The impacts of natural hazards on human societies can be acute, far reaching and attimes surprising. As much as the products of hazards arising entirely by natural means,however, the disastrous circumstances created by such events are socially-createdphenomena. Not only are natural hazards themselves the product of a complex web ofEarth-system processes, their effect on human society is the result of a constellationof inter-related and unpredictable variables. The impact of any given hazard on aparticular human society, therefore, can be estimated but never predicted with absolutecertainty. We are frequently reminded of this when natural hazards strike humanpopulations today – though it is usually only the short-term ‘moment of disaster’that captures the attention of the media rather than the multitude of processes thatcaused the event to occur and influence its longer-term consequences. By turning tothe ‘laboratory’ of the past, however, it is possible to investigate the impact of extremenatural events, both during these tumultuous moments and across longer timespans.Additionally, the different ways in which human societies have responded to thesetypes of event – and whether measures that were adopted ameliorated or exacerbatedthe situation – may be explored. The subject of this book, therefore, is the relationshipbetween later medieval society (AD 1000–1550) and natural hazards. What followsexplores meteorological disasters – a subset of natural disaster – focussing on theirimpact in Britain, though with a comparative eye to the medieval world more generally. n order to accomplish these objectives a variety of historical and archaeological sourcesof evidence are investigated in order to explore different aspects of these interactionsbetween nature and culture. Disasters as a subject of academic enquiry are highlyinterdisciplinary¹combining elements from the physical sciences, such as physicalgeography and climatology, with the humanities and social sciences.