Large fire of London

The large fire of London is strong a conflagration which struck the center of London (England) of the Sunday September 2nd with the Wednesday September 5th 1666. Fire devastated the City of London inside the old man Roman wall and threatened, without however reaching them, the aristocratic district of Westminster (today the West End), the palate of the king Charles II, and the majority of the poor districts of suburbs. It consumed 13.200 houses, 87 parish churches, the cathedral Saint-Paul, and the majority of the buildings of the authorities of the City. It is estimated that it destroyed the houses from approximately 70.000 of the 80.000 inhabitants of the City. The assessment of deaths unknown and is generally regarded as having been weak, since only some checked deaths were consigned. This reasoning was recently contradicted under the terms of the fact that deaths of the poor and the members of the middle-classes were not consigned nowhere, and that the heat of the blazing inferno could incinerate many victims, not leaving identifiable corpses.

Fire began in bakery from Thomas Farriner (or Farynor), in Pudding Lane, shortly after midnight, the September 2nd, and was propagated quickly. The use of the means of Fight against the fire and the creation of firebreak by the demolition were delayed in a critical way by indecision of the Lord-maire of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. When the demolitions with large scales were ordered, during the night of Sunday, the wind had already poked the fire of bakery, making such measurements useless. Monday, fire was propagated towards the north and the heart of the City. The order in the streets left the place to chaos while spread rumors according to which foreigners were at the origin of the fire. The fears of the homeless people were focused on the French and the Dutchmen, enemies of England within the framework of the Second War anglo-Dutchwoman (1665 - 1667); these groups of immigrants were victims of Lynchage S and aggressions. Tuesday, the fire extended on most of the City, destroying the Saint-Paul cathedral and crossed the Fleet to threaten the court of Charles II with Whitehall. In same time, actions of fight coordinated against fire are reflected in place. It is considered that the fight to circumscribe the fire was gained thanks to two factors: the strong east wind fell, and the garrison of the Tour of London used its Gunpowder to create effective firebreaks, which prevented fire from being propagated more still towards the east.

The fire had economic consequences and social disastrous. The evacuation of London and the emigration of the refugees were strongly encouraged by Charles II, who feared a revolt among the latter. London was rebuilt according to the layout of the streets such as it was before the fire, even if many radical proposals were made.

London in the years 1660

In the years 1660, London was by far more the big city of the United Kingdom, with a population estimated at a half-million inhabitants, more than the total of the population of the fifty most populated cities of England. Comparing London with the magnificence Baroque of Paris, John Evelyn qualified it “aggregate of anarchistic, Scandinavian wood houses”, and announced the fire hazards due to wood and the urban density. By “anarchistic”, Evelyn understood not planned and impromptu, resulting from the population growth and a urban spreading out not controlled. London had become increasingly over-populated inside its wall, which dated from the Roman time , and it had extended beyond the wall by the appearance of unhealthy slums like Shoreditch, Holborn and Southwark, and by the annexation of the town of Westminster.

At the end of the 17th century, the City itself, i.e. the zone ranging between the wall of the City and the the Thames, was only part of London, covering 2,8 km ² (700 acre S) and sheltering approximately 80.000 inhabitants, that is to say a sixth of the inhabitants of London. The City was surrounded by a crown of suburbs where lived the majority of the Londoners. The City was already the shopping mall of the capital, the largest market and wearing of England, dominated by the merchants and manufactures. The aristocracy scorned the City and lived is in the countryside, beyond the slums of the suburbs, or more in the west in the privileged district of Westminster (current the West End), where were Whitehall and the court of Charles II. Richest preferred remote food of the encumbered City, polluted and unhealthy, in particular after the epidemic of Bubonic plague (the “Grande plague of London”) of 1665.

The relations between the City and the Crown were tended. During the First civil war (1642 - 1651), the City of London had been a republican bastion , and the rich person and dynamic capital had still the capacity to be a threat for Charles II, like had shown it several republican risings in London with the beginning of the year 1660. The magistrates of the City belonged to the generation which had fought during the civil war, and they remembered that the appropriation of the absolute capacity by Charles I {{er}} had led to this national traumatism. They were decided to cross short to any similar ambition in his/her son, and when the large fire threatened the city, they refused the soldiers and other helps that Charles offered to them. Even in such critical circumstances, the idea to see the unpopular royal troops sent in the City was unbearable for them. When Charles took the orders of the hands of the ineffective Lord Mayor, the fire was already unverifiable.

