Great Fire of London

Posted by Maggie on Wednesday, September 2, 2009 | Leave a Reply

It was on this day in 1666, at one o'clock in the morning, that the Great Fire of London broke out at the king's bakery on Pudding Lane.

Fire was a real danger in London - most of the buildings were made out of timbers, with thatched roofs, and were built one up against the next; and on top of that, it had been a dry, hot summer. But peoples' minds were consumed by the plague, which had devastated the population in the previous two years.

The king's baker was named Thomas Farynor, and it was his house that caught on fire. One of the workers in the bakery woke up to the smell of smoke, and woke everyone else up. They went up to the roof and escaped by climbing onto the roof next door - everyone but the maid, who was too scared, and died in the fire.

There wasn't a centralized method of fire control in London. People usually took care of fires themselves, and if the danger was serious enough, they tore down adjacent buildings to make a fire break. When the Great Fire broke out, people in the neighborhood called in the Lord Mayor of London to ask permission to tear the buildings down. He didn't think it was a big deal - in fact, he said, "A woman might piss it out."

A lot of the information we have about the fire comes from Samuel Pepys, who kept detailed diaries about his personal life and the events going on around him. His maid woke him up at 3 a.m. to tell him about the fire, and he wrote, "So I rose, and slipped on my night-gown and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back side of Mark Lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off, and so went to bed again, and to sleep." But a few hours later, she woke him up again, and told him that 300 houses had been destroyed.

Pepys walked to a high point in the city to look, where he saw what he described as "an infinite great fire." He realized that the fire was far more serious than the Lord Mayor's reaction. So Pepys went straight to the King and the Duke of York and told them what was going on. They immediately authorized tearing down buildings for fire breaks, but by that time, it was too late. The wind was strong, and the fire was spreading. On top of all that, mobs were forming, convinced that there were arsonists. Some blamed the French, some the Dutch, others the Catholics.

The fire burned from the early hours of Sunday through Thursday. Pepys wrote, "I met with many people undone, and more that have extraordinary great losses." By the time it had finally run its course, 373 acres of the city had been burned, and 13,200 houses. One sixth of Londoners were homeless.

The dispossessed people of London wanted to blame someone. Anyone who was Catholic or didn't speak English well was considered a suspect, and many people were attacked. A French man confessed to starting the fire. Even the jury at the time believed him mentally unstable and probably not guilty, but they needed to blame someone, so he was hanged for the crime. Anti-Catholic and anti-foreigner sentiment continued in London. There was even an inscription that blamed the Catholics put on the monument to the Great Fire, and it wasn't removed until 1831, more than 150 years later.