Authors have, for some time, been looking for various measures of how to assess the snowiness of past winters.  Dr Richard Wild has a means of assessing "heavy snow days" over the UK (his website is here)  and we have Bonacina's analysis from 1875 onwards here, nowadays updated by Dave O'Hara.

I devised my own scheme where I took individual snow events in a given winter, and scaled them from 1 to 5 in terms of severity and geographical distribution and added them together to give the winter a total.  The detailed ins and outs are not available here, but you can find the results here and compare them with the results that other analyists have obtained.  Sources used for this analysis were wide-ranging, including both of the above sources, and the "British Snow Reports" from 1947-1991.  I posted the details onto the Net Weather forum a while ago.  This can be seen as an archive of the results for anyone who has missed them or lost them.