Fire hazards in the City

The layout of the streets of the City was primarily medieval, forming a network of narrow, tortuous and over-populated paved streets. It had undergone several important fires before 1666, most recent going back to 1632. Constructions timber and roof of Chaume was prohibited since centuries, but these inexpensive materials continued to be used. The only built-up area mainly out of stone was the rich person centers City, where the residences of the merchants and brokers formed roomy small islands, encircled by Paroisse S in which each piece of constructible ground was used to face the rapid growth of the population. In these parishes worked much of craftsmen whose activities represented fire hazards: founders, blacksmiths, glaziers, theoretically prohibited downtown, but tolerated in the facts. The dwellings frays with these sources of heat and of pollution were designed in a dangerous way. The corbellings (covered upper floors) were characteristic of the buildings out of wooden of six or seven stages. Surface that they occupied on the ground was weak, but they maximized their use of space available in “encroaching”, according to the word of a contemporary, on the street by gradually increasing the size of their upper floors. The extension risk of fire posed when these corbellings met almost at the top of the narrowest streets was known: “as it facilitates a conflagration, in the same way it blocks the remedy”, wrote an observer, but “the avarice of the citizens and complicity corruption of the magistrates” acted in favor of the corbellings. In 1661, Charles II issued the prohibition of the bow windows and the corbellings, but it was practically not applied by the local authorities. The following measurement of Charles II, in 1665, alerted on the fire hazard due to the narrowness of the streets and authorized the imprisonment of the recalcitrant builders and the demolition of the dangerous buildings. Once again, it had only little impact.

The banks of the river were a zone-key of the evolution of the large fire. The Thames offered its water to the fight against the fire and the possibility of fleeing by boat, but the warehouses and fuel stores of the poorest districts, along the river, presented more the high-risk of fire of all the city. Along the quays, the collapsing residences of wood and the paper hovels tarred of the poor piled up between “the old paper buildings and the most combustible tar matters, bituminizes, hemp, resin and flax which accumulated around”. In London also the black Poudre pullulated (or gunpowder), in particular at the edge of the river. It remained about it much in the residences of the citizens who went up at the time of the civil war, considering the former members of the New Model Army of Cromwell had preserved their Mousquet S and the powder necessary to instruct them. Between five and six hundred tons of powders were stored in the Tour of London, at the northern end of the Pont of London. The salesmen of the quays also had of them the important stocks, stored in wood barrels.

The bridge of London, only physical bond between the City and southern bank of the Thames, itself was covered with houses and had appeared a mortal trap at the time of the fire of 1632. Sunday at dawn, these houses burned, and Samuel Pepys, which observed the fire since the tower of London, foot-note which it worried much for his friends who lived on the bridge. One feared that the flames can cross the bridge to threaten the borough of Southwark, on southern bank, but an empty space between the buildings of the bridge was used as firebreak.

The 5,5 height meters Roman wall which surrounded the City threatened to lock up the runaways in the burnt zone. When the bank of the river was on fire, to pass by one of the eight doors of the wall became the only means of escaping. During the first two days, few people thought of fleeing the City completely: they were satisfied to carry all that they could to the “sure” zone nearest, generally the church of the parish or the accesses of the Saint-Paul cathedral, to have to move again a few hours later. Some moved their goods “four to five times” in the same day. The perception of a need for fleeing beyond the walls took root only late in the course of the day of Monday, and there were then scenes of quasi-panic around the narrow doors, whereas the thrown into a panic refugees tried to leave with their packages, carrioles, horses and carriages.

The crucial factor which obstructed the fire control was the narrowness of the streets. Even in normal weather, the troop of carrioles, carriages and pedestrians in the streets caused frequent congestions, and during the fire, the ways moreover were blocked by refugees who camped near the goods that they had been able to save or fled while moving away from the flames, obstructing the teams of demolition and fire control which sought to approach some.

