Dan Snow's History Hit - Great Fire of London

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Why do we call the Great Fire of London in 1666 “great”? Was it because of the significant challenge it posed to authorities and residents as they sought to bring it under control? Was it because of the extent of its devastation? Or was it because it occurred during an eventful couple of years when plague and war also threatened lives?In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to historian Rebecca Rideal, author of 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire, whose research has drawn on little-known sources to set the Great Fire of London in the broader context of the political, social and economic events of the time. This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

In September 1666, the most devastating fire Britain has ever experienced began in the City of London. Today we know this event as the Great Fire of London, a name it earned soon after the blaze had torn through the city for four days. Perhaps like me, you'd like to know why. So why do we call it great? Was it great because of the significant challenge it posed to authorities and Londoners as they sought to bring it under control? Was it great because of the extent of its devastation? No less than 87 churches and 13,000 homes were destroyed by the fire, and that's before we've assessed its emotional and social impact. Or how about, was it called great because the fire occurred during a momentous

eventful couple of years where disaster and war also threatened the third rider of the apocalypse if you will? To address these questions and to think about the causes and consequences and memory of the fire, I am delighted to welcome historian, podcaster, TV producer and founder of the wonderful HistFest, Rebecca Radiel. Rebecca's book, 1666, Plague, War and Hellfire, draws on archival research and little-known sources to set the place in the broader context of political, social and economic events of the time. She also examines the stories of individuals caught up in the fire. And she explores all those ways that historians disagree about this event. She's the perfect person to turn to to find out all

about the so-called Great Fire of London. Rebecca, welcome to Not Just the Tudors. It's actually amazing to me that I've managed to go this long without inviting you on, for which I apologise, because you are just an amazing scholar working in this period and also an amazing advocate of other people's work through HistFest and all the work that you do. So welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on here. I really like your show. I thought it might be useful to start by setting the scene prior to the Great Fire of London. So perhaps you could give us a sense of what life was like in the city in the 1660s.

Who was living there? What sort of activities and events might take place over the course of a day? What size the city was? That sort of thing. Okay, so England in the 1660s is a place that's had a regime change. So in 1660, we have Charles II coming back to the throne. We have a monarchy again after 10 or so years of Cromwell et al. London itself by the 1660s has grown into something that I like to refer to as a metropolis, just because if we use the word city, it can get a bit confusing. We have three parts.

list, just because if we use the word city, it can get a bit confusing. We have three parts. We've got the central old kind of walled Roman city, which is referred to as the City of London. We have the suburban sprawl around this and also Southwark as well. And then leading along the strand, we have nicer houses where wealthy people are starting to build and create residence for themselves. And then we have the third component, which is the city of Westminster. So all of these places are joined together to create the metropolis of London. In terms of the population at this time, we have a good guide from the statistician, John Grant, who estimated that there were around 460,000 people living in London at this point in time.

And I think modern estimates roughly concur with this. It would have been between 400,000 and 500,000 during the 1660s. The makeup of the population was interesting. It tended to skew slightly younger than the rest of the country, just because it's the capital city. It's where people go for work, for training, to learn their craft and then perhaps move on. So we have lots of people that are just out of university or just out of school, taking on apprenticeships or training to become lawyers, that kind of thing, women going into the domestic sphere. So we have trades as well, like booksellers,

haberdashers, all scattered around. There are main kind of commerce hubs, Westminster Hall. But yeah, a real mixture of people, migrants from around the country, but also migrants from countries around Europe and further afield too. In terms of entertainment, there would be theatre. We still have bear baiting going on at this point in time, so that was a draw. And people lived their lives Monday to Saturday. Sundays were off and reserved for church. That's a very evocative picture. And one thing I was struck by is how quickly the population must have grown, because our estimate in 1600, it was about 200,000. So there must be a sense that the metropolis is heaving with people. Yeah, and people come and go. So it's a city that's always being replenished,

