(Steven Hayward) From volume 4 of Churchill's Marlborough: His Life and Times, about the winter of 1708-9, near the culmination of the long war against Louis XIV: But there now fell upon France a new and frightful misfortune. Since the beginning of December there had been a hard and almost unbroken frost. On January 6, after a brief thaw, it set in again with a bitterness so intense that two days later
Source: Power Line