Monstrous Rayne

On July 28, 1716, the air was stale and hot in the neighborhood of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, England. No bird or cloud marred the sky; the only wind was the breeze made by the swinging feet of Mary Hicks and her daughter Elizabeth as the life left their hanged bodies.¹ The Hickses were the last victims to be tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft in England, but by the larger cyclical patterns of cultural aggression, they were only perhaps the last such killings to be recorded. Although Mary’s age was not listed, based on average marital ages at the time, she would have been in her mid-to-late-twenties; Elizabeth was only nine.² And yet, for all the virulent catharsis of the day, no one present at the executions would go on to note the heat of the day, the dead grass and desolate hardness of the ground in which the bodies were to be buried, or consult a farming almanac for reminders of the previous year’s temperatures—why so? What bearing could meteorological information have on bodies hanging from a desiccated tree limb? That is, unless such data could tell the tale of the hanging tree, its desiccation, and, by extension, the female corpses hanging from it like rotting fruit.³

Two women accused of witchcraft. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A closer exploration of severe weather patterns in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century Europe readily illuminates correlations between extreme climate conditions and extreme human behavior and yet, as this essay contends, such a parallel is only the beginning.⁴ In a larger view of the past, extreme weather serves as a lens for imagining monstrosity, a critical intervention that sheds new light on the witch hunt outbreaks across the premodern (or early modern) period and magnifies overlaps between witch trials and drought years: the rise and hunt of monsters in monstrous seasons of prodigious, inescapable heat. 

Paradoxically so, a drought takes a perfect storm. On a metrological level, droughts require flatlined storm systems, which call for massive, sustained drops in air pressure and temperature across a wide region for multiple seasons, which is a feat for island nations like England and Ireland and a coast-heavy continent like Europe and yet, such a feat was “the Little Ice Age.” Dating from the fourteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the “Little Ice Age” describes an epoch of lowered global temperatures across the second millennium CE, a period which saw its own macrocosmic maelstrom of solar flares, earthquakes, and aggressive volcanic activity. The Little Ice Age’s meteorological swings rose and broke like waves and took nations with them.⁵ The phenomenon amplified disease in plague years, through heavy rainfall and then followed by severe droughts during the Black Death (1346-1353), vexed war conditions with heatwaves during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), and aggravated religious upheaval as a result of heavy frosts and searing heat sweeping Europe from 1516-17 ahead of the Protestant Reformation. But the “Maunder Minimum” brought a new low. Dating from the mid-seventeenth century to the early-eighteenth century, the “Maunder Minimum” was a global period of inexplicably low solar activity, making for an era of even cooler temperatures, causing endless ivory winters and cloudless summers, weather that sounds idyllic, until it translates to unyielding cold and insufferable drought, which, in premodern England, fueled regicide, piracy, and the golden age of witch hunts.⁶

Women and many children looking for food during a famine. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Again, a drought takes a perfect storm—then it causes one: an exact combination of violent climate conditions, causing an equal amount of violent cultural activity that embodies its own grief, rage, zeal, and horror, all at once. As such, there is no form of extreme weather like drought: it is an outlier, it is nature deformed, it is monstrum. Thus, to both sync with and transfigure the first of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seven theses on monstrosity: the monster’s body is not only cultural—it is meteorological.⁷

The old London Bridge, engraving by William Henry Toms, showing the tidal rapids. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It is through the lens of extreme weather that the monster-mongering case of Mary and Elizabeth Hicks comes into view. Per Martin Rowley’s meteorological data notes, the English weather extremes of 1715-16 were merciless, with the most prominent meteorological indicator being the River Thames, which was recorded to have frozen solid for the duration of winter, only to be thawed and drained so low by drought in summer that “by September…people walked under the arches of London Bridge.”⁸ At a fraction of the Thames’s width in central London, the River Great Ouse through Huntingdon would have seen harsher freezes and even emptier beds in July 1716 as Mary and Elizabeth Hicks were arrested, taken from their home, and tried, events documented in a 1716 pamphlet about the trial and examination of the Hickses, which also included reports of violent illnesses, racked crops, and dying livestock.⁹

There is familiarity to the charges brought against the Hickses. Some neighbors testified to “strange Pains and Tortures…putting them in strange Fits, making them to Vomit Pins and Needles…” Others noted the sudden “24 Hour” death “in the greatest Pain imaginable” of “one Mr. Adams” after a wax visage of him was “melted away” by Mary Hicks. But this was only the start of Huntingdon’s crisis, which rippled outward to “Damag[ed] Cattle,” “Lame” Horses, “Sick” Oxen, “Crows [bleeding] to Death at the Fundament,” “Calves and Sheep [struck] Blind,” “Hogs run Mad,” and, with the addition of little Elizabeth’s alleged deeds, the reduction of “all the Corn in [a] field [to] Stubble.”¹⁰ In a large urban setting, these incidents might have proved isolated, but for a small agrarian community like early eighteenth-century Huntingdon, these happenings would have wavered between petty treason and regional apocalypse, threatening life by threatening livelihood.¹¹ If there is familiarity to these witch trial charges, it is arguably because of the community’s unfamiliarity with the hideous nature of drought and its impact: the pained, nauseated symptoms of intense dehydration, the sudden fatal effects of severe heatstroke, the carnage of underfed, underwatered, and diseased livestock, and the blurred vision and psychotic state of overheated bodies starting to experience organ failure. 

