Grote Mandrenke: 1362 The Great Drowning of Men and the Storm that Reshaped Europe

“A strong gale blew from the north so violently that it flattened trees, mills, houses and a great many church towers.”

--Anonymous 14th Century Chronicler

The town of Durwich sits along the coast of southern England.  It is located on the coast, at one of the wider points of the English Channel, just across from Holland.

Around sunrise on January 15, 1362, Durwich is beset by hurricane force westerly winds in excess of one hundred milers per hour.  Trees are uprooted and flung through the air like projectiles shot from a cannon.  Roofs are torn off and houses made of wood and thatch collapse  into piles of unidentifiable debris.

The residents of Durwich England cower out of fear, huddling together, in the open fields and dirt roads of their village.  They cling to one another desperately in family groups and pray to God and the Saints to deliver them from this calamity.  But it appears as if God and the saints above have forsaken them as the wind continues to ravage everything in their midst.  

As the people of Durwich fervently pray and wail in despair, a great wall of water rises up out of the sea.  For a moment their eyes open wide with terror as the storm driven wave, over twenty feet high, rises above their heads.  Then, in an instant, the village of Durwich England exists no more.  Everyone who lives there, and everything that stood there, is washed forever out to sea.

This is the Great Drowning of Men of 1362.  It is an event so horrible that over six-hundred years of history will go on to record it by many different names.

In England people will name it “The Great Wind” after the destructive wind gusts that flattened buildings and cathedrals in and around London.

In the Netherlands and Germany it will be called “Grote Mandrenke” which translates from low Saxon as The Great Drowning of Men.

In meteorological terms the Great Drowning of Men that occurred in northern Europe between 15 and 16 January, 1362 was an extratropical cyclone.  An extratropical cyclone is a storm that mimics the characteristics of a tropical cyclone, gusting whirlwinds and torrential flooding downpours, but takes place in the more temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere.

The storm of 1362 packed hurricane force winds and torrential rains that created storm surges of tidal wave size and proportion that completely redrew the map of the United Kingdom, Holland and northern Germany.  The storm destroyed towns and villages all across northern Europe exactly like Durwich England.  It lasted for over two days and claimed at least 25,000 lives from a medieval population that had already been ravaged only ten years earlier by the most destructive plague in human history, the Black Death.

        In England the storm would forever be called “The Great Wind”.  That year on the 17th of January an enormous joust was to be held in the royal capital city of London.  Two days prior to the festival, great gusts of wind swept through London, leveling houses, uprooting trees and toppling cathedral steeples.  

An anonymous monk of Canterbury Cathedral attributed “The Great Wind” to Godly retribution for the people giving themselves over to sporting, drink and sin on the eve of the jousting tournament.  He recorded the destruction that the storm brought to London thus:

“(A)round the time of vespers that day (January 15, 1362) dreadful storms and whirlwinds such as have never been seen or heard before occurred in England causing houses and buildings to come crashing to the ground.” --Chronicle of Canterbury Cathedral 14th Century

That same anonymous monastic Canterbury chronicler then goes on to report how the cyclone force winds even lifted London’s strongest and largest men straight up into the air and whipped them around in dizzying circles.

The storm first struck in Ireland where fierce winds are said to have leveled the majority of the city of Dublin to the ground,  After striking Ireland the gale then continued to move in a westerly direction, sweeping across the British Isles on the 15th of January before smashing into the Dutch coast and northern Germany the following day.  Over the course of January 16, 1362 the Great Drowning of Men would produce storm surges the likes of which the coastlines of northern Europe had never seen before.

Prior to the storm of 1362, Amsterdam had been a sleepy inland Dutch village, but during the storm tremendous tidal wave surges swept away hundreds of square miles of land along the Dutch coast, making Amsterdam the preeminent seaport in Holland, a position it has occupied ever since.

The Netherlands were impacted more by the Great Drowning of Men of 1362 than perhaps anywhere else.  In conjunction with an incalculable death toll where massive tidal surges simply washed away tens of thousands of Hollanders in the blink of an eye, the storm also completely reshaped the coastline and changed the ecological nature of the Netherlands itself.

In 1362, The Great Drowning of Men (Grote Mandrenke to the Dtuch) literally overnight created a wetland area known as the Zuiderzee.  The Zuiderzee is a vast marshland, located below sea level, that has characterized Dutch life and commerce ever since.  The Zuiderzee is responsible for the vast series of dykes that criss-cross the coastal areas of the Netherlands and it is this marshland that gave rise to the iconic windmill which has been used as a representative symbol of Holland for hundreds of years.

        Occurring less than ten years after the peak of the Black Death swept across Europe, The Great Drowning of Men was considered, at the time, to be a harbinger of future even greater evils to come.  Monastic chroniclers of the time period believed that the Grote Mandrenke in conjunction with other unsettled weather events, plagues and famines that regularly swept across western Europe were a clear sign of the approaching end of the world.

In reality, calamitous weather events such as The Great Drowning of Men that occurred in 1362 and repeated drought related crop failures like those that took place during the first half of the fourteenth century, all marked the beginning of a time period that scientists today would call “The Little Ice Age”.

The Great Drowning of Men was one of several severe storms and foods in the middle ages that characterized the unsettled weather patterns of The Little Ice Age.  The Little Ice Age would last for nearly five-hundred years and continue on well into the 19th century.  It would be characterized by particularly short and cool summers accompanied by severe storms and generally unpredictable weather patterns all across Europe and North America.  Today, it is believed by most climatologists in the scientific community that cyclical changes in weather patterns such as The Little Ice Age of 1300-1800 are naturally occurring changes that take place within greater changes in the earth’s constant evolution as a planet over the course of extended time.

Perhaps, today, in the midst of a worldwide plague reminiscent of the Black Death of the 14th century, we can look back at disasters such as The Great Drowning of Men from over six-hundred years ago and take solace in the fact that the world is not ending and that if we simply weather the storm, so to speak, just as our ancestors did during The Grote Mandrenke, then maybe, no matter how terrible things actually are something good might just come out of it all.