The fire control at the 17th century

The fires were current in the city, over-populated and mainly built out of wood, with its opened hearths, candles, furnaces and deposits of fuels. There was no body of Sapeurs-pompiers, but the London Milice local, the Trained Bands or Train-band , was generally available to answer general alarms. To supervise the fire hazards was one of the tasks reserved for the guet of the city, composed of a thousand of men and public criers patrolling the streets the night. The townsmen also only managed to deal with the fires, with unquestionable success. The bells of the churches sounded to inform the inhabitants of a dangerous fire, and those met in haste to apply the techniques at their disposal: the demolition and water. The law obliged the turns of each parish church to contain the equipment necessary to these efforts: long ladders, buckets of leather, axes and “hooks with fire” ( firehooks ) to cut down the buildings Sometimes, buildings of big size were shaven in a fast and effective way by means of gunpowder explosions controlled. This drastic method to create firebreaks was frequently employed at the end of the Large Fire, and the modern historians think that it is thanks to that fire was finally controlled.

To destroy the houses threatened by a dangerous fire by means of hooks or of explosives was often effective means of containing the damage, but in this precise case, the demolition was delayed during hours by the indecision and the incapacity of the Lord Mayor to give the orders necessary. When the orders of the king “not to save any house” arrived, the fire had destroyed much more houses, and the demolition contracters could not work any more in the streets invaded by crowd.

The use of water to extinguish the flames was also opposed. In theory, a system of pipes in Orme served 30.000 houses via large a Tower water to Cornhill that the river filled with high tide, and there existed also a water tank of rain with Islington. It was often possible to open a drain close to a building on fire and to connect it to a pipe to sprinkle the flames or to fill of the buckets. Moreover, Pudding Lane was close to the river, and theoretically, all the streets leading to bakery and with the adjacent buildings should have been used by two columns of men, one doing without the buckets full to the fire and the other with the empty buckets to the river. That did not take place, or at least had ceased when Pepys contemplated the flames since the river, in the middle of the morning of Sunday. In its newspaper, Pepys comments on the fact that nobody tried to extinguish the fire, everyone preferring to flee it, being pressed to carry their goods and all to leave with the flames. Fire propagated until river without to meet much of resistance and attacked quickly to warehouses of quays, which not only cut the access to the water tank which the river constituted, but put also fire at the Noria S located under the Bridge of London which pumped the water of the water tower of Cornhill: the access to the river and water reserve became both inaccessible.

London had a leading-edge technology in the form of vans of fire, which had been used within the framework of preceding fires of great width. But with the difference of the useful hooks, these broad pumps had seldom appeared rather flexible or functional calculuses to make a great difference. Only some were provided with wheels, the others were assembled on sledges without wheels. They had to be moved at long distances and they arrived generally too late. Being provided with mouths, but not with pipes, their range moreover was limited. To this occasion, an unknown number of vans were brought or drawn in the streets, some through all the City. The water of the conduits which they were supposed to use was already inaccessible, but the bank of the river was still accessible in certain points. Several machines rocked in the Thames when one tried to operate them to fill their tanks. The heat released by the flames was already too strong so that the other machines can approach sufficiently to be effective: they did not even reach Pudding Lane.

Unfolding of the fire

The personal experiences of many Londoners during the fire can be seen in letters and memories. The two more famous authors of diaries of the time, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, noted the events and their own reactions day after day, and endeavoured to remain informed from what occurred in the City and beyond. For example, they went both the fourth day in the park of Moorfields, in the north of the City, to see the camping of the refugees there, and they came out from it shocked. Their newspapers are the primary sources of all the modern analyzes of the disaster. The most recent works, those of Hanson (2001) and Tinniswood (2003), are also based on the short memories of William Taswell (1651 - 1682), a young schoolboy of Westminster School, fourteen years old in 1666.

After two rainy summers in 1664 and 1665, London had undergone exceptional a Sécheresse since November 1665, and it wood of the buildings was extremely dry after the long summer of 1666. The fire of the bakery of Pudding Lane extended initially full west, poked by a strong east wind.

