‘Jangled the Belles, and with Fearefull Outcry, Raysed the Secure Inhabitants’*: Emotion, Memory and Storm Surges in the Early Modern East Anglian Landscape

Abstract

The history of the disasters of sea inundation along the North Sea coastline and the pivotal role the emotion of fear plays in early modern life has not been a focus in and of itself. Using evidence from the landscape, place names, manorial archives, personal accounts, printed pamphlets and depictions of flooding, I demonstrate how fecundity, flood and fear are interconnected and embedded in the emotional repertoire of North Sea communities as an ongoing reality. Pushing the historiographical interrogation of the landscape further, I analyse the importance of the relationship between the coastline, sea and the emotion of fear that sculpts that landscape in different ways in response to inundations in low-lying early modern East Anglian and Dutch coastal communities.

*More Strange Newes: of Wonderfull accidents happening by the late overflowings of Water, in Summerset-shire, Gloucestershire, Norfolk, and other places of England (London, William Iggard, 1607), sig. C4. [British Museum C. 32.c.4].