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Article

Open Access

An Ecocritical Reading of the Great Storm Presented in Aldhelm’s Carmen rhythmicum Set Along the Devon/Dorset Coast: An Insight Into the Wider Environmental Damage Affected Across Southern Britain in the Later Seventh Century

Author(s)

Katherine Barker

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DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2021.08.001

Affiliation(s)

Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, ‎London
Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, England

ABSTRACT

In the closing decades of the seventh century, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, first West Saxon Bishop of Sherborne, composed a lengthy, 200 line poetic work known as the Carmen rhythmicum which takes as its focus a dramatic storm. The earliest storms recorded present within a few decades of the invention of the barometer and, as Hubert Lamb notes in his Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwest Europe, “circumspection is needed in accepting reports based on those of early observers”. Aldhelm’s poetic Carmen provides a powerful element of “meteorological corroboration” here in its historico-geographical setting along the Dumnonian/Devonshire border. A length of Devon/Dorset coastline which today forms part of the Jurassic Coast inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2001; a coastline, notes the website “subject to severe weather conditions at times … violent storms occurred in 1824 and 1974 … these and various lesser storms have battered the cliffs and caused flooding … an eroding landscape”. This paper takes as its subject, Aldhelm’s vivid description of a severe storm, he experienced along this coastline over 1,300 years ago and which he survived. Presented here is a first-ever reading of the environmental impact alluded to and to its long-term legacy across the southern Britain of the later seventh century. The length of time, Aldhelm declares it had taken him to compose this work, enhances both its bardic, legal connotation and his description of the damage effected by this tempestas, this hurricane-force wind, following its “blowing over”; a tempestas, we also read here as alluding to an outbreak of plague.

KEYWORDS

Anglo-Saxon England, St Aldhelm, Storms, Plague, Counties, Boundaries

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