How Ordinary People Survived the Little Ice Age
Inside History
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The winter of 1683–84 is the coldest in England's long temperature record. On Candlemas night, families climbed into the hayloft in the dark to count whether their stores would last until spring.
This is a slow, close journey through one Little Ice Age winter, lived from inside an ordinary household in a village in Essex. From the pig-killing at Martinmas to the first grass of spring, we follow how people stored their food, fed the fire, kept warm in shared beds and layered wool, carried their animals through to Lady Day, and got by when the Thames froze and the mills stood still. We also see why, in the harder years of the 1690s, the same careful arithmetic failed across the north of Europe.
00:00 — Half Your Straw, Half Your Hay
05:18 — Laying In
10:30 — The One Warm Room
16:01 — Wool, Linen and the Shared Bed
21:10 — The River Stops
26:49 — The Deadest Time of the Year
32:15 — The Long Evenings
36:15 — The Grass Comes Back
Selected sources:
• Diaries and farm books of the time: John Evelyn (1683–84), Ralph Josselin (1641–83), Henry Best (1641), Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573)
• Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (2018)
• Met Office Hadley Centre, Central England Temperature series
• Andrew Appleby, "Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590–1740" (1979)
• Rosanne D'Arrigo et al., "Complexity in crisis: The volcanic cold pulse of the 1690s and the consequences of Scotland's failure to cope" (2020)
• Audrey Henshall and Stuart Maxwell, "Clothing and other articles from a late 17th-century grave at Gunnister, Shetland" (1952)
Based on current historical scholarship and primary sources. Where the record is uncertain, we say so.
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How Ordinary People Survived the Little Ice Age
Inside History
4,300 views
The winter of 1683–84 is the coldest in England's long temperature record. On Candlemas night, families climbed into the hayloft in the dark to count whether their stores would last until spring.
This is a slow, close journey through one Little Ice Age winter, lived from inside an ordinary household in a village in Essex. From the pig-killing at Martinmas to the first grass of spring, we follow how people stored their food, fed the fire, kept warm in shared beds and layered wool, carried their animals through to Lady Day, and got by when the Thames froze and the mills stood still. We also see why, in the harder years of the 1690s, the same careful arithmetic failed across the north of Europe.
00:00 — Half Your Straw, Half Your Hay
05:18 — Laying In
10:30 — The One Warm Room
16:01 — Wool, Linen and the Shared Bed
21:10 — The River Stops
26:49 — The Deadest Time of the Year
32:15 — The Long Evenings
36:15 — The Grass Comes Back
Selected sources:
• Diaries and farm books of the time: John Evelyn (1683–84), Ralph Josselin (1641–83), Henry Best (1641), Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573)
• Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (2018)
• Met Office Hadley Centre, Central England Temperature series
• Andrew Appleby, "Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590–1740" (1979)
• Rosanne D'Arrigo et al., "Complexity in crisis: The volcanic cold pulse of the 1690s and the consequences of Scotland's failure to cope" (2020)
• Audrey Henshall and Stuart Maxwell, "Clothing and other articles from a late 17th-century grave at Gunnister, Shetland" (1952)
Based on current historical scholarship and primary sources. Where the record is uncertain, we say so.