Consideraciones temperiei pro 7 annis, per Magistrem Wilhelmum Merle, socium domus de Merton

Abstract

IN January 1337, barely forty-five years after the death of Roger Bacon, and ten years after the accession of King Edward the Third, William Merle, a Fellow of Merton College, and Rector of Driby, in Lincoinshire, commenced a journal of the current weather as experienced partly at his rectory “in Lyndesay, near the north-east coast,” and partly at Oxford. This journal he continued month by month for seven years, or up to three years before his death, the notices of the last four years being considerably amplified over the earlier entries; and the original manuscript, still preserved in the Bodleian Library, has now, thanks to the initiation of Mr. G. J. Symons, been reproduced in facsimile by photography, translated from the monkish Latin of the original text by Miss Parker, and published in a handsome small folio volume, of which one hundred copies have been printed. It is probably, as stated on the title-page, the earliest known weather journal in the world.

Consideraciones temperiei pro 7 annis, per Magistrem Wilhelmum Merle, socium domus de Merton.

Reproduced and Translated under the supervision of G. J. Symons, F.R.S. (London: Edward Stanford, 1891.)