The summer Europe could not see the Sun

A twenty-seven-kilometre crack opened in southern Iceland and poured out lava for eight months, and the haze reached England within a fortnight.

A quarter of Iceland's people died in the famine that followed. In Hampshire, Gilbert White wrote up the strange blood-red sun and the smell of sulphur; across Europe the following winter was one of the coldest on record, and the death toll from the whole event runs into six figures.