Sunday

A fire was declared in the bakery of Thomas Farriner shortly after midnight Sunday September 2nd. The family was trapped on the floor, but could leave by a window and take refuge in the house of at side, except a maidservant too terrified to jump and who was the first victim of the flames. The neighbors tried to help to extinguish the fire; one hour later, the parish constable arrived and judged that it was to better destroy the adjacent houses in order to prevent that fire is propagated. The owners protested, and one required the presence of the Lord Mayor, to sir Thomas Bloodworth, the only one with being able to impose this decision to them. When Bloodworth arrived, the flames consumed the close residences and moved towards the warehouses of papers and flammable stores of bank of the river. The most experienced firemen claimed the demolition, but Bloodworth refused, applicant whom the majority of the residences were rented and which their owners were untraceable. It is generally thought that Bloodworth was a yes-man not having the capacities necessary for the post of Lord Mayor, and that he succumbed to panic when he had to face this emergency. Pressed, it had this famous word: “Fi! A woman could extinguish it while pissing above” and from went away. After the destruction of the City, Samuel Pepys wrote in his newspaper, at the date of the September 7th 1666: “People décrient over all simplicity stupidity of my Lord Mayor in general, and more particularly in its management of the fire, showing it of all the evils. ”

Around 7 hours of the morning, Pepys, which was officer graded high of the Navy Board, went to the top Tour of London to have an outline of the fire. It foot-note in its newspaper which the storm in the east had transformed into flood of flames. They had set fire to several churches, 300 houses (according to its estimate), and had reached bank of the river. The houses on the Pont of London burned. Gone up on a boat more closely to inspect the extent of the damage around Pudding Lane, Pepys describes a “lamentable” fire, “each one trying to recover its goods, and throwing them in the river or carrying them on barges; the poor people remaining in their residences until the fire is very close, and ruant themselves then on boats, or climbing of a staircase to another on the edge of the river”. Pepys continued towards the west along the river to the court, with Whitehall, “where people accosted me, and I made them an account which plunged them in the distress, and the rumor arrived to the king. Thus I was convened, and told with the king and the duke of York what I live, and ordered me to go to my Lord Mayor of his share, and to order to him not to save any house, but to cut down them in front of fire in each direction. ” The brother of Charles, Jacques, duke of York, offered the services of the Royal Life Guards to help with the fire control.

With one thousand in the west of Pudding Lane, close to the staircases of Westminster, the young schoolboy William Taswell saw some refugees arriving at the Abbaye of Westminster on board rented barges, carrying only simple covers like clothes. The prices of the owners of barges had just exploded, and only luckiest could secure a place on their board.

Fire extended quickly thanks to the wind. About the middle of the morning of Sunday, the townsmen ceased their attempts extinguishing it and fled. Their mass, added to that their bundles and of their carrioles, fills up the streets, blocking the firemen and their horse-drawn carriages. Pepys took a hackney carriage to return of Whitehall downtown, but had to continue with foot after the Saint-Paul cathedral. The barrows filled of goods and the pedestrians were always fleeing the fire, heavily charged. The parish churches which were not directly threatened filled of pieces of furniture and goods of values, which should be moved soon again. Pepys found the Bloodworth mayor trying to coordinate the fight against the flames and the destruction “like a woman about to disappear”, answering the message of the king while geignant that it was well cutting down of the houses, “but fire catches up with us more quickly than we cannot do it”. Clinging to its dignity, he refused the soldiers whom the duke Jacques proposed to him and returned at his place to lie down. Charles descended the river since Whitehall on board the royal barge to inspect the events. He discovered that in spite of what Bloodworth with Pepys had declared, of the houses were still not cut down. With audacity, it ridiculed the authority of Bloodworth and ordered massive destruction in the west of the affected area by the fire. The delay made these operations mainly useless, the fire being already unverifiable.

Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after alarm was sounded in Pudding Lane, fire had become a Embrasement generalized flash which generated its own climate. The Effet of chimney caused a gigantic increase of hot air everywhere where the drafts were reduced by the frame, as on the level of the piers, leaving a vacuum to the level of the ground. The strong winds which resulted from it did not extinguish fire, as one could believe it, quite to the contrary: they provided Oxygène to the flames, and the turbulences caused by the rise of the airstream erratiquement made culer the wind in the north and the south of the principal direction of the high wind, which always blew of the east.

