Common sense submerged

The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street…

The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street, so that inhabitants were compelled to pass out of their houses through the upper windows, and were thence conveyed by boats along the street’. The year was 1770, though it might equally well have been 1793, when the water ‘reached ye parlour of ye Unicorn and Mr Stickley’s oven’, 1799, when ‘Mr Lunn was drowned’, or any of the many other years when the Avon burst its banks. So assiduous was the Reverend Thomas Beale, vicar of Bengeworth in the late 18th century, at recording flood levels that his diaries are still used as source material for students of river flooding in Britain.

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What the Reverend Thomas Beale never sought to do, on the other hand, was to apportion blame.