Lecture: Facing the World’s End?

We are thrilled to have Alex Hibberts joining us to give a lecture on climate change in Medieval and Early Modern England. Hibberts is a climate historian whose research explores storms, storm surges, floods, and coastal erosion in late medieval and early modern England. He explores how and what pre-modern experiences of climate change during the Little Ice Age can teach us about adaptation, resilience, and disaster management. Alex has studied at the universities of Durham and Uppsala and is chair of the Northern Environmental History Network.

Facing the World’s End? Experiencing Climate Change in Medieval and Early Modern England, c.1350-1600

DRAGEN Lab
St. Jerome’s University
November 15, 4:30 - 6:30

In late medieval England, changes in the ocean’s behaviour was one of many proposed portents of the world’s impending end. Encouraged by popular vernacular verse such as the Pricke of Conscience poem, emblazoned into stained-glass in York, many anxiously watched for signs of the coming apocalypse. Based on patristic texts, such as Augustine of Hippo’s Literal Meaning of Genesis (415), popular understanding expected natural law to keep the sea apart from the land. Yet, in the early throes of the Little Ice Age (c.1300-1800), this was a time of devastating storm surges, flooding, and catastrophic coastal erosion.

This paper will explore how two coastally located communities of English Augustinian canons, Hastings Priory (East Sussex) and Bilsington Priory (Kent), responded creatively to this period of profound climatic and intellectual crisis. At Hastings, the canons claimed their priory had been ‘destroyed by tempests and sea flood’ However, combining archaeology and documentary data has revealed a carefully constructed narrative of imagined ‘natural’ disaster justifying relocation to a new site and repurposing of the old. This demonstrates medieval experiences of environmental change were not all one-directional, as often assumed, but could be manipulated. At Bilsington, a geophysical survey has revealed previously lost marshland field and drainage systems. These artificial constructions, akin to an act of Creation, kept the waters at bay. Nonetheless, unlike the Creator, these rills, channels, and ponds required constant upkeep by tenants welded into a top-down enforced framework of property rights and services. 

After the dissolution, secular owners of each house continued to reference the legal frameworks and land units of their monastic predecessors, despite inhabiting different systems of belief.  Thus, in many cases, late medieval changes wrought upon coastal landscapes lasted well into the nineteenth-century industrial age.