The Wine Freezes in Bottles: When an Entire Continent Froze the Winter of 1709 that Devastated all of Europe

 “I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the modern memory of man.”  The words of Anglican clergyman William Derham when describing the winter of 1709 as he witnessed it in London.

William Derham was both a minister and a natural scientist who lived in a suburb of London over three hundred years ago at a time when religion and science weren’t necessarily constantly at war with one another.  Today, Derham is best remembered as the person who first came up with an accurate way to measure the speed of sound, but while he was alive, in addition to giving thundering sermons from the church pulpit, Derham was also an enthusiastic meteorologist who kept detailed records of weather conditions and who beginning in 1697 and stretching all the way to 1735 religiously recorded the temperature several times a day--no pun intended.

One such day when William Derham recorded the temperature was January 5, 1709, and on that day, he recorded a high temperature of 5 degrees Fahrenheit--and that’s about where the high temperature stayed each day in London that year for the next three months!

William Derham

The winter of 1709 called “The Great Frost” in England, or simply,”Le Grand Hiver” in French which translates to “The Great Winter”--even today, over three hundred years later, still holds the record for being the coldest winter in Europe in the last five hundred years.

All over Europe, it was said to be so cold that winter, and the ground froze so solid, that it was impossible to bury the dead.  Corpses had to be left in barns or in the open air until the earth thawed in the spring and allowed for proper burial.  And the poor and the homeless died by the tens of thousands all across the continent due to exposure.

In January of 1709, just as the Great Frost suddenly set in and stayed, Sweden invaded Russia but the forces of Charles XII of Sweden were stopped before the gates of Saint Petersburg and forced to retreat due to the bitter cold.  In the Great Northern War that year 14,000 Swedish soldiers and an equal number of Russian troops simply froze to death--there were practically no deaths due to combat because it was simply too cold to fight.

Even in the south of France, along the Mediterranean coast temperatures dropped well below zero and Emperor Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Orleans, when writing from Versailles to her aunt back in England said in a letter on January 10, 1709, “Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this.  The cold here is so fierce that it fairly defies description…the wine freezes in bottles.”

In Venice the lagoons and canals of that fabled Italian city froze solid for nearly three months and people took to traveling around the city on sledges and to ice-skating on the Venetian lagoon as pictured at the beginning of this article.  

English sailors in the north Atlantic died in droves due to the cold aboard their ships.  A London newspaper reported when talking about the river that was the maritime lifeblood of the city in 1709 that, “The Thames now seems to be one solid block of ice!”

The Thames became a major travelling thoroughfare for pedestrians and horse drawn carts passing through the city of London.  And apparently, at first in the beginning of January 1709 open-air festivals were held on the ice and the River Thames became the source of wintertime revelry much like the frozen over lagoon with its swirling ice skaters and sledding children in Venice was at the very beginning of the Great Frost.

Contemporary Newspaper showing a Frozen Thames

It’s amazing how suddenly the freezing temperatures came about and how long they lasted.  In a recently published National Geographic article entitled “Could Europe’s Freakish Winter of 1709 Happen Again?” historian Juan Jose Sanchez Arreseigor writes of the winter of 1709, “On January 5 temperatures plummeted--not, perhaps, a surprise in a European winter.  But 1709 was no ordinary cold snap.  Dawn broke the next morning on a continent that had completely frozen over from Italy to Scandinavia and from England to Russia.”

The continent of Europe would not even begin to thaw out that year for over three entire months.  Below normal temperatures were recorded, by people like the pioneering Anglican minister William Derham, practically until the end of May.  And when the land did begin to thaw from the Great Frost of 1709 it left nothing but devastation, starvation, death, flooding and agricultural ruin in its wake.

As reported in The Guardian in England in an article from December of 2020 by journalist David Hambling, “The pandemic (COVID-19) is set to cause the greatest economic slump that Great Britain has seen for over three-hundred years.  The last time it was caused by weather…the apocalyptic winter of 1709.”

When the earth--icebound and frozen solid for more than ninety days--finally unfroze it brought massive flooding that devastated cities and destroyed farmland and crops.  In an economy driven by agriculture like that in 18th century Great Britain or France (and the rest of Europe too for that matter!) the freezing and then the flooding of 1709 caused thousands upon thousands to starve and left the entire continent teetering on the brink of catastrophic famine the likes of which had not been seen in Europe since the beginning of the 1300’s.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in England dropped by twenty-three percent year over year beginning in 1709.  It would not recover to levels seen prior to the Great Frost of 1709 for more than a decade.  Food prices sky-rocketed and in addition to literal starvation there was economic stagnation in all of Europe that would not be equaled again until the Great Depression and COVID-19 pandemic.

It got so bad, economically, that King Louis XIV resorted to giving handouts to the poor and destitute in the form of “soup kitchens” and free bread and he took to taxing the rich in an effort to subsidize poor farmers so that French agriculture could get back on its feet, so to speak, in the aftermath of “Le Grand Hiver” of 1709.  This is remarkable because as anyone with even a passing knowledge of French history knows, the Bourbon Dynasty was not known for its benevolence and charity to the poor and destitute.

Great Frost of 1709 with St. Paul's Cathedral in the background

At the time, as Europeans lived through the deadly cold winter of 1709, it’s cause was a mystery--many attributed it to a vengeful God made angry at a sinful society while others simply called it a freak of nature--surprisingly even today among climatologists the exact cause of the Great Frost of 1709, why it got so cold to begin with and why the freezing temperatures remained over all of Europe for so long, is still a mystery and open to debate.

In the years just prior to the Great Frost of 1709 there had been massive volcanic eruptions around Europe such as those on the Canary Islands and at Santorini on the Greek coast of the Mediterranean.  These eruptions may have thrown tons of ash and debris into the atmosphere that diminished the sun’s power and could have helped cause a catastrophic winter.  The year 1709 also fell squarely in the middle of an historic time period that climatologists now call the Maunder Minimum which lasted roughly from about 1645 to 1720.  Essentially, the Maunder Minimum was simply a period of time when the sun’s solar energy was at its lowest point and fluctuations like the Maunder Minimum in the sun’s poser are thought to be naturally occurring phenomena by some.  All of these theories as to the cause of the Great Winter of 1709 are still hotly debated and not agreed upon by a consensus of historians, climatologists and researchers.

But, regardless of what may or may not have caused it, an event like the Great Frost of 1709 could most certainly happen again. In fact, with today’s erratic climate and nature’s frequent catastrophic weather events, it is more than likely that another deep freeze will descend somewhere on earth in the near future.  If history has taught us one thing it is that natural disasters are an inevitable part of the past, present and the future.

However, this article began on a hopeful note by profiling a man in William Derham who was both a man of science and a man of spirituality.  Today, if we as a society are to avoid the calamitous after-effects of extreme weather events like those of the Great Frost of 1709--famine, economic ruin, national instability--then we all need to think clearly, act intelligently and selflessly and not let our vision of the future be clouded by political, scientific, religious or personal prejudices and biases.