Few people in Sussex will ever forget the Great Storm of October 1987, which produced winds of near hurricane strength.

There was widespread damage to property and millions of trees were uprooted. It was easily the worst storm of the 20th century in the South East.

The Valentine’s Day storm a fortnight ago also had winds of ferocious strength, reaching more than 80 mph in parts of Sussex.

Yet they were insignificant compared with another storm which battered much of England in November 1703.

Yet it pales into near insignificance compared with another storm which battered much of England in November 1703.

No meaningful weather records survive of that terrible time but it was the first major event ever to have been reported by what amounts to modern journalism.

Daniel Defoe, later to become world famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, was impressed by the violence of the storm at his home in London.

He issued appeals for eye witness accounts of the tempest and collected them all in a book which still makes compelling reading today. Scores of observers responded.

In The Storm, published in July 1704, Defoe called it “the tempest that destroyed woods and forests all over England”.

He wrote, “No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it.”

Coastal towns “looked as if the enemy had sackt them and... most miserably torn to pieces”.

Ferocious winds destroyed more than 400 windmills. Defoe reported that in some mills the sails turned so fast the friction caused the wooden wheels to overheat and catch fire.

Towns such as Brighton felt the full fury of the blast and were in a miserable state afterwards, although most people managed to find some kind of shelter from the storm.

Not so those at sea. A third of the Royal Navy’s ships were lost, most of them in the Channel and many off Sussex.

Defoe thought the destruction of the sovereign fleet was a punishment for its poor performance against the Catholic armies of France and Spain during the first year of the War of the Spanish Succession.

Many towns, including Brighton, lost most of their fishing fleets and sadly large numbers of men were also drowned during the tempest. Nearby Shoreham was ruined and repairs took many years.

Eventually Brighton built sea defences which stopped flooding during storms at high tide but no shelter was provided for the fishing boats until the marina was built in 1980.

The wind was so strong that plants were covered with salt as far as 20 miles inland. This was discovered when sheep refused to eat the grass.

Defoe estimated that the total loss of life was 8,000 but it could have been up to 15,000 at a time when England was much more sparsely populated.

The storm lasted for a week and winds are thought to have got up to 140 mph. No wonder many people like Defoe, in the days before global warming, thought only God could have authorised such a calamity.

And it is a tribute to Defoe that only he had the sense and literary ability to write an account which gives both the facts and flavour of the times.