Great balls of fire: A monk named Gervase saw ball lightning way back in 1195

On October 21, 1638, people were congregating at a church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, in Devon, England, when a severe thunderstorm broke out. Witnesses described an 8-foot ball of fire hurtling through the church, tossing large stones from the walls to the ground, smashing pews and windows, and filling the church with smoke and the pungent odor of sulfur. Four people died and many more were injured in what has been widely recognized as the earliest known account of ball lightning in England—until now.

A British historian and a retired physicist have found an even earlier credible account of ball lightning in the writings of a 12th-century Benedictine monk, Gervase of Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury. According to a recent paper published in the journal Weather, Gervase of Canterbury recorded in his Chronicle a "marvelous sign" that "descended near London" on June 7, 1195. The sign was a "fiery globe" emerging from below a dark and dense cloud, and it predates the Widecombe-in-the-Moor account by nearly 450 years.

“Ball lightning is a rare weather event that is still not understood today," said co-author Brian Tanner of Durham University (emeritus). “Gervase’s description of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, falling as a spinning fiery sphere and then having some horizontal motion is very similar to historic and contemporary descriptions of ball lightning. If Gervase is describing ball lightning, as we believe, then this would be the earliest account of this happening in England that has so far been discovered.”

As we've previously reported, ordinary lightning occurs due to the ionization and dissociation of molecules in the air (a process with the awesome name "dielectric breakdown"), which occurs during a static electric discharge between clouds and the ground. Ball lightning is much rarer, to the point where some have even postulated that it's actually a hallucination rather than a real weather phenomenon. As the name suggests, ball lightning appears as a spherical or spheroidal ball of light, between one centimeter and one meter in size and variously colored as purple, green, white, or orange. Just like normal lightning, ball lightning seems to occur primarily during thunderstorms. Ball lightning can persist for a few seconds, and the spheres travel horizontally close to ground level.

Tanner and Gasper were scouring medieval archives for reports of celestial phenomena when they came across Gervase of Canterbury's Chronicle. Much of the monk's writing concerned the priory's day-to-day operations—including a detailed account of rebuilding the cathedral's choir after a fire in 1174—as well as disputes with neighboring houses and an Archbishop of Canterbury. But Gervase was also fascinated by natural phenomena like eclipses, floods, famines, earthquakes—and ball lightning.

Here is the full account, translated from the Latin:

But just how credible was the monk's account, given that it was clearly based on a second-hand report? The evidence points to a sober, careful, and reliable chronicler.

"He reported dates and times of solar eclipses remarkably accurately and comprehensively," the authors wrote. The same was true with lunar eclipses. "These are all the more impressive when considering that observation of partial eclipses was visually challenging in medieval times. In a detailed account of the partial eclipse of 13 September 1178, Gervase accurately describes the turning of the horns of the partly obscured solar disc to point downwards, as well as the changing colours close to maximum eclipse."

Gervase's description of the ball lightning, written when the monk would have been around 50, likewise stands up to close scrutiny, per the authors. For instance, the "sixth hour" would have been near noon, statistically the most likely time for ball lightning to occur. His description of the dark cloud forming corresponds to the dark clouds that can form at the apex of a cumulonimbus incus cloud's inverted pyramid shape. And his descriptions of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, the lateral motion, and the fireball dropping down to the Thames are consistent with other historical and modern accounts of ball lightning.

Much of what we know about ball lightning's characteristics comes from historical accounts recorded through the centuries. While there are some reports from antiquity that bear some resemblance to ball lightning, these could also be descriptions of lightning bolts, per Tanner and his co-author, Giles Gasper, a historian at Durham University. The two cite a 6th-century description of ball lightning found in History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours as the earliest convincing description of ball lighting. Churchgoers en route to matins in January of 583 saw a great ball of fire fall from the sky—bright enough to make it seem like high noon—before the fireball disappeared behind a cloud.

Gregory of Tours interpreted the ball lightning as a portent of the death of King Chilperic's son. The good folk of Widecombe-in-the-Moor attributed the ball lighting that destroyed their church to an act of the devil. Some especially righteous sorts blamed the incident on two people who were playing cards in the pews during the sermon, thereby angering God.

By the mid-18th century, lightning had become a question of science, albeit with occasional unfortunate consequences. In 1753, a Russian scientist named Georg Wilhelm Richmann attempted to reproduce Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment. A glowing ball of charge traveled down the string, jumped to his forehead, and killed him instantly. Nikola Tesla purportedly produced small artificial lightning balls in his laboratory, but he largely considered them a curiosity. Centuries later, scientists still puzzle over the phenomenon, despite several laboratory experiments that have produced effects visually similar to ball lightning.

Ball lightning is such a rare occurrence that no scientists have ever observed it in the field while they had equipment to measure its properties—at least until 2012. Then, a team of Chinese researchers were measuring the properties of ordinary lightning when they serendipitously happened to catch ball lightning with both their high-speed cameras and their spectrographs. They found that the chemical composition of the event matched that of soil. This strongly supported the hypothesis (proposed nearly fifteen years ago) that ball lightning is basically a dirt clod dislodged and heated to incandescence by a cloud-to-ground lightning strike.

DOI: Weather, 2022. 10.1002/wea.4144  (About DOIs).