because as I say, you have this wave of young people, much like we do today, much like we have in any capital city. Young people go to the city, and then they move away once they've either married or decided that they're going to set up their trade somewhere else or go back to their hometown. So it's a similar kind of thing that we have going on here, but the numbers keep creeping up and up. And just in terms of comparison, so if we say that there were roughly around 450,000 people living in London at this time, I think the next largest cities would be places like Norwich, which we think had around 20,000 to 30,000 people. So the difference is really stark. That's a huge difference. And it's that size of population, or at least that density of dwelling,

which is going to be one reason why the fire is so great. So I thought perhaps we could think about the chronology of events from Sunday, the 2nd of September, 1666, to the point at which it was contained. Before we get to the contentious question of how it started, let's just think about precisely what happened. Okay, and it's important that it started on a Sunday, but I'll come back to that. So around one o'clock, maybe two o'clock in the morning on Sunday the 2nd of September 1666, a baker, Thomas Farriner, his family had all gone to sleep and a small fire broke out within their bakehouse. It's a story that we all know. We don't know who enabled this fire to happen. We don't know who didn't check because someone should have checked

to make sure that everything was safe before the family went to bed. But in any case, someone within the household created the circumstances for a fire. It consumed the Fariner household quite quickly. Sadly, we have the first death very early on. The maid within the Fariner household was unable to escape because it happened so early. People had to be woken up to be alerted to the fact that there was a fire going on on Pudding Lane, which is where the bakehouse was. The Lord Mayor was called for pretty quickly and people were demanding that houses be pulled down around the Fariner household. He was nervous to do this because London at this time was a city that was made up of landlords and tenants. Most people that were living and occupying houses were

tenants, so they would not have the authority to agree to a house being pulled down. So this didn't happen. And this is what I think. These are the crucial hours, these first few hours. If houses around the Fariner household had been pulled down, I think the fire could have been contained. When that decision was not made, it just went beyond anything that was containable. So it spread down Pudding Lane, it spread all the way down towards the River Thames. At around three o'clock, Samuel Pepys reports in his diary that he was woken by a maid who said that there was a fire that had broken out in the city. And he looked out of the window and thought, oh, it's not so bad. I'll just go back to sleep. So he went back to bed. He's not actually that far from Pudding Lane. But anyway, he goes back

to bed, spreads all the way down to Thames Street. Thames Street is almost made for burning. This is where all the shipments that come in along the Thames are stored and held before they're transferred further around the city. And these shipments are things that are really flammable. So oily fish, tar, pitch. And I think as soon as it got to Thames Street, that was it then. It just spread. It lit up the whole street. People had to evacuate their homes. We have evidence of particular families who I try to focus in on in my book a little bit, individuals that aren't the big hitters. house on Thames Street with her new husband. And then it kept spreading. Pepys finally woke up and he saw that actually, oh, things quite hot outside. So he went to the Tower of London as fast as he could, met with the Tower of London's lieutenants, I think it's nephew, possibly son, and they went in a boat and kind of had a look at the spread of the fire. He realised that this was quite a big deal. So he then travelled across the city towards Whitehall, where Charles II

was in residence, and passed on the news to Charles II. Charles then ordered Pepys to go back into the city to tell the Lord Mayor to pull houses down. Pepys fought against crowds that were now starting to evacuate from the places that were affected by the fire, found the Lord Mayor absolutely desperate and beside himself, sleep deprived. He said, yes, we have been pulling houses down, but actually I'm so tired, I need to go. And he was never seen again. He was seen again, but he wasn't seen during the fire. He relinquished his responsibility and it kept spreading. It was an uncontainable fire. There was a wind that was pushing it. I was about to say, thank goodness, westward, but I'm sure the people that had their homes to the west of the city wouldn't agree with me. But the main fear was that it had broken out

