From the ‘Miller’s Tale’ to King Lear’s roaring sea, a history of flooding in literature

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is renowned for its salacious storyline of sexual misadventure. Set in 14th-century Oxford, it tells the tale of John the Carpenter, a husband so terrified that another “Noah’s flood” is coming to drown the world that he sleeps in a basket in the attic – freeing his wife to bed her lover downstairs.

Chaucer’s pilgrims all have a good laugh at John’s expense as they walk together from London towards Canterbury, echoing John’s neighbours who “gan laughen at his fantasye” of Noah’s flood and call John “wood” (mad). The pilgrims listen to this particular tale (one of 24 Canterbury Tales) as they walk along the south bank of the River Thames between Deptford and Greenwich.

That stretch of river was well-known to Chaucer. At the time of writing, what remains one of English literature’s greatest works, he had been tasked, in March 1390, with repairing flood damage to the riverbank around Greenwich.

As a poet who swapped his pen for a spade to dig banks and defend the land around Greenwich from inundation, Chaucer knew from experience that flooding was no laughing matter. He – and later Shakespeare – lived through periods of weird weather not unlike what we are seeing today.

Their changing climate was...

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