At the beginning of evening, Pepys returned on the river with his wife and some friends to study the fire. They ordered to the boatman to as bring them close to fire as possible; “and all along the Thames, with the face with the wind, you were almost burned by an ember rain”. When these “embers” became unbearable, the group went in a tavern of southern bank of the river and remained until fallen the night there: they could then see the fire gaining the bridge of London and crossing the river, “like only one arch of flames on this side to the other of the bridge: to see that made me cry”.

Monday

At the dawn of Monday September 3rd, fire extended mainly towards north and the west, the turbulences caused by the fire pushing the flames at the same time towards the south and north. The progression towards the south was primarily blocked by the river itself, but it had ignited the houses of the Bridge of London and threatened to cross it to strike the borough Southwark, bank of the south. It was saved thanks to a preexistent firebreak on the bridge, a broad breach between the buildings which had saved southern bank of the Thames at the time of the fire of 1632 and preserved it again this time. The parallel push towards north led the flames in the middle of the City. Several observers stress the despair and the feeling of impotence which seems to have seized the Londoners in this second day, and misses it efforts made to save the rich districts threatened by the flames, like the Royal Exchange (purse and store combined) and the stores of consumer goods of Cheapside. The Royal Exchange took fire at the end of the afternoon and was nothing any more but one carcass smoking after a few hours. John Evelyn, a courtier, wrote in his newspaper:

The fire was so universal, and people if dumb-founded, that as of the beginning, I do not know by which despair or turn of the destiny, they hardly fought to extinguish it, so that it was not heard nor anything else saw only cries and lamentations, and creatures inattentive not seeking even to save their own goods, if strange was the consternation which struck them.

Evelyn lived with six kilometers of the City, with Deptford, and was thus not pilot beginnings of the disaster. Monday, it went to Southwark fits with body some with other easy people to contemplate what Pepys had seen the day before: the City burning on other side of the river. The fire had clearly extended: “the City very whole catch in terrifying flames close to bank; all the houses of the Bridge, any Thames Street, and while going up towards Cheapside, while going down towards Three Craniums, were consumed now”. In the evening, Evelyn foot-note which the river was covered with barges and boats charged with goods fleeing. It observed a great exodus of handcarts and pedestrians through the narrow doors of the City, going in the undeveloped sites to the north and the east, “which with miles with the round were strewn with movable goods of all kinds, and tents set up to shelter at the same time people and what they had been able to carry with them. Miserable O and calamitous spectacle! ”

In the threatened city, suspicions were born according to which the fire was not an accident. The swirls involved sparks and glares ignited on long distances, which were going to be placed in the thatched roofs and the gutters out of wooden, causing new starting points of fire apparently without bond with the major fire. The rumor ran consequently which wanted that these new departures were caused knowingly. The Second War anglo-Dutchwoman made carry the suspicions on the foreigners. The fear and suspicion reigned, the noise ran that an invasion was imminent and that foreign agents had been seen throwing “fireballs” in houses, or taken with grenades or matches. A wave of urban violence followed. William Taswell was pilot plundering and destruction of the store of a French painter, and he saw a blacksmith catching a French in the street and striking an iron change of course to him on cranium. The fear of terrorism was largely helped by the rupture of the communications, as the infrastructures were devoured by the flames. The General Letter Office , which treated the mail of all the country, burned early in the morning of Monday. The London Gazette just managed to publish its number of Monday before the buildings of the printer do not leave in smoke (this number treated primarily gossip of the good company, with a small note concerning a fire declared Sunday morning which “continues with a great violence”). The entire country depended on these infrastructures, and the vacuum which they left was filled by the rumor. The monks also claimed to deal with news Conspirations of the powders. Monday, suspicion involved panic and collective paranoia, so that the Trained Bands as the Coldstream Guards were devoted less to the fire control than with the arrest or the rescue of the anger of the crowd (even both) from abroad, the catholics, or the people to the equivocal pace.

