The Great Fire of London
On the 2nd of September 1666, in the early hours of the morning, one of the greatest catastrophes would befall the mother of all cities: The Great Fire of London.
Farriner’s Folly – the Baker who Ignited a City
There has been much speculation about how the fire first started, but one of the most widely accepted is that it started in the bakery owned by a Thomas Farriner, located on Pudding Lane.
Although the street was named Pudding Lane, conjuring up images of sticky toffee pudding and other various sweet treats, back in the 17th century, the “pudding” in question was actually offal (the entrails and internal organs of animals). Pudding Lane gets its name from its proximity to Eastcheap, which was a meat market in medieval London. Carts would ferry animal guts away from the market, down Pudding Lane, to rubbish barges waiting on the river Thames.
The word ‘pudding’ is taken once again from an Old French word: ‘boudin’, a blood sausage primarily made of blood and guts, very common in medeval times. And well, Black pudding is still a quite popular traditional breakfast in Ireland and the Uk.
Thomas Farriner was producing biscuits for the Navy’s Victualing Office, which is why he was often referred to as the King’s Baker.
Did you know?
The baker Thomas Farriner (or Fariner, or even Farynor) likely got his surname from his family’s ancestral trade – in French the word “farine,” means “flour.”
This was a common practice during medieval times, where many surnames were derived from the family’s occupation. Both the trade and the name were passed from generation to generation. Other examples of this include “Carpenter,” “Taylor,” “Cooper,” “Smith,” “Miller,” etc.
It is said that one of Thomas’ furnaces had been left alight, although modern historians today believe it may have been a stray ember that had been blown onto the baker’s wood-stores. Anyhow, this ignited the fire, which quickly started to be spread by wind to neighboring properties.
Back in the mid-17th century, the houses would have been closer to each other, made of timber, wattle-and-daub, covered in a highly flammable substance called pitch, with a thatched roof (Oh, ‘‘Thatcher’’: another medieval trade-related surname that you will be familiar with).
The houses would have had projecting upper floors from the 1st and 2nd stories, nearly touching the opposite neighboring properties. This method of construction was known as jettying.
you can still see that in York for example :
But let’s come back to London and the Pudding Lane bakery, where Thomas suddenly woke up to a house full of smoke. He managed to escape from the building with his family through a neighbor’s window; however, his maid died. It is said she was the first victim of the fire.
There was no organised fire-fighting brigade at that time, so people would make do with what they had at hand: Leather buckets and water squirts, and send someone to wake up the highest authorities of the City, namely:
Thomas Bludworth, Lord Mayor of the City
London has seen many incompetent mayors over the centuries, but Thomas Bludworth must take first prize.
Woken up in the middle of the night and alerted to the dangers of the fire, he was possibly still sleepy (and grumpy!) when he famously replied:
“A woman could piss it out.”
Before going back to bed…
Failing to make the right decisions to act early, further attempts to control the fire would fail miserably.
September 2nd, 1666 – The Beast awakens
London had seen an exceptionally dry summer and was a fragile tinderbox waiting to explode. The persistent wind would give the fire its fuel to drive onward and increase in strength, often referred to at the time as “God’s Bellows.”
The fire would spread at an alarming speed, first to the neighboring houses and then, carried by the strong winds, down to the River Thames and extending eastward along the river, cutting the way to the precious water which would have filled the buckets and the barrels for the fire carts.
When the fire reached the warehouses lining the river, it got even worse, as most of them were full of combustible material such as timber, coal, tallow, oil, tar, and the buildings would just explode!
The wind would double the heat from the fire from 450° to nearly 1000°, incinerating anything in its path. Today, modern firefighters would describe this as a wildfire, and even with our modern equipment, they would struggle to contain the blaze.
All the bells from all the City churches would be ringing out a warning, but one after another, 87 of them (out of 107) became silent, being swallowed by the roaring blaze. The City was far from silent though. One witness described the noise of the fire as being like the passing of 1000 chariots beating together.
At that time, early forms of controlling fires involved creating firebreaks by blowing up houses between the fire and its intended spread, reducing fuel.
But Thomas Bludworth, although he must have been fully awake by then, would not give the order, fearing to face the financial disaster that would inevitably follow. Indeed, an ancient law of the City declared that if a man destroyed another’s house, he would be responsible for the cost of rebuilding it.
Bludworth may have been waiting for authority from the king, so as to relinquish himself of this responsibility, and avoid to displease the rich and powerful landlords and merchants who had put him in his position as Lord Mayor.
oh well…
September 3rd, 1666 – The Beast is Hungry
By the 3rd of September, the fire was spreading northward and westward and had reached the financial and commercial heart of the City, Gracechurch Street and Cornhill, destroying Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, and all of its expensive stocks of luxury spices, adding some exotic smells of roasting spices to the suffocating air of the blazing City.
