8 March – Mary Bailey, a
mariticide, becomes one of the last persons in Britain, convicted of murder, to be sentenced to be hanged, and their body burned. Mary Bailey and John Quin, accused of murdering Cornelius Bailey at Portsmouth, are both convicted and hanged at
Winchester; Bailey claims her innocence to the end. After execution, Quin's body is handed to the surgeons for dissection, and Mary Bailey's body burned.[4]
1 August – the beginning of the driest twelve months in England and Wales for which reliable records exist – the
England and Wales Precipitation totalled just 522.0 millimetres or 20.55 inches[6] – with a second successive extended, cold and dry winter from October to March
13 August –
Parliament passes
Pitt's India Act (An Act for the better Regulation and Management of the Affairs of the
East India Company and of the British Possessions in India).[7] It requires the governor-general to be chosen from outside the Company and makes company directors subject to parliamentary supervision.
Publication of the Annals of Agriculture edited by
Arthur Young begins.
Two long, severe winters following the eruption of the
Laki volcano in Iceland produce the coldest weather since 1740 and eighth-coldest calendar year (mean
Central England temperature 7.82 °C or 46.08 °F) for which reliable records exist – this despite May 1784 being among the ten hottest in that record.[10]
^
abPalmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 228–230.
ISBN0-7126-5616-2.
^Lough, Janice; Wigley Tom and Jones, Phil; ‘Spatial patterns of precipitation in England and Wales and a revised homogeneous England and Wales precipitation series’; in Journal of Climatology; Volume 4, pp. 1–25 (1984)