The inhabitants, in particular most fortunate, despaired to save their goods of the fire, an aubaine for the poor in good health which were engaged like carriers sometimes (and were satisfied to conceal purely and simply the aforementioned goods), in particular the owners of carts and boats. Hirer out a cart cost two shillings Sunday; Monday, the price climbed to forty books, a small fortune (equivalent to more than 4000 pounds of 2005). It seems that whoever had a cart or a boat at short distance of London had cut through a path to the City to seize these opportunities, the carts helping to block the narrow doors on which the inhabitants in escape ruaient themselves. Chaos with the doors was such as the magistrates ordered the closing of the doors in the afternoon of Monday, hoping to force the inhabitants to concentrate on the fight against the flames rather than on the rescue of their possessions. This measurement did not bear its fruits and was cancelled the following day.

While at the same time the streets yielded to violence, in particular with the doors, and than the fire made rage out of any control, Monday marked the beginning of the organized actions. Bloodworth, which, as Lord Mayor, was responsible for the coordination of the fight against the flames, had seems it left the City: its name does not appear in any contemporary account of the events of Monday. In this state of emergency, Charles exceeds once again the authorities of the City and named his brother Jacques, duke of York, in load of the operations. Jacques installed control units around the perimeter of the fire and engaged townsmen of the lower classes in teams of firemen paid well and nourished. Three courtiers were in charge of the management of each station, with sufficient authority to order demolitions. The purpose of this visible gesture of solidarity coming from the Crown was to put an end to the apprehensions citizens to be regarded as financially responsible for the destruction of houses. Jacques and his guards patrolled in the streets all Monday, saving the foreigners of crowd and trying to maintain the order.

Tuesday

Tuesday September 4th was the day when the damage was most important. The control unit of the duke of York with Temple Bar, the junction of the Strand and of Fleet Street, was supposed to stop the projection of the fire towards the west and the palate of Whitehall. Jacques hoped that the Fleet would form a natural firebreak and laid out its men along the river, between Fleet Bridge and the Thames. However, early in the morning of Tuesday, the flames leaped over Fleet, thorough by the east wind, and overflowed the men of the duke, who had to run to catch up with it. With the palate, consternation was of setting in front of the projection relentless of fire: “Oh, the confusion which reigned then at the court! ” written Evelyn.

Working finally according to a preestablished plan, the firemen of Jacques had also created a broad firebreak in the north of the fire. It contained the fire until the end of the afternoon, then the flames leaped through and started to destroy the luxurious trade of Cheapside.

All had believed that the cathedral Saint-Paul would be an inviolable refuge, with its thick walls of stone and the natural firebreak which formed the empty place which surrounded it. It was full with the goods which the townsmen and its crypts had been able to save were occupied by stocks of the printers and booksellers of Paternoster Row , located not far from there. The building was however in the course of repair and of many scaffolding S of wood surrounded it, which took fire in the night of the Tuesday to Wednesday. The young person William Taswell, leaving the school, was held on the staircases of Westminster and looked at the flames encircling the cathedral, then the scaffolding on fire to ignite the beams of the roof. In the half an hour space, the principal ceiling melted, and the books and papers of the crypt ignited in one grondement. “The stones of Saint-Paul flew like grenades, molten casting ran in the streets like a torrent, and the same paving stones shone of a wild heat, such as neither horse nor man could press them”, Evelyn foot-note in its newspaper. The cathedral was soon nothing any more but one ruin.

During the day, the flames started to move towards the east starting from the neighborhoods of Pudding Lane, vis-a-vis the east wind and in direction of the tower of London and its powder reserves. After having awaited all the day the assistance requested from the official firemen of Jacques, occupied in the west, the garrison of the Tower decided to deal itself with the things and created firebreaks while exploding houses in the neighborhoods, slowing down the projection of the flames effectively.

