Practising Cold Weather: English Agricultural Discourse and Memory, 1739–1800

The remarkably cold and dry weather of the 1740s presents an avenue of inquiry into the relationships between changes in English agricultural practice in the second half of the eighteenth century, the impacts of past climate changes and the memory of such climate extremes. Using historic climate data, proxy sources and the agricultural writings of William Ellis, this article considers the impacts of the 1740s in light of scholarship on climate change and the Little Ice Age, English agriculture and climate memory to demonstrate the impacts of an extreme climate event on agricultural practice and discourse, as well as production. It argues that agricultural practice served as a repository of climate memory long after the 1740s ceased to occupy the writings of leading agriculturalists.