘wheelie bin chaos’ in Plymouth, a trampoline became airborne in Dorset, and hundreds of thousands turned in to watch a middle-aged man spur on pilots attempting to land at Heathrow Airport.
One clip which went particularly viral was a short video of a church spire toppling in Wells, Somerset.
Subsequently, “Hot Fuzz” trended on Twitter, as people compared the unfortunate accident to the scene in the 2007 action-comedy film where the intrepid journalist Tim Messenger (played by Adam Buxton) is crushed by a falling pinnacle. Church spires are particularly vulnerable to high winds, particularly if they are not adequately maintained, and this is far from the first time that a church has been so brutally deprived of its steeple—a threat which is only exacerbated by climate change.
Of course, I wouldn’t be mentioning any of this if there wasn’t some kind of early modern parallel to be drawn—and there is. Periods of strong wind are not uncommon throughout English history and just as people flock to news outlets for information nowadays, so too did Londoners of the seventeenth century purchase cheap news pamphlets. Of course, these offered no meaningful forecast, besides a general warning of God’s anger (i.e. “if we don’t stop sinning this will happen again”) but the fundamental motives of both parties were the same; Authors, publishers, and printers wanted to make money by selling sensationalised stories of stormy destruction and readers wanted to keep up with the news and entertain themselves. Of course, few media outlets nowadays would admit to trying to cash in on such destruction (and the sensationalism is often more about cherry-picking particularly devastating examples rather than outright lying) but some aspects of news reporting never change.
Lively title-page woodcuts were a popular strategy when it came to drumming up sales and although the extent of damage was always made just as clear in the pamphlet’s text, the woodcuts offer some interesting insights. The 1613 pamphlet The Wonders of this windie winter, for example, features a remarkable woodcut which shows trees uprooted, houses clinging on to their foundation, and—relevantly—a church spire toppling.
This kind of composition (the sea, the land, and the sky) appears to have been a popular one, because another pamphlet from that year, The last terrible Tempestious windes and weather (1613), looks very similar. This woodcut also features spires toppling (in fact there are four in total) and the loss to life is made much more prominent through the inclusion of a string of corpses along the shore. The inclusion of the devil, who is destroying a church spire, spoon-feeds the religious implications to the viewer, although the slightest skim-reading of the text would also do the job.
With no offence intended to the woodcutter of the first image, this second illustration is much more detailed and pleasing to the eye (the former woodcut, for example, has serious perspective issues with regard to the people in the water—perhaps the initial plan was simply to draw some drowning people and no ships? That might explain why some of the arms are so huge). It’s possible that the woodcut owes its crudeness to a rushed creation, whereas the other might have been created in advance (I cannot personally find these woodcuts in any pamphlets from an earlier date).
The more detailed woodcut was reused in 1618 to visualise the storms which had battered Spain that year. One interesting detail is that the 1618 pamphlet (Newes From Spain) is different in one regard: The devil toppling the spire is entirely absent. I’m not sure if that was an active decision on the part of the printer, or if the Devilish figure was not a part of the initial woodcut but added on for emphasis. If there was an active decision made to omit the Devil, I’m not entirely sure as to what that could have been. The pamphlet certainly chalks the weather up to divine intervention, so its omission is not an indication of any secularity. Perhaps the printer was aware of English hostilities towards Spain (or held them himself) and did not want to imply any sympathy for the nation by ascribing the destruction to Satan—not that this would really make sense theologically, but it’s a possible motive.
But if a modern audience finds tales of flying wheelie bins amusing, early modern news reports went the extra mile. The Wonders of this windie winter (1613) reports general destruction to houses but also that something a little out of the ordinary happened in a parish church in Kent:
‘vpon Saint Iohns day last, being Sunday, in the time of Euening prayer, the Church being full of people, arose a most terrible tempest of lightning, wind, and thunder, raging extreamly, to the great affright of man, woman and child there remayning, in the middest of which feare, broake into the Church a most vgly shape out of the ayer like vnto a broad eyd bul and dasht the Ministers booke out of his hand, with which blow the same arme and hand was stroken lame and black, whereupon the whole audience so fearefully pressed one vpon another to get forth that many were hurt and almost bruzed to death, amongst which number a Millor was quite slaine, by the fright of this mishapen spirit […] but this is reported of the same towne of Chart, the parishioners haue an euil custome among them, for continually, be it either in seruice or sermon time, they wil stand in troupes of foure or fiue in a company in diuers parts of the Church, conferring & talking of worldly affaiers, not regarding at al the words of the Minister…’
There was a similar incident during a storm in 1577, where a huge black dog burst into the church and ‘with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste’ ran through the congregation, killing two people. Afterwards, the creature entered another town’s church and ‘slew two men and a lad, and burned the hand of another person that was there among the rest of the company, of whom diuers were blasted.’
It’s hard to come up with any reasonable explanation for either of these reports. It’s not impossible that a bull, dog, or other animal could, being affrighted by a storm, burst into a church and wreak havoc, but the first report describes the beast as rendering a man’s hand ‘lame and black’ and the dog in the second account apparently burns a group of people, neither of which has any obvious rational explanation. Perhaps the stories are entirely made up or grossly sensationalised, but it’s also possible that there are shreds of truth to them. Lightning can obviously burn people, storms can cause animals to panic, and thunderous weather can cause Christians to retreat into the security of their faith. It is possible that a collection of fairly uninteresting truths simply blended together and formed these fantastical tales.
In any case, the author’s message was always the same: God was angry with England so he had either actively caused, or passively permitted, these terrible tempests to occur. A general moral decay was usually to blame, though occasionally more specific reasons were given. Even today, hurricanes are blamed on gay and trans people by some religious zealots. And despite the effects of climate change, the general risk of devastating storms is something which has remained unchanged throughout human history, so these kind of events allow for potentially very fruitful cultural comparison. The moral of this story might be that some people have always viewed storms as divine punishment for human sins, regardless of meteorological advancements. The practical takeaway is that if a storm starts to brew, avoid church spires.
