Ensconced in our warm homes, or perhaps enjoying a toe-tingling walk before sitting beside a glowing log fire in a village pub, it can be difficult to appreciate the forebodings felt by our ancestors at the first flutters of snow. The period known as the Little Ice Age – roughly from the 14th to mid-19th centuries – brought more frequent severe cold winters to Britain than today, heralding hardships for many.
The 14th-century poet William Langland gives us a grim glimpse in Piers Plowman of “the poor in the cottage, burdened with a crew of children” who “suffer painfully with hunger in winter”, while an Elizabethan pamphleteer later wrote of “cold doings” and livestock languishing in the countryside while frozen rivers prevented food from reaching London.
In the 1660s we find diarist Samuel Pepys bemoaning “the
