Worst storm in British History - November 26th 1703

Three hundred years to the day before the recent storm which destroyed Chillenden windmill, an even more damaging storm occurred, in which 8000 people were killed in Britain and in the surrounding seas. Daniel Defoe wrote about the storm, describing amongst other items windmills which caught fire due to the friction when the wind tried to turn the sails against the brake. Defoe's The Storm has been reissued by Penguin Classics in an new edition edited by Richard Hamblyn, and another very readable account of the destruction is The Greatest Storm by Martin Brayne.