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Miss Austen Writes Books About Rainy Days
The last thing Jane Austen wrote was a poem about
St Swithin. She had moved from her cottage at
Chawton to lodgings near Winchester cathedral to
be close to her doctor in May 1817 having been
poorly for some time. Bed bound she wrote
Venta
Belgarum
(from the Roman name for Winchester)
at the time of the annual horse race in Winchester
held on St Swithin’s Day. Two days later she died
and was buried in the cathedral, quite close to
St Swithin as it happens. She was the last person
ever to be buried inside the cathedral due to the
rising water table.
Miss Austen quite often used the weather as a plot
device in her novels. In Pride & Prejudice, which was
published 200 years ago this year, Jane Bennet is
forced to stay with the Bingleys after catching a chill
in a rain storm on her way to their house. Her mother
is delighted at the opportunity it affords for her
daughter to catch the eligible Mr Bingleys eye.
In Sense & Sensibility it is rain all the way from early
in the novel when the heroine Marianne Dashwood
sprains her ankle during a rainstorm and is rescued
by Mr. Willoughby. Later she catches her near death
in another storm and is laid up long enough to reflect
on events and write off Willoughby as a bad idea.
Witchcraft & The Weather
The Vikings thought that a whole nation, the Finnish,
had weather changing powers and refused to take a
Finn to sea. This particular superstition persisted right
into the 20
th
century with some ships’ crews being
reluctant to accept Finnish sailors and for a long time
some men were daft enough to believe that witches
could alter the weather.
In the early mediaeval period the Catholic church
were vocal in challenging the idea that mere mortals
could influence the weather. For example, in the ninth
century, an important cleric, called Agobard, the
Archbishop of Leon, wrote a letter, which he headed,
“Against the foolish opinion of the masses about hail
and thunder”. But by the 13
th
century such voices for
rational thought were lost in the noise of the
Inquisition and accusations of witchcraft became
common in the hunt for heretics. By 1484 the
Catholic church had fully embraced the notion of
weather changing witches and Pope Innocent VIII
wrote an introduction to the
Malleus Malleficarum
(originally written in German as Der Hexenhammer -
Hammer of the Witches) which set out to prove that
witches did exist with a whole chapter describing
“
How they Raise and Stir up Hailstorms and
Tempests, and Cause Lightning to Blast both Men
and Beasts.”