Readers of The Times may turn to Matthew Parris to follow the tide of contemporary events, but a monk with almost the same name served a similar purpose in the 13th century. After a month of relentless rain and widespread flooding, the latter’s observations make illuminating reading.

Matthew Paris’s massive History of the English was written, in Latin, mostly just before and after 1250. The author was a Benedictine monk of St Alban’s and his details on nonpolitical subjects are usually credible. His weather reports for the 1230s and 1240s show that the present floods had precedents.

Global warming makes an appearance. The summers of 1236 and 1241 were “almost unbearably” hot, and so dry that cattle died of thirst. But wind and rain are more prominent. The year 1237 had two hurricanes strong enough to knock down buildings, and another in early 1238 sank 20 ships at Portsmouth.

That wind was followed by two or three months of incessant rain, after which came the same period of heat and drought, and then rain again all autumn, ruining crops.

There were several floods, the worst in 1236-37 and 1248-49. In 1236, Paris writes: Between January and mid-March the rain never stopped. No one could remember anything like it. Serious floods began in the second week of February, when high tides meant that rivers could not empty into the sea. Fords became useless, river banks disappeared, fields, bridges, mills, all vanished.

Disaster struck again later in the same year, this time in East Anglia: In the middle of November a combination of onshore wind and high tide continued for an unheard-of two-and-a-half days, so that the rivers could not empty. Coasts were laid waste, ships torn from their anchorage and lost, houses wrecked, trees torn up. Many people were drowned, not to mention entire herds and flocks of livestock . . . One tiny village had to bury a hundred bodies in a single day.

The Thames valley suffered seriously twice in these years. In 1236: On 19 November there was a deafening thunderstorm with terrifying flashes of lightning. People feared that worse was to come, and were right. Rain and wind continued incessantly for many days afterwards, and the Thames overflowed its banks, so that round Lambeth it grew to a width of six miles.

Floods came again 13 years later: There was heavy rain from early June, followed by serious flooding, especially severe in the country round Abingdon.

—The author is Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford, and a former tutor in medieval history