The Rains of 1661: Dearth, Religion, and Politics in Little Ice England

The spring and early summer of 1661 saw unusually heavy and persistent rainfall in parts of the British Isles, and this anomalous precipitation played a major role in the significant harvest shortfall that followed later in the year. A preliminary foray into the climate history of the early modern British Isles, this paper explores the rains of 1661 from a number of complementary perspectives. It uses written and paleoclimatic evidence both to reconstruct the climatic anomaly of 1661 and to situate it in the broader context of the seventeenth-century phase of the Little Ice Age. It explores the bodily and emotional experience of abnormal rainfall, its pressures on agrarian life, and the role of Protestant religiosity as an explanatory and consolatory discourse in times of climatic stress. And then turns to explore how contemporaries applied political meanings to climatic anomalies, and how the restored monarchy responded to the societal stresses produced by abnormal weather.

Alastair Bellany is Professor of History at Rutgers University, USA.