Monthly Highlight

Back to Monthly Highlights

Flooding in the extreme

Posted in This months highlight on 03 Feb 2025

This memorandum, between the pages of a Sutton Courtenay parish register, was stumbled upon during a routine baptism search (ref. D/P128/1/4). This curious note by the Curate, I. W. Batcheler, captures the effects of rainwater which froze when hitting the ground due to icy temperatures (24 Fahrenheit/minus 4.4 degree celcius) on 19 January 1809. The ice was then covered by a layer of heavy snow over the course of the next couple of days. When it finally rained again on 24 January, the snow and ice melted, resulting in the ‘highest flood ever recorded’. A full transcript of the memorandum is available at the bottom of this article.

Handwritten English from 1809, ref. D/P128/1/4

Riverside parishes, such as Sutton Courtenay, would have been particularly badly affected. As the memorandum explains, ‘the River Thames cover[e]d the high meadow opposite the Church yard & flowed into the street’. For people to get through, ‘boats passed from the Swan publick house to the Otneys & Abingdon’ and ‘several of the inhabitants were brought out of their houses in boats.’

This extract from the Sutton Courtenay enclosure map, dated 1804 (ref. D/EX458/2) shows the proximity of the church circled in black to the River Thames (blue arrow:

Part of a map od Sutton Courtenay with a black circle and blue arrow, 1804, ref. D/EX458/2

This had an impact on agricultural life as ‘many cattle drowned’ and trade could not travel through the ‘impassable’ roads. Daily life would have been brought to an abrupt halt whilst this act of nature took its course. It is little wonder that the curate felt it was so monumental that it required a permanent record in the parish register.

Curiously, the memorandum is written between the pages of 1775 baptisms and 1728 burials. Perhaps these were the nearest available blank pages to the curate at this pressing time. Looking ahead to the register for 1809, it is unsurprising that no baptisms, marriages or burials took place at the church between 15 January and 8 February.

The Oxford Journal (28 January 1809) concurs with the curate’s statement that these events ‘exceeded the flood in 1775’. In nearby Oxford, ‘the sudden thaw of a great accumulation of snow, accompanied by much rain, has produced in this neighbourhood a flood of greater extent and depth than has occurred here for the last thirty years’.

The Tempest Database maps archival evidence of extreme weather in the UK. Although Sutton Courtenay is not listed, it records letters which refer to extremely hot weather occurring in Oxford in May 1809. This database, together with the parish register, suggests that 1809 was a year of both extreme heat and extreme cold.

With the weather in recent years becoming more drastic, there is inevitably greater interest in researching weather patterns of the past. Rare historic observations, such as this, can help us on our journey to greater understand how weather has changed throughout time. 

Full Transcript of the Memorandum:

On the nineteenth day of January One thousand eight hundred and nine, the thermometer below 24˚for the greatest part of the day there fell a rain which froze immediately on touching the ground or any plant: in a day or two after it was succeeded by a deep fall of snow which lay on the ground till the twenty fourth when it began to thaw & rain, which melted the snow so suddenly, the ground being cover’d with ice under it from the frozen rain abovemention[e]d, that there was the highest flood ever recorded; it exceeded the flood in 1775 by more than fifteen Inch perpendicular: Boats passed from the Swan publick house to the Otneys & Abingdon: several of the inhabitants were brought out of their houses in boats: much damage was done by the waters, many cattle drowned & the roads render[e]d for a time impassable. The River Thames cover[e]d the high meadow opposite the Church yard & flowed into the street. I W Batcheler, Curate of Sutton Courtney [sic].