![]() Gervase’s description of ball lightning is also remarkably similar to modern reports. For example, his seemingly fanciful description of the splitting of the image of the moon is consistent with the formation of a vertical mirage from a column of hot air from activity such as iron working or bell casting. In the chronicle it says:Ī sort-of fiery globe threw itself down into the river.īut Gervase appears to have been an astute observer and reporter of celestial activity. One abbot takes up his post, another deposed, alongside the appearance of a fiery spinning ball. ![]() The reader is left to draw their own conclusions. No attempt is made to explain the “marvellous sign” in the sky seen near London. The ball lightning entry is sandwiched between the installation of a new abbot of St Albans and the deposition of the abbot of Thorney. They were, nevertheless, clearly important enough to Gervase to be included. Gervase’s records of natural events appear within the historical narrative, often with no preamble. We dug through hundreds of pages in Latin and stumbled across this sighting, detailed in our article in Weather, the journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. We discovered the account of what appears to be ball lightning while exploring Gervase’s records of natural events in his chronicle, a cornucopia of historical details giving insights into medieval culture. The writing includes descriptions of solar and lunar eclipses, earthquakes and floods. This extensive work (nearly 600 pages in its modern edition) records historical events in England and further afield, the friends and enemies of the monastic house, and descriptions of noteworthy or unusual natural phenomena. Previously the earliest record of a sighting was believed to be from the 17th century. It would appear that this is the first credible written record of ball lightning in England, and much more convincing than an earlier European description. ![]() For what they observed has all the hallmarks of ball lightning: an atmospheric effect, the origin of which remains hotly disputed.Īn account of this extraordinary moment survives in a monastic chronicle compiled between about 11 by Gervase, a monk of Christ Church Cathedral in Canterbury. Witnesses could never have known that the natural phenomenon that they were seeing would defy scientific explanation for more than 800 years. On June 7, 1195, a fiery spinning ball emerged from a dark cloud in an erstwhile sunny sky close to the London lodgings of the bishop of Norwich. ![]()
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