close-ish to the Tower of London. And the Tower of London contained all of the artillery that was needed for war at that time. And it was consuming livery halls, it consumed church after church, and it just kept spreading. And you've talked about the ways in which they might have tackled the blaze and indeed did go on to. We don't have a proper fire brigade in London in the 1660s. What else did they do? Were their methods at all effective? Fire is fire. We know how to combat fire and we know if it's too big the things that we have will not combat the fire so water stopping its spread removing any further fuel so what they had were fire engines now these are not fire engines like we have today they're actually a design that was brought over from Germany I think in the 1620s might have been the 1630s but it was

basically a cart with a big tank and a pump so water could be squirted out at the affected area. So they had these fire engines. They had a handful of them at key places around London. They found that they were too cumbersome actually to navigate the narrow passages and lanes of the city to get to the affected parts. They also had fire hooks, which were basically just hooks that were used for pulling down buildings. Water squirts as well. They had buckets that they could fill with water and throw at the fire and pipes that ran like veins underneath the city streets that they could sever and retrieve water from them as well. Really basic methods, but we still use those basic methods today. So I don't think we should necessarily turn our nose up at them, but that's what they had. It wasn't enough. And I was really struck by what you just said about the Lord Mayor, Thomas Bloodworth, and

his response, you know, saying he's tired and then disappearing. It seems like he's kind of paralysed. And I wonder how people responded to the fire. Do we see people getting involved? Do we see people trying to take advantage of the situation or more people like the mayor just not knowing what to do? We see commonalities and then we see interesting differences as well. I'm going to paraphrase now, but one commentator said that the elites, those that were wealthier, looked to their own and to evacuate as fast as they could. The middle classes, that's not a term that we should use really in the 17th century,

but the middling sort were in shock and awe and not really sure what to do. But those at the bottom of the social pecking order just use it as an opportunity to pilfer and steal from others, which is a really snobby thing to say and deeply unfair. steal from others, which is a really snobby thing to say and deeply unfair. But actually, there was a lot of truth in the idea that people were making money out of the fire and taking advantage of the situation. So I'll deal with them first. There were reports of people thieving and going into people's houses and taking their stuff. People that had a cart or they owned a boat and would usually transport people in and out of the city, they put their rates up. And there was one complaint that they'd gone up to £30 in contemporary money.

So there was that going on. I do think there's truth in this notion of people being awed by the fire because it's so hard for us to imagine what this must have been like. I think unless you've experienced a fire, and even if you have, you will not have an awareness of this. We have images from the time. We have paintings that were created shortly afterwards that give a kind of flavor.

But the notion that everything is orange and hot, and then if you look above, it's completely black, but it's supposed to be daytime. It's something that we can't really get our heads around. And I think what's really interesting when you look at the different sources, you find references that are really similar. So at one point, the fire didn't cross London Bridge because there'd been an earlier fire in the early part of the century that had destroyed buildings that may have helped it along during the Great Fire of London. But it meant that there was a kind of loop across from one side

of London Bridge to the other. And you find in Samuel Pepys's diary that he refers to this as a bow from God. And a similar analogy is given by Thomas Vincent, who's a Puritan preacher at the time, he describes it in the same way. So they were awed by this and stunned, but then they were also looking to preserve their own goods. And you find stories of people moving their goods from their home and then moving them half a mile down the road to friends or relatives that they have. And then they're having to move them again and again, just to try and save the things that they have. So there's that too. There's also despair. There's descriptions of the sound of the fire as well. Just these deep clattering bangs and cracks and one of the sources says women and children shrieking but I'm sure men were as well so a real mix of attitudes

but I think most people would have been stunned by the scale of the fire and one person who comes out of this quite well is the king tell me about his actions in dealing with the fire and whether you think his heroics were successful PR. They were definitely successful PR and they were definitely PR. But you'll know as well. So there's always been a difficult relationship between the monarch and London because the city of London has different rules. It has a different hierarchy.