September 4th, 1666 – The Beast’s Fury
On Tuesday, the 4th of September, the fire was at its most terrible! It is said that the smoke could be seen as far as Oxford.
Both the Guildhall and Old Saint Paul’s cathedral had been engulfed in the fire.
In a desperate attempt to save some precious books and manuscripts, Saint Paul’s Cathedral’s crypt had been used to store thousands of books, deeds, and other treasures.
That seems a good idea, and everybody thought the underground crypt of such a large stone building was the probably the safest place. Unfortunately, the great Tower of Saint Paul’s was covered in scaffolding for repairs. This added more fuel to the fire, and it is said that the stones in the heat were exploding like grenades. The heat was so great when it reached Old Saint Paul’s lead roof, that it simply melted like butter in a pan! The lead is said to have run down Ludgate Hill like a river.
The treasures people had tried so hard to protect within the vaults of the cathedral were soon consumed by the fire, or drowned into the scorching melted lead.
The people really needed a man to take control…
That would happen in the person of Charles II, the king!
The King of the Great Fire
Charles would take control, organizing eight command posts around the city where the fire was spreading and starting to organize firebreaks by blowing up houses.
The King was there, helping his people, and the fire gave Charles a second chance to reassert his reputation, and his credibility as a monarch. He had been king for six years before the fire, and all he had really become famous for was womanizing and gambling. The previous year, the great revisitation of the plague in London had seen him flee the Capital, leading to criticism. The fire would give him the opportunity to show his mettle to his subjects.
Admiral Penn
He was assisted in this task by another brave man: Admiral Penn (father of William Penn, future governor of Pennsylvania). He ordered firebreaks to stop the fire from reaching the Tower of London: not only because they were concerned about the destruction of an already 6 century-old building, but also because of what was inside it! The crown jewels and other fine treasures were there of course, but most importantly, there were over 9000 barrels of gunpowder stored inside. Had the fire reached the Royal Armouries, Londoners would have witnessed the greatest explosion that would ever hit the city of London. Luckily, Penn was successful and was credited with saving one of London’s oldest buildings.
Samuel Pepys
The famous 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys would view the destruction from the spire of the church of All Hallows by the Tower, a stone’s throw from Pepys’s house in Seething Lane. His detailed diary of the events of the fire would provide historians with an amazing insight into this terrible disaster.
From the diary of Samuel Pepys:
‘’We went to a little ale-house on the Bankside, (…) and there stayed till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. (…)’’
‘’We stayed till (…) we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. (…)’’
September 5th and 6th, 1666 – The Desolation of the City
It would not be until Wednesday the 5th, when the wind fell, that the fire started show any signs of calming down. By the 6th of September, the fire finally died away, with the sun rising on a ruined city. Most of the medieval city had disappeared forever. Over 13,000 buildings were destroyed, as well as 87 churches. Over 350,000 people were displaced, living in tents in temporary camps in North London.
After the Fire – Finding a Culprit
It’s not surprising that there was a great outpouring of anger and fear. How could that happen? Who was responsible? The people were looking for a culprit, someone to pin the blame on.
Thomas Farriner? No. He escaped prosecution, despite his bakery being cited as the starting point of the Great Fire. How? Well, luckily for Thomas, another would take the blame for the fire.
Thomas Bludworth, the Lord Mayor? Neither. The man conveniently disappeared on the second day of the fire, to reappear in the streets of London 3 days later, when it was safe to come back…
The scapegoat came in the form of a man named Robert Hubert, a Catholic French migrant who had settled in London. Originally from Normandy, he was the son of a watchmaker.
When arrested and questioned by the authorities, Robert decided to inform them that he had started the fire himself.
Why would he do such a thing? Well, sadly, Robert wasn’t quite right in the head. He wanted to become famous and go down in history as the man who destroyed London.
Of course, the law had to be followed, and there was a court trial.
And guess who was there to support Robert’s claim that he started the fire? The entire Farriner family, who signed an indictment claiming that Robert had thrown a firebomb through their window.
This got them off the hook and led to the hanging of poor Robert Hubert at Tyburn gallows on the 29th October 1666. Although many, including the judge, thought it was quite obvious that Hubert was mad.
Thomas Farriner was in the crowd at Robert Hubert’s execution.
So, the rumblings of a nefarious Catholic conspiracy to destroy London started to gain momentum. There was no shortage of alternative suspects, though, including the Dutch, with whom England was at war.
Eventually, it was finally agreed that the Great Fire started not by arson but simply by the physics of the fire and London’s inability to deal with such a blaze.
One of the extraordinary facts that were reported after the Great Fire is that only six people died.
This mystery might be explained by the fact that there were no bills of mortality (a census taken in each district of London of how people died on a monthly basis) printed during the Great Fire, due to the destruction of the printing press.
We may never know how many people really died in this dreadful catastrophe.
Tony P.