Wednesday

The wind fell Tuesday evening, allowing the firebreaks dug by the garrison to be effective as of the next morning, Wednesday September 5th. Pepys crossed the city smoking, burning the feet, and climbed at the top of the arrow of Barking Church, from where he contemplated the City in ruins, “saddest vision of desolation which I ever saw”. Many minor fires continued to burn, but the Large fire was completed. Pepys visited Moorfields, a vast waste ground located just at the north of the City, saw there a large camping of refugees without shelter, and foot-note that the price of the bread in the neighborhoods of the park had doubled. Evelyn also went to Moorfields, which had become the principal place of rallying of the homeless people, and was horrified with the sight of many desperate who were there, some in tents, others in shelters built with the means of the edge: “much without least the haillon or essential ustensil, without bed nor board reduced to most extreme misery and poverty”. Evelyn was impressed by the pride of these Londoners, “almost died of hunger and destitution, not asking for however least the penny of relief”.

The fear of terrorists foreign and a French invasion or Dutch was always also high among the victims of the fire, and during the night of the Wednesday to Thursday a general panic in the camps of Moorfields and Islington burst. A light in the sky above Fleet Street gave rise to a rumor according to which 50.000 immigrants French and Dutch had raised themselves and walked towards Moorfields to finish what the fire had begun: to kill the men, to rape the women and to steal their thin goods. Terrified crowd rua in the streets, attacking all the foreigners that she crossing. According to Evelyn, it is only “with great evil and the worst difficulties” than they were alleviated and rejected into Moorfields by the Trained Bands , the Life Guards and the members of the court. The tension was such as Charles feared a general revolt of London against monarchy. The production and the distribution of foods were gone down to zero, and Charles announced that the City would be supplied out of bread daily, and that sure markets would be established around the city. These markets were there only for the sale and the purchase; there was no question of helping voluntarily.

Assessment

The direct victims of the fire known are rare and it is supposed traditionally that the total of the victims was also weak. To carry gives the figure of eight dead, and Tinniswood speaks about less than ten dead, though he adds that some deaths had to pass unperceived and that there had to be deaths in the provisional campings, in addition to the burned and poisoned victims. Hanson enters in dissension with the assumption according to which there were only rare victims, and enumerates the dead survivors of hunger and cold during the cold winter which followed, of which, for example, the playwright James Shirley and his wife. Hanson also claims that “ is to show credulity to believe that the only papists or foreigners beaten with died or lynched were those saved by the duke of York ”, that the official figures say of it only few on the destiny the not listed poor, and that heat in the center of the blazing inferno, largely higher than that of a fire of chimney, was sufficient to entirely consume bodies, not leaving anything or only some fragments of bone. The fire, which was not only fed by wood or thatch, but also by oil, Bitume, coal, Suif, grease, sugar, alcohol, Térébenthine and gunpowder, dissolved the imported steel which was on the quays and the large chains and iron bolts of the doors of the City. Only the Dent S could have resisted such temperatures, but the poor seldom had some was this only one. Anonymous fragments of bones would not have been either of a great interest for the famished ones which excavated tens of thousands of tons of remains after the flames in the search of goods of value, not more than for the workers who cleared ashes for the rebuilding. Hanson calls some with the common direction and puts the Emphase on the fact that the fire attacked the rotted residences of the poor at high speed, undoubtedly trapping “the old men, the very young people, the slow ones and the disabled person” and burying ashes of their bones under the debris: the assessment of the victims would not be then of eight, but “several hundreds and rather probably of several thousands”.

The property damages were quantified with 13.200 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 houses of the Livery Company , the Royal Exchange , the Custom House , the Cathédrale Saint-Paul, several prisons, of which that of Bridewell Palace, the General Letter Office , and three Western doors of the City: Ludgate , Newgate and Aldersgate . The cost of the disaster, first of all quantified to 100 million books of the time, was thereafter tiny room to the dubious figure of 10 million books (more than one billion books of 2005). Evelyn thought of seeing more of “200.000 people of all rows and dispersed statutes, installed close to piles of what they had been able to save” in the fields towards Islington and Highgate.