So the mayor and the alderman is so important. And if something happens in the city, the jurisdiction automatically falls to the mayor and the alderman and the established hierarchies. We also know that in terms of the monarchy and the city of London, the civil war is a real sticking point. So it's a really tricky relationship. So first of all, obviously, authority goes to the mayor who disappears. Then Charles, when he's informed, he puts the Earl of Craven in charge of the efforts to try and contain or combat the fire. And he does this because the most important and capable leaders at this time are actually at sea, because England is at war with the Dutch at this point in time. So the person that he ordinarily would have turned to would be George

Monk. And he writes to him to recall him from the Navy, but it's impossible for him to come back in time. So Charles then puts his brother, James the Duke of York, future James II, in charge of the efforts as well. And James is a difficult and interesting man. He has a whole catalogue of flaws. But one thing that he's good at is having the really dogged determination that people can follow quite easily. And he does do quite well in shoring up troops and making sure that there are bases around the city that are there to tackle certain parts of the fire. And Charles then goes out himself as well. And he makes a big show of helping and getting down and really helping in the physical effort to combat the fire too. What he does do as well, after the fire has finished,

he makes sure that he gets a brilliant write-up in the London Gazette about his efforts, which I just think is great. Because actually, we do know that there were people outside of London that were thinking actually, this could topple the Stuarts, or at least they said it in the heat, pardon the pun, of the moment that this fire could topple the Stuarts more than anything that had done before. And it absolutely had the possibility to, but we also know that there's nothing like a disaster to unite people as well. So I think there was a lot of things going on. And I think in the end, for Charles II, who'd had a really tricky year in 1665 because of the Great Plague, it was useful.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So let's turn to the thing that schoolchildren debate, first of all, which is what was the cause of the fire? How did people at the time explain it? And what is your view?

Everyone knew where it started. They knew it had started at Pudding Lane. But equally, the English were at war with the Dutch. They have a predisposed hatred of anything that could possibly be French, possibly be to do with Catholicism. So there's that kind of in the back of people's minds. They're at war with the Dutch, but I must also say they're also at war with France, who are a silent partner of the Dutch. So they know where it starts. They know it's in Thomas Farriner's bakehouse. But people are also happy to believe that it's arson. And I think lots of people think, oh, that's just daft to think that it was an arson attack.

But actually, if you look at the contemporaneous reports of the fire. So what we have is this central place where it starts. But then as it starts to spread, people report seeing these huge flakes that are floating around in the sky and landing in unexpected places. Now, if there's a fire going on half a mile away from you, and then suddenly the house over the road is set alight, that's going to seem suspicious, I think. I think it can be explained by the blow and the breeze of the debris. So people were also looking towards foreign born people living in London that may have started the fire through arson. So it was quite quickly that rumours started to spread that actually it was down to the French or it was down to the Dutch. And this made French, Dutch and actually anyone

with a foreign sounding accent living in London, really unsafe. And this is where we have some of the more disturbing stories. I suppose we can understand that people don't like to put something this major down to chance either. People want there to be a rational explanation. Somebody has done this. This is our enemies. Or perhaps there would have been on the other side, those who thought it was a divine judgment. One thing your book does brilliantly is put it in context, that we've got this terrible plague epidemic. We've got this Anglo-Dutch war going on. Is that something that people were thinking in terms of understanding why this has happened?

Yes, absolutely. In the end, there was a scapegoat. There was a man that was blamed for the Great Fire, an unfortunate man named Robert Hubert, who seemed to fit the bill. He was perfect. He was French, firstly. The only problem was he was a Protestant and he wasn't in London at the time. But for some strange reason, and we don't know, and I think I would love to have more source material about him and to present it to a psychologist perhaps, but he decided to confess that he had committed arson at Thomas Farriner's bakehouse. He even led investigators to the site of the arson as well. And he was tried and found guilty. I always wonder if he was a vulnerable person in some way.