The Devil gives wax dolls to witches. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

But drought does not just devour the body; it preys on the mind, as seen in the drought-related sermon described in the 1716 pamphlet. Though mentioned in passing, the town sermon on the Biblical book of Ephesians is not gratuitous in its fixation on the Devil’s monstrous identities, especially “the Prince of the Power of the Air.”¹² There is,” the pamphlet attests, “confin’d unto the Atmosphere of our Air a vast Power; or Army of evil Spirits….” This statement reads as fear-mongering on a single read, but when drought is used as a lens for imagining monstrosity in the premodern period, it is an evidentiary claim on the part of Huntingdon’s citizens, as based in a text like William Fulke’s Meteors, which described drought in terms of vexed “Aire,” “exhalations,” and “vapours” across the earth.¹³ Written in the sixteenth century, but not widely distributed until the mid-seventeenth, Fulke’s treatise on weather was one of the most popular meteorologic materials of its day, and for a town the size of early-eighteenth century Huntingdon (a little over 2000 people) with limited resources, Fulke likely represented the extent of local knowledge, with accounts of atmospheric phenomena that collapsed myth and religion with English almanac citations and Aristotle’s Meteora to produce such entries as those on “monstrous rayne,” “flying dragons,” and “fire drakes” narratives which would have played directly into fearful hands in droughted 1716. If Huntingdon’s accusations and sermon readings against the Hickses sound familiar as standard witch trial charges, then perhaps it is because they are—and the brutality of drought not only comes with the territory of witch trials, it personally dries the firewood and lights the stake.

So framed, the lens of monstrosity found through extreme drought not only magnifies and transfigures monstrous episodes of the past, it becomes a portal for reckoning with monstrosity and carnage in the present of the twenty-first century and the future to come as global temperatures continue to rise with climate change. These cycles—their prayers, their dry throats, and their eyes on the sky—all draw us back to 1716 and the swinging feet of Mary and Elizabeth Hicks on July 28 in Huntingdon and begs the question: what even first marked these women as monsters, dragged them through the streets, drew the ire of their community’s drought grief, and stranded them in the burning air? Domestic as milk and just as curdled in the heat, Mary and Elizabeth were initially suspected and accused of witchcraft for the, allegedly, unusual behavior of removing their stockings in the heat “in order to raise a rainstorm.”

1. The whole trial and examination of Mrs. Mary Hicks and her daughter Elizabeth (W. Matthews, 1716).
2. The whole trial and examination of Mrs. Mary Hicks . . ., 2.
3. The majority of the premodern meteorology data referenced here looks to the publicly accessible research of weather historian and meteorologist Martin Rowley. The reference columns of his charts and data on ancient, medieval, and premodern weather align with this bibliography of his archival materials: https://premium.weatherweb.net/weather-in-history-notes/.
4. There lives a beautiful ecocritical subfield devoted to the impact of climate on the early modern imagination and its steady role in destabilizing such a volatile era of change. My intervention of extreme weather as a lens of monstrosity builds upon these works and monster studies and amplifies the research in these fields by magnifying cases of heightened, abnormal, and often apocalyptic weather phenomena as a form of monstrum in premodern culture, a critical methodology that I developed based on my dissertation about the monstrous cast of the Biblical Flood narrative in the Renaissance imagination. Further reading on premodern weather might include: Vladimir Janković, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850, 1st. paperback ed. 2002 (BasicBooks, 2002); William F Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate (Princeton University Press, 2010); and Craig Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
5. A masterclass case study about the Little Ice Age and its macro-and micro-impacts on the shape of a European nation can be found in Dagomar Degroot’s The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
6. Even more violent trends in early modern England are documented by Randolph Roth in “Homicide in Early Modern England 1549-1800 : The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis.” Though Roth’s data is macro-in scale, a granular imagining of extreme weather tracks with swings in crime, life expectancy, and child death rates. Roth’s research is publicly accessible online via Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, Vol. 5, no. 2, 2001.
7. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25.
8. Martin Rowley, Weather in History 1700-1749 AD https://premium.weatherweb.net/weather-in-history-1700-to-1749-ad/.
9. The whole trial and examination of Mrs. Mary Hicks . . ., 3.
10. The whole trial and examination of Mrs. Mary Hicks . . ., 7.
11. The 1801 census of the town of Huntingdon listed  a population around 2,368. Early eighteenth-century Huntingdon was still recovering from the numbers reported in Roth’s data on weak health, high crime, and low life expectancy in seventeenth-century England. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Insight, Open data on Huntingdonshire Historic Population: https://data.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk/dataset/cambridgeshire-historic-population-1801-2011/resource/fb284128-d037-4fd7-89d1-9b3e0eac3202#{}
12. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Insight, Open data on Huntingdonshire Historic Population, 7.
13. William Fulke, Meteors, or, A plain description of all kind of meteors as well fiery and ayrie, as watry and earthy . . . (William Leake, 1655). His treatise A Goodly Gallerye . . . was published in 1563, but does not have the surviving copies that Meteors does.