Continuations of the fire

The need for finding a Scapegoat as fast as possible is seen in the acceptance of the confession of a certain Robert Hubert, French clock and watch maker simple of spirit, which declared being an agent of the Pape and to have lit the Large fire in Westminster. It modified thereafter its history to claim that it had started the fire in the bakery of Pudding Lane. In spite of doubts about the fact that it was or not conscious of what it said in its confession, Hubert was recognized guilty and hung with Tyburn the September 28th 1666. After his death, one discovered that it had arrived at London only two days after the beginning of the fire. These allegations according to which fire had been lit by catholics were exploited by the propaganda of the party opposed to the court pro-catholic of Charles II, especially during the Complot papist and the crisis of exclusion which followed under its reign. As for the baker, it was only briefly worried since the confession of Robert Hubert raised the suspicions on him, it continued its activity.

Charles II feared that the chaos and the agitation which followed the fire do not give rise to a new London rebellion. He encouraged the homeless people to leave London to settle elsewhere, proclaiming quickly that “all the Cities and Cities, whatever they are, must without contradiction receive the aforementioned people in distress and to allow them the free exercise of their manual trade”. One does not know precisely how much left, and towards where, though some settled with Oxford.

A special court, the Short Fire , made up of three judges or more, was made up to treat arguments between tenants and owners. The Fire Runs decided which should rebuild, while being based on the richness of each one, and which could terminate the contracts. This court sat at Cliffords Inn between the February 27th 1667 and September 1672. The businesses were heard and a verdict was generally returned during the day; without this court, the legal quarrels would have seriously delayed the rebuilding of the city. The judges worked free between three and four days per week; in reward for their efforts, the painter John Michael Wright (v. 1617-1694) was charged to make the portraits of the twenty-two judges who sat at the Fire Runs , of which the brothers Hugh and Wadhamn Wyndham.

Several plans for a rebuilding radically different from the City were proposed, movement encouraged by Charles. If it had been rebuilt according to these plans, London would have competed with Paris in its magnificence Baroque. The Crown and the authorities of the City tried to establish “to which all the houses and all the grounds belonged in right”, in order to negotiate compensations with their owners for in-depth modifications which these plans implied, but this unrealistic idea had to be abandoned. The townsmen, worried by their survival, were unaware of in major part the exhortations asking of the workers to measure the grounds on which houses had been held, without counting those which had left the capital; moreover, with the unemployment generated by the fire, it was impossible to make sure of the workers for this task.

The problems of property not having been able to be solved, none the plans for a City baroque, very plazas and avenues, could be carried out; there was nobody to negotiate, and no means of calculating the compensations which should be versed. In the place, the old plan of the streets was recreated in the new City, somewhat improved in the fields of hygiene and the prevention against the fires: the streets were widened, the quays along the Thames made more open and accessible, without houses to obstruct the access to the river, and especially, the houses were built out of bricks and stones, not out of wood. New public buildings were built on the sites of old, most famous being undoubtedly the cathedral Saint-Paul and the fifty new churches of Christopher Wren.

A memorial of the Large fire, designed on the initiative of Charles II and drawn by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, was set up close to Pudding Lane. High of 61 meters and simply known like “the Monument”, it is an element representative of London which gave its name to a subway station. In 1668, the charges carried against the catholics were added to the Monument: “… more terrifying Fire of this City; lit and perpetuated by the treachery and the ill will of the faction papist” (… the most dreadful Burning off this City; begun and carried one by the treachery and mischievousness off the Popish faction ). By excluding the four years of reign of Jacques II (1685 - 1689), this inscription disappeared only in 1830.

Another monument, the Golden delicious Servant boy of Pye Corner, with Smithfield, mark the place where the fire stopped. According to the inscription, the fact that the fire was declared in Pudding Lane (the “way of the Pudding”) and stopped in Pye Corner (the “corner of the tart”) is a sign which the Fire was a punishment of God for fished Gourmandise made by the very whole City.

The epidemic of plague of 1665 had killed a sixth of the population of London, that is to say 80.000 people, and much suggest, since there were not any more recurring epidemics of Peste in London after the fire, that this last saved lives on the long run by reducing in ashes a great number of unsanitary housings, with the rats and the chips which transmitted the disease. The site of the Museum off London affirms that these two elements are bound, while the historian Roy Porter points out that the fire did not touch with the slums of the suburbs, which formed the most unhealthy part of the city. Other epidemiologic explanations were advanced, just as the observation as the disease disappeared from the near total of the European cities at the same time.

Random links: