Dover Straits earthquake of 1580
Though severe
earthquakes in the north of
France and southern
England are rare,
[Mild earthquakes are quite common. Earthquakes of magnitude 5 or higher occur about every eight years, the Guardian Unlimited reports ( 22 October 2002)] the
Dover Straits earthquake of 6 April 1580 appears to have been the largest in the recorded history of England,
Flanders or northern France. The earthquake, which occurred about 6 o'clock in the evening, is well recorded in contemporary documents,
[An earlier destructive quake, of 1380, is also well recorded in southern England and Flanders (UK Earthquakes)] including a well-known letter from
Gabriel Harvey to
Edmund Spenser, the "earthquake letter", mocking popular and academic methods of accounting for the tremors. It fell during
Easter week, an
omen-filled connection that was not lost on the servant-poet
James Yates, who wrote ten
stanzas on the topic:
Oh sudden motion, and shaking of the earth,::No blustering blastes, the weather calme and milde::Good Lord the sudden rarenesse of the thing::A sudden feare did bring, to man and childe,:::They verely thought, as well in field as Towne,:::The earth should sinke, and the houses all fall downe.
Well let vs print this present in our heartes,::And call to God, for neuer neede we more::Crauing of him mercy for our misdeedes,::Our sinfull liues from heart for to deplore,:::For let vs thinke this token doth portend,:::If scourge nere hand, if we do still offend.
Yates' poem was printed in
1582 in
The Castell of Courtesy.
[James Yates, "Verses written for a requisite remembrance of the earth quake which happened on Wednesday the 6. of Aprill. 1580. betwene 5. and 6. of the clocke at night of the same day".]Shakespeare scholars are familiar with the 1580 quake, as a reference to it in
Romeo and Juliet would appear to date the play to 1591:
Nurse: "'T is since the earthquake now eleven years..." (
Romeo and Juliet, I.iii, line 22)
Perhaps the most terrifying were the experiences of those sailing on the
English Channel, where
freak waves and swells sank more than two dozen English, French and
Flemish vessels.
[One report even estimated 120 vessels lost off the English coast, with a further fifteen near to Mont St Michel.] A passenger on a boat from
Dover reported that his vessel had grounded on the sea bed five times and that the seas had risen higher than the mast of his vessel.
Calais bore the brunt of the tremors, which lasted a quarter of an hour and were followed by a "deluge"— a
tsunami— that engulfed the town and surrounding countryside, drowning cattle and several people. Part of the town wall collapsed and several were killed and injured by collapsing walls.
Boulogne-sur-Mer was flooded too.
Further from the coast, furniture danced on the floors and wine casks rolled off their stands. The
belfry of
Notre Dame de Lorette and several buildings at
Lille collapsed. Stones fell from buildings in
Arras,
Douai,
Béthune and
Rouen. Windows cracked in the cathedral of Notre Dame at
Pontoise, and blocks of stone dropped ominously from the vaulting. At
Beauvais the bells rang as though sounding the tocsin.
In Flanders chimneys fell and cracks opened in the walls of
Ghent and
Oudenarde. Peasants in the fields reported a low rumble and saw the ground roll in waves.
On the English coast, sections of wall fell in
Dover and a landslip opened a raw new piece of the
White Cliffs. At
Sandwich a loud noise emanated from the Channel, as church arches cracked and the gable end of a transept fell at St Peter's Church. In Hythe, Kent,
Saltwood Castle — made famous as the site where the plot was hatched in December 1170 to assassinate
Thomas Becket — was rendered uninhabitable until it was repaired in the nineteenth century.
In London, half a dozen chimney stacks came down and a pinnacle on
Westminster Abbey; two children were killed by stones falling from the roof of Christ's Church Hospital. There was damage far inland, in
Cambridgeshire; stones fell from the
Ely Cathedral. Part of
Stratford Castle in Essex collapsed.
In
Scotland, local report of the quake disturbed the adolescent
James VI, who was informed that it was the work of the Devil.
["It being reported to the King that the Master of Gray his house did shake and rock in the night as with an earthquake, and the King (then 14 years old) interrogated David Ferguson, Minister of Dunfermline, what he thought it could mean, that the house alone should shake and totter, he answered, 'Sir, why should not the Devil rock his awn bairns?" (John Row, History of the Kirk of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1840), quoted among excerpts in Ebenezer Henderson, The Annals of Dumferline on-line] There were aftershocks. Before dawn the next morning, between 4 and 5 o'clock further houses collapsed near Dover, and a second tsunami was reported to have drowned 120 people. A spate of further aftershocks were noticed in east Kent on 1-2 May.
A study undertaken during the design of the
Channel Tunnel[Seismic risk assessment in Colin S. Harris, Malcolm B. Hart, Paul M. Varley, Colin D. Warren editors, 1996. Engineering Geology of the Channel Tunnel.] showed that in the southeast of England the 1580 quake may have had a magnitude of 5.3 to 5.9 and located the epicentre beneath the Channel. The study estimated its
focal depth at 20–25 km.
Two later quakes in the Dover Strait, in 1776 and 1950, were noted in the 1984 compilation by R.M.W. Musson, G. Neilson and P.W. Burton,
[Macroseismic reports on historical British earthquakes, 1984.] none in the study occurring before 1727, but the same team devoted an article to the 1580 earthquake that year,
["The 'London' earthquake of 1580 April 6", in Engineering Geology 20, pp 113-142.] the classic study. Historical accounts of the earthquakes of 1380, 1776 and 1950 have led some scientists to suggest that all are caused by periodic tectonic activity that results in a tremor occurring in the Dover Straits approximately every 200 years.
*
Shaksper: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List, 2002 archives Friday, 26 April 2002, and following messages, which, taken together, compile references used to write this article.
*
Geology shop: UK Earthquakes. Source for much detail in this article.
