The Early Modern Commons

I was interested in Richard Hall’s diary entry for 17 July 1797 – in other words 225 years ago. It reads: Very early this morning a tremendous storm of Lightning, Thunder and great rain – was particularly dreadful in London. The Lightning and Thunder...

The news this week is all about how cold it is, how the ‘Beast from the East’ is hitting travel on roads across the country – but just to put it in perspective, in 1814 the temperature had fallen below freezing overnight on 27 December...

Today it rained. And then rained some more. All day. But by happy coincidence I came across  a splendid print by George Cruikshank, dating from 1820, entitled ‘Very Unpleasant Weather – Raining Cats and Dogs and Pitchforks’ and...

To mark the end of the year, a snippet repeated from Richard’s diary for 1790: I have not come across a record of the disaster – although the century seems to have been marked by a number of catastrophic drownings in the canals around Amsterdam,...

Image courtesy of the Royal Museums, Greenwich. Today I am delighted to offer a guest post to freelance writer Lucy Lawrence. She has many years experience across a variety of sectors, having made the move to freelancing from a stressful corporate job...

OK, so I have done Gillray and I have done Rowlandson: how about the lesser mortals who caricatured those intrepid skaters (or even, skaiters)? Again courtesy of Lewis Walpole Library, here is “Skaiting Dandies Shewing Off” drawn by Charles...

As a follow-up to the post a couple of days ago featuring Gillray’s skating-themed etchings, I thought a Rowlandson would be appropriate. Except that it was actually made some years earlier than the Gillray, so I suppose it is a prequel rather than...

225 years ago my ancestor Richard Hall noted that following the passing of the Duke of Cumberland, there was a period of mourning at Court which was to last six weeks. The entry echoes the way that my ancestor always referred to the monarch as “good”...

Today marks the two hundredth anniversary of the explosion of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now, Indonesia) – an  event which caused catastrophic damage not just in the Far  East, but to weather patterns throughout the globe. It led...

To mark the end of the year  a snippet from Richard’s diary for 1790: I have not come across a record of the disaster – although the century seems to have been marked by a number of catastrophic drownings in the canals around Amsterdam, often...

Richard Hall was fascinated by extreme weather conditions and loved writing down tittle-tattle from around the country. I like the description of the storm which happened off Lerwick in 1797: In case your eyesight isn’t up to deciphering the spidery...

Writing in his notebook about extreme weather conditions, Richard Hall notes: The Terrible, launched in Harwich in 1762, was the fourth of that name (if you include vessels captured from the Spanish and the French, and then re-named). It doesn’t...

Richard Hall loved writing about the weather. Quite apart from filling his diaries with entries about the rain and snow, he kept a retrospective note-book on weather abnormalities. Here is his entry for March 1774: Poor old Edward Vickers (I think it...