I really do think he was. And actually, I think it was the Earl of Clarendon who said later on that, I think he called him a wretched soul that wanted to depart this life. There's a lot of sadness there. When we talk about the victims of the Great Fire of London, he is absolutely one of the victims of the Great Fire of London. But despite this, people also saw it and knew that it was, or believed it to be an act of God. And for something to be an act of God does not mean that it's benign in any way. This is a God that is giving judgment to his people and giving judgment to the people of London in particular. And once you have that in your head, and this is a deeply religious society, you then have to reflect and think, okay, this is a judgment on me. I'm a Londoner. What is it that we as a collective have done wrong? Why am

I being judged in this way? And they looked to myriad answers. The Quakers believe it's because they're being persecuted. This is a retribution against their persecution. People believe it's because they'd killed a king over a decade before. Others thought that it might have been the licentiousness of the court. Others looked into their own lives and wondered what it was that they had been doing like everybody else. And you see this in sources across the board from the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn to letters to petitions that are being sent. It's everywhere, this sense of God's judgment. So I often wonder, obviously, everybody wants to blame someone

when something's gone wrong in their life, and people have lost a lot. They're also sleep deprived during the Great Fire, which is something that I don't think we should downplay, because it does strange things to the human psyche. But if it's not an act of arson, then it's something that they've done themselves. So there's that interplay, I think, as well. And again, seeing it as a form of divine judgment brings an element of control, because if there's something they did wrong, and this happened, then they can do something right, and it won't happen again. Whereas if it's just accidental, it's much more terrifying in some ways. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And London was used to fires. It's not unusual for a fire to break out. So the fire, it broke out in Thomas Farrer and his bakehouse. It could have been a small fire.

London had fires all the time, so regularly. I think where we get this sense of it being divine judgment was the perfect storm of circumstances whereby London was incredibly dry. It had been a really hot summer. So it's basically a tinderbox. And then this strong easterly wind is blowing what could have been a contained small fire across the whole of the city. So lots going on. One of the myths about the fire is that it caught and spread

because London houses had thatched roofs. Was this really the case? It was definitely a city that was timber-based, so that would have helped with the burning. What we do know, though, is that it went up to 1,700 degrees. And we know that because the Museum of London have done their science bit on some things that they found in the city from that time. And that's relevant, particularly around the question of how many people died. around the question of how many people died. Because there's this thing about the fire of London in that it affected vast number of properties, as you've said, vast numbers of churches and so on. But the tally officially of how many people died is very, very small.

And some historians have suggested that that's because the fire was so hot that other people who might have died would have been incinerated so completely that no remains would be there to be found. What do you make of this? I think it's a really interesting point. And as you say, fire is something that can kill but then also destroy the evidence. It can do that. And the temperatures were incredibly high. We've got different things going on here. So Edward Chamberlain wrote a tract in 1671, I think it was, where he looked at the Great Fire and he said that actually it had killed, I think, between six and eight people, he said. Reports that were going out were that the casualties had been very small, 12 at the most. We do have individual accounts, for example, from a schoolboy named William Taswell who wrote an

account of the fire when he was an adult and he said he'd seen the body of an old lady a lady I should say others had seen bodies elsewhere so we've got these visual records and accounts of seeing bodies we have the parish records one of my bugbears about the great fire is that people say oh it destroyed all the parish burial records. So we don't know. It did not destroy the parish burial records. Some are missing, but there's so many that are there that we can look at and access. And we see interesting patterns after the Great Fire of London. So when I went down a really geeky, deep dive into maybe there were more people that died than we think. I was comparing statistics, the data from

parish burial records in August, September and October of 1666. And I didn't compare them with 1665 because that's great plague year. So I just thought it would be erroneous. I did it with 1664 and I think I did it with 1667 as well. And in certain parishes, we see a jump in the number of people that are buried. And this is explained largely because parish churches were destroyed. So you would have had people that would ordinarily go to different parish churches being buried in other ones. But what's interesting is when you go into the proportions and the age range of people. So in the parish of St. Giles, what we see is that there are two thirds more people whose deaths are marked as being down to being aged in September of 1665, following the Great Fire,

which is an interesting thing. We also see gaps when it comes to records of infants being inputted into the parish data. So there are really interesting questions. And I think the bottom line is, we don't know how many people died. We don't know. I often look to other fires. So the Great Fire of Chicago that happened, even though it was in the 19th century, in terms of the city setup, it was a wooden city, started a similar time of year, we have a better sense of deaths, then there were a few hundred population size was roughly the same as well. So I don't know, but I do think it was higher than eight, 10, 12 in the tens, maybe hundreds, but it's a guess. How interesting. And that we would see that by omission of those infants or the greater number of elderly, because these are the groups most likely to be more difficult to move, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. And we do have reports of some sick and elderly being

removed from their homes. So there are sick people in the city, vulnerable people. Once the fire was brought under control, what do historians agree about the devastation to the city and what is still open to debate? So in terms of numbers, we have around 80 churches that are destroyed. We have the Guildhall, really important building in London, which is mainly destroyed. It's there, but by the grace of God, but Baynard's Castle is completely destroyed, which is a massive London landmark. Many livery halls are destroyed as well. We have big figures that are put about, like the city sustained 10 million pounds worth of damage, but it's the individual accounts that

really get me. So there are letters from people that say things like, oh, I've lost my income of 86 pounds a year on a property that I rented out to a tenant and things like that. I find them the most troubling. Of course, Charles II had it declared that no man's loss was as great as his, but I don't think so. So there was a lot of loss and there were a lot of industries that were very affected. Booksellers were deeply affected. They stored lots of their goods within St. Paul's Cathedral. Why wouldn't you?

It's a building made of stone and it has a massive natural fire break all around it, but that still was consumed by the fire. So there was a lot. People were desperate though, because they lost their homes. They had to live and camp out in more fields and other public open spaces around the city for long periods of time. And I find them to be the saddest examples of the loss. Yes, I mean, the fire is absolutely devastating in that regard. As you say, the homelessness, the refugee camps, these are all things that we're familiar with in modern times. And this is what's happening in London in the 1660s and attempts to create relief funds. And your book is very, very good

at looking at these kind of micro histories about individuals who were caught in the fire. One of those that we ought to talk about is Thomas Farriner, the baker in whose shop the fire had begun. What became of him? He was fine. He lived out the rest of his days and the business passed to his son afterwards. So he faced no consequences for the fire at all, which is a stark difference to Robert Hubert and the many that were blamed for it as a kind of proxy of people's rage. And it's probably because he wanted to make sure that he was fine that he put his name to Hubert's guilt. Yeah, he was one of those that signed Robert Hubert's fate afterwards. You also draw on the Pepys, as you've mentioned, Samuel Pepys,

the diarist, and John Evelyn, the writer, both of whom are very important sources for looking at the fire. Do they give a sense of how the fire affected people's emotional and mental health? I think there's a direct way. Not so much Evelyn. He talks about it. He talks about how everybody is stunned and in awe of what's happening, stunned into staying still and not really doing much. You get that from Evelyn. What you don't get from Evelyn, actually, and this is my bugbear with him,

is any sense that he really helped during the fire. Too busy writing it all down. I know. That's a side note. You do get this kind of sense of the catastrophe and the scale and the visuals, I suppose, from him. You get the visuals from Pepys as well. But you also get from Pepys his despair because Evelyn's outside of the city. He's watching from afar, from across the Thames.

Pepys is in the city. He's in Seething Lane, which actually isn't far from Pudding Lane at all. But luckily for Pepys, it's on the right-hand side. It's on the easterly side, so the wind isn't blowing in that direction. But he barely sleeps. He, I think, in his diary, you can tell he's sleep-deprived. You can tell he's panicked and worried. He moves his goods outside of the main affected areas. He talks about people scrambling to try and get boats to put their goods on to take them out of the city. So you get all of that from him. But then also what you get is a more direct impression of the effect of the fire on him

psychologically. And you get this in 1667, where he writes about having nightmares about the fire. He writes about his fear that the fire would happen again. And then later on in 1666, around November time, there's fear that there's going to be another big fire because if a smaller fire breaks out in the city, it doesn't really come to much. So you do get all of that from his diary. You get it from letters as well. There's one individual named Sir Nathaniel Hobart,

and he writes, the image of this terrible judgment has made such an impression in the souls of every one of us that it will not be effaced while we live. We also have the reports of a man called Sir William Batten, who was part of the Navy, and people complain how he used to be a serious and honest man, but now rants and calls people's wives ill names. There's another one that I find most disturbing, which is about the man that publishes the London Gazette, Thomas Newcombe. There are complaints made against him because he's never doing his job. He's always found wandering around a churchyard, kind of talking to himself. And I think these little snapshots give us an insight, I think, without reading too much into them, they're definitely examples of people not behaving

quote unquote normally and in their regular way. I think it had a deep psychological effect, more than we could ever know from the source material. Historians in recent times have also begun to consider the effect of the fire on marginalised groups. So the poor and people of colour and women and children, I suppose, as well. Can you tell us anything about the immediate and the longer term effects of the fire on these groups? Yeah, it's a big question. And I think as we go further into the 18th century, there might be others that are better placed to speak on these things. What I will say, though, is that London became a really dangerous place. If you look at a map, you always think, oh, actually, that's a

leveled place. It wasn't leveled. It was more like you could imagine the Blitz, but without the modern buildings. But because of this, there are reports of people wandering through the city who've seen the body of a woman who'd been murdered for example and that gives you a kind of horrible small hint as to what it must have been like immediately after the fire during the fire it was a horrible place to be foreign born and living in london we have lots of accounts of attacks we have accounts of attacks that are really quite disturbing. We have regular, quote unquote, again, regular fighting or attacks. So the schoolboy, William Taswell, described seeing a Frenchman being felled with a bar. And he describes in detail seeing the blood

pour down the man's legs. I think people became obsessed with the idea that there was somebody that was throwing fireballs into homes. And because of this, and remember, people are sleep deprived. They're predisposed to hate anyone that might seem like they're Catholic or maybe French. We get accounts of women, a really strange one, a woman that people thought was hiding fireballs near her chest. When in actual fact, I think it was chickens or hens, and she had her breasts cut off. This is in a report. So it might be a case of stories changing and evolving over time. We only have these snapshots. Similarly, though, there was another

story of a man that people thought had a fireball, so he was then attacked and dismembered. And I wonder whether those stories are related and they've got changed over time. We have accounts of groups of women who were holding breadstaffs and attacking foreigners in the city as well. In the end, anyone that was foreign born had limited options, really. The Spanish ambassador opened up his home for people to go in to seek refuge and sanctuary. But many foreign-born people were arrested and put into prison. So that we have all of these really disturbing accounts. We have this crowd of people on Moorfields, thousands strong, that get into a hysteria that on the Wednesday night of the fire, there's going to be some invasion from the French and the Dutch. And I do think it's remarkable, actually, that we don't see even more accounts of violence,

because the sad thing about human nature, as we study French history as well, we know about the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, is that people can do awful things. And it's surprising that there isn the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. In the aftermath, did it also widen the gap between the rich and the poor? There are lots of things that happen that remain the same in the city in terms of the rebuild. But in order to be able to afford to rebuild the place that you were living, you need to have funds already. So we have issues there where people leave the city and just don't come back. We have the kind of baked in issues that the rich and wealthy houses on the

Strand weren't really affected. So that becomes even more wealthy, it becomes a more desirable place to live. We have the suburbs in the east that start to grow a bit more. So it does change the makeup of the city and the way it's put together and also the areas that are popular and the areas that aren't. There's lots of subtle consequences of the fire. One of the myths around the fire is that it ended the plague. How do we explain this? And would you completely refute it? Oh, gosh, it's so hard, isn't it? And also, the plague didn't end. We have Marseilles in 1720, and plague has never left the world. We've had huge epidemics right up until the early 20th century and actually plague is still something that exists today but it can be

cured and this is what makes me mad when you see outbreaks in places like Madagascar because antibiotics can save a person from plague now. But in terms of its presence in England, yeah it's really interesting and I wish that we knew. I don't think the Great Fire was the key to the Great Plague disappearing because the Great Plague finished really around January 1666, that particular epidemic. There's people that die from plague every year during the 17th century, but we see it fade. There've been lots of theories that have been put forward, trade routes changing, pick your theory. I'm not sure.

And I wouldn't like to pin my name to any theory, really, because I think maybe there'll be new evidence that comes out. And I think it'll be scientists that do it, perhaps not historians with this one. We have alluded to the fact that the city is rebuilt, of course. And it feels like one of the areas in which the impact of the fire could have been greater in some ways because people had ambitious schemes people hoped to do things that weren't accomplished can you give us an idea of some of those schemes and why they didn't really come about basically you have a city that's full of people that are polymaths they love to think and think about utopias this has been going on for 150 years,

at least thinking about what the ideal city could be like. So you've got men like Christopher Wren, Robert Hook, John Evelyn. And I can just imagine, firstly, the shock and the horror and seeing all the awful things that have happened. But then they must have thought, oh, this is my chance. I can realize this utopia. So there are three main plans that are put forward. First one's by Christopher Wren. He gets in there really early and the Royal Society are really annoyed with him for doing that and not clearing it through them first. The next one's John Evelyn. His plan's quite similar in terms of ideas to Christopher Wren's. And then the third main plan, there are many others, comes from Robert Hooke.

And like with most things with Robert Hooke, it no longer exists. I don't know why, but it doesn't, we don't have his plan. So they're beautiful cities. These are really lovely designs, but they're never going to work because London is a city of landlords and tenants. There's no one person that owns the city. Lots of people own very small parts of it. And often those parts overlap and there are weird leases. So it basically is largely redesigned along the same lines. There are just a few rules that are put in place so that trades that deal with fire or combustible goods are supposed to be moved out of the city. Streets are widened. There's supposed to be a wider gap between the Thames and the houses

nearby. And crucially, obviously, houses are supposed to be made out of brick or stone. But the rule is that they should be clad, actually. They could be clad in them, but still be wooden inside. So yes, those dreams never come true. But interestingly, after the Blitz, the pamphlet that was put out looking at a redesign for the city in the opening page, and this is research by Professor Christopher Hibbert, in the opening page, they have the specter of Christopher Wren looking over the pamphlet. So this kind of utopian Wren city is still alive in people's imaginations, I think. alive in people's imaginations, I think. Finally, then, we've talked about Charles II and his interventions and his appearance in the London Gazette. Did a Stuart Phoenix rise from the ashes of the Great Fire? No, it didn't. I think it just got worse. It was great PR for Charles, but what he didn't realise was that his brother was just going further and further down a route that was not going to be helpful for England, which was basically that having said all of this about anti-Catholic

feeling within England, James in 1669 made a secret conversion to Catholicism. And it wasn't long before it became not so secret and caused huge issues, which arguably led to what we refer to again, quote unquote, as the Glorious Revolution. Yes, not a phoenix. Thank you very much for this wonderful guide to the Great Fire of London. We've dealt with some of the myths, we've thought about some of the theories and some of those things that are disputed. also, quite importantly, I think, focused on some of the characters who are less well-known, as well as those that are very familiar names. So thank you so much for this guide. And obviously, if people want to find out more, they can pick up a copy of your book, 1666,

which explores the plague, and it explores war, and it explores the fire. So it's a three for one. All the bad stuff. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks to my producer, Rob Weinberg, and my researcher, Esther Arnott. And thanks to you for listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. We're always eager to hear your suggestions for podcast subjects. So drop me a line at notjustthetudors at historyhit.com or on Twitter at notjusttudors. Also, if you're in need of an extra hit between podcasts, do sign up to our newsletter, Tudor Tuesday.

Details of how to do that are in the notes below this podcast. And please rate, rank, bestow multiple stars and comment on this podcast wherever you listen, including on Spotify. It really helps more people find not just the Tudors. you