Adrian Tinniswood is the author of fourteen books of social and architectural history. A Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and a Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at Bath Spa University, he has worked for and with the National Trust at local, regional and national level for more than thirty years. In 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to heritage.
Samuel Pepys was born on 23 February 1633, the son of a London tailor. Pepys worked with the Navy Office, eventually rising to become Secretary of the Admiralty. He also became a JP, an MP and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In later life he was accused of being part of the anti-monarchist ‘Popish Plot’, and was twice imprisoned for it. Upon his second release he retired to Clapham, then considered to be ‘in the country’. Samuel Pepys died on 26 May 1703. His diaries, which had been written in code, were bequeathed to Magdalen College, Cambridge, where they can still be viewed.
John Evelyn, born 31 October 1620, was a scholar, gardener, architect and diarist. Born in Surrey, Evelyn later settled in Deptford, London, and his diaries, like those of his friend and colleague Samuel Pepys, form a vivid account of life as a seventeenth-century courtier. Following the Great Fire, Evelyn submitted plans for the rebuilding of the city, and although these ultimately proved impossible to implement they brought him close to Christopher Wren and Charles II. He died in 1706.
2 SEPTEMBER 1666: 350 YEARS SINCE THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
In the early hours of 2 September 1666 a small fire broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane. In the five days that followed it grew into a conflagration that would devastate the third largest city in the Western world.
This short edition is the essential guide to the Great Fire of London and includes first-hand descriptions from the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, as well as a gripping account from renowned historian Adrian Tinniswood.
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Extracts from By Permission of Heaven copyright © Adrian Tinniswood 2003
The Great Fire of London in the Year of 1666: Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Peter Jackson Collection / Bridgeman Images
This edition first published by Vintage in 2016
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Afterwards, everyone swore they had been expecting it. They pointed to the prophecies of doom and the Popish plots that had been the talk of the city all through that long, hot August. They reminded each other about the harbingers of calamity: the great pyramid of fire which had hovered ominously over the sea earlier in the year; the monster which had been born in a tenement slum just days before it happened – a terrible thing with a wolf’s tail, a goat’s breasts, the ears of a horse and a birthmark in the shape of a human face on its chest. Such portents were signs of God’s wrath, people said. England had been called to account. England’s debauched King had been shown the error of his ways.
But that was afterwards, when it was too late.
As dawn broke bright and clear on the first day of September 1666, no one dreamed they were waking to the last sunrise the old city would ever see. No one dreamed that over the next six days God would blot out the heavens, or that hell would break loose as fear and flame turned the streets of London into Armageddon.
Afterwards, Thomas Farriner was always quite clear about one thing. The events of that Saturday night were not his fault.
Farriner was an ordinary tradesman. His main source of income was a contract to produce ship’s biscuit, an unleavened bread which was baked, sliced and then oven-dried. His client was the Navy’s Victualling Office, which is why he was occasionally referred to in contemporary accounts of the Fire as ‘the King’s baker’; and his premises were on Pudding Lane, a narrow thoroughfare less than 100 yards long which ran north-to-south from the meat markets and butchers’ stalls of Little Eastcheap down to Thames Street with its riverside wharves and warehouses. The parish church, St Margaret Fish Street, had been the site of a large fish market in the Middle Ages – a 1311 ordinance required French lampreys to be set out for sale under its walls immediately on their arrival in England – and according to John Stow, whose famous Survey of London first appeared in 1598, Pudding Lane had acquired its name because the Eastcheap butchers had a scalding-house for hogs there, ‘and their puddings, with other filth of beasts, are voided down that way to their dung boats on the Thames’. ‘Pudding’ is a medieval word for entrails or bowels.
The area also had a more appetising reputation. Over the years, numbers of cooks and bakers had set up shop in and around Eastcheap, drawn there by the easy supply of fresh meat and the proximity of the Victualling Office near Little Tower Hill. Breads, pies and hot meats were all offered for sale to the public, and traders ‘cried hot ribs of beef roasted, pies well baked, and other victuals’.
As well as baking hard tack for the navy, Farriner ran just such a business, making and selling bread (few households baked their own), and cooking both his own pies and pasties and those which had been prepared by his neighbours. His bakery was less than halfway up Pudding Lane; it lay behind the Star Inn on Fish Street, the main northern approach to London Bridge, which ran more or less parallel to the lane. He lived over the shop with his daughter Hanna, a maid and a manservant.
Thomas Farriner closed for business at the usual time on Saturday evening, around eight or nine at night. His oven was probably of the beehive type, a brick structure which was brought up to temperature by laying bundles of faggots directly on its floor and kindling them with a light from the bakehouse hearth. The faggots were raked out when the baker judged the oven to be hot enough; loaves were baked when it was at its hottest, and then as it cooled down their place was taken by pies and pasties.
So the oven should have been virtually cold by now. Thomas checked it and filled it with faggots ready for the morning. He prepared several pots of baked meat for Sunday dinner, raked up the coals in the hearth and went to bed. A couple of flitches of bacon were left beside the oven.
Hanna checked on the bakehouse around midnight, when she also took a last look round the house to make sure all was well. Then she too went to bed.
About an hour later the Farriners’ manservant woke up. Smoke filled the ground floor of the bakery, and he could hardly breathe with the fumes. But he managed to climb the stairs and rouse Thomas, Hanna and the maid. Only now there was no way down, and the four found themselves trapped on the upper floor.
