Dover Straits earthquake of 1580

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Though severe earthquakes in the north of France and southern England are rare,[1] the Dover Straits earthquake of 6 April 1580 appears to have been the largest in the recorded history of England, Flanders or northern France. It occurred about 6 o'clock in the evening.

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[edit] Records

The earthquake is well recorded in contemporary documents,[2] 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.[3]

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: "’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years...” (Romeo and Juliet, I.iii, line 22) ”

[edit] Impact

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.[4] 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. Indeed the many Puritans blamed the emerging theatre scene of the time in London, which was seen as the work of the devil, as a cause of the quake.[5] 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.[6]

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.

[edit] Magnitude

A study undertaken during the design of the Channel Tunnel[7] 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.

[edit] Other earthquakes in the Dover Straits

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,[8] none in the study occurring before 1727, but the same team devoted an article to the 1580 earthquake that year,[9] the classic study.

In 2007, an earthquake estimated at a magnitude of 4.3 affected Kent around the Folkestone area at about 08:18 BST on the 28 April, causing damage to property and injuring at least one person. Reports suggest that the centre of the quake was about 6 kilometres off-shore and at a depth of at least 4 kilometres. The Channel Tunnel was unaffected.

[edit] Cause

Historical accounts of the earthquakes of 1580, 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.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Mild earthquakes are quite common. Earthquakes of magnitude 5 or higher occur about every eight years, the Guardian Unlimited reports (22 October 2002)
  2. ^ An earlier destructive quake, of 1380, is also well recorded in southern England and Flanders (UK Earthquakes)
  3. ^ 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".
  4. ^ One report even estimated 120 vessels lost off the English coast, with a further fifteen near to Mont St Michel.
  5. ^ Bryson, B. (2007) Shakespeare, Harper Press, London
  6. ^ "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
  7. ^ Seismic risk assessment in Colin S. Harris, Malcolm B. Hart, Paul M. Varley, Colin D. Warren editors, 1996. Engineering Geology of the Channel Tunnel.
  8. ^ Macroseismic reports on historical British earthquakes, 1984.
  9. ^ "The 'London' earthquake of 1580 April 6", in Engineering Geology 20, pp 113-142.

[edit] References