Someone, either Thomas or his manservant, hit on the idea of clambering out of one of the upstairs windows, crawling along the guttering and climbing back in through their neighbour’s window. They were shouting as loud as they could to raise the alarm:
And now the doleful, dreadful, hideous Note
Of FIRE, is screem’d out with a deep-strain’d throat;
Horror, and fear, and sad distracted Cryes,
Chide Sloth away, and bids the Sluggard rise;
Most direful Exclamations are let fly
From every Tongue, Tears stand in every Eye.
At some point Hanna was badly burned. But she managed to scramble to safety along the eaves with her father. They were followed by the manservant. Only the maid was left in the house, too frightened of heights, or too confused by the noise and the smoke to escape. As the easterly gales whipped across the rooftops, she died there – the first victim of the Great Fire of London. No one even knows her name.
Like most London streets, the houses in Pudding Lane were timber-framed and linked so that two haphazard terraces faced each other, almost touching eaves in the centre of the lane where their upper storeys had been jettied out. People were hardly alert: the early hours of Sunday morning were a time when, as one contemporary put it, ‘Slothfulness and the Heat of the Bed have riveted a Man to his Pillow, and made him almost incapable of waking, much less of acting and helping his Neighbours.’ But community action was the normal and expected response to an accident of this sort, and the neighbours did stir themselves, roused by the Farriners’ cries – and, in one case at least, by their abrupt arrival through a bedroom window. They threw on clothes and ran out into the street to see what was happening. Within minutes, there must have been dozens of anxious and bleary-eyed people milling around in the driving wind, shouting to make themselves heard over the crackling flames and using whatever came to hand to extinguish the blaze: buckets of water; shovelfuls of earth and dung; milk, beer and urine.
For nearly an hour, it looked as if the blaze could easily be confined to the bakery, with minor damage to the homes on either side. As a precaution, neighbours began to bundle up their valuables and drag them out into the street; the summer had been extraordinarily hot and there had been little rain, so that the timber and plaster were very dry, and the wind was obviously fanning the flames. The parish constables arrived, and decided that the situation warranted the presence of the Lord Mayor. As chief magistrate of the City it was Sir Thomas Bludworth’s job to authorise any radical measures involving citizens’ property; and the constables, uneasy at the speed with which the flames were consuming Farriner’s bakery, were looking for permission to override the wishes of neighbours and pull down buildings in the street, so as to prevent the spread of the fire.
But Bludworth, whose success in City politics was due to his Royalist sympathies rather than any innate ability, was a weak man. Although he was coming to the end of his year in office, he didn’t have the experience, the leadership skills or the natural authority to take command of the situation. True, he was prompt to arrive on the scene; but what he saw there – the raging fire, the chaos and confusion and heat and noise that always accompany such accidents – terrified him. As the fire moved from the bakery to the adjoining houses, creeping along the lane towards the warehouses of Thames Street, more level-headed men among the firefighters wanted to form firebreaks by demolishing several untouched houses. But Bludworth simply said that he dared not do it without the consent of the owners. Most of the shops and homes were rented, so those owners were God knew where. Not in Pudding Lane, for sure.
Pressed to reconsider, Sir Thomas took refuge in bluster. The fire wasn’t all that serious, he said. ‘A woman could piss it out.’ And with that he went home to bed and a place in the history books.
Bludworth wasn’t alone. In Seething Lane, seven streets away, Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys were woken abruptly at 3 a.m. by their favourite maid, Jane Birch. The servants had stayed up late to prepare for the dinner which the couple were giving that day; as Jane was going to bed she happened to look out of her window and catch sight of an unmistakable glow in the west. As soon as she told him that there was a fire, Samuel leaped out of bed, threw on his dressing-gown and followed Jane to her chamber. The blaze seemed close – just beyond the next street, in fact. But sights like that were not uncommon, and Samuel decided there was nothing to worry about. Like Sir Thomas Bludworth, he shrugged and went back to bed.
When he got up four hours later, the fire seemed further away. He also thought, presumably because the daylight took away from the drama, that it was ‘not so much as it was’. Jane soon disabused him; she had heard that ‘above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it was now burning down all Fishstreet by London Bridge’.
Feeling anxious, Samuel left the Navy Office in Seething Lane and walked the hundred yards or so to the Tower of London. The Lieutenant of the Tower, Alderman Sir John Robinson, was an old acquaintance (although not a friend – Pepys thought him a fool, a glutton and ‘a talking bragging Bufflehead’); and accompanied by Robinson’s little son, he climbed to the battlements and surveyed the scene.
What he saw appalled him. Thanks to Bludworth, an ordinary house-fire had turned into a street-fire; and that street-fire now threatened to engulf the entire south-eastern corner of the City. During the night the easterly gale carried sparks and burning embers from the bakery across into Fish Street, where they ignited hay in the yard of the Star Inn. The trail of destruction had crept down Fish Street Hill, destroying St Margaret’s and the neighbouring church of St Magnus the Martyr, which had presided over the northern end of London Bridge since before the Norman Conquest. Worse, it had reached Thames Street, where it found the wharves and met ‘nothing but old paper buildings and the most combustible matter of Tarr, Pitch, Hemp, Rosen, and Flax which was all layd up thereabouts’. Now the houses which lined the bridge itself were in flames.