Great Fire of London

This article is about the 1666 re of London. For other

Great Fires, see List of historic res. For other notable
res in London, see Early res of London and Second
Great Fire of London. For the novel by Peter Ackroyd,
see The Great Fire of London (novel).
The Great Fire of London was a major conagration

City of London. The use of the major reghting technique of the time, the creation of rebreaks by means of
demolition, was critically delayed owing to the indecisiveness of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. By the time large-scale demolitions were ordered
on Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery
re into a restorm which defeated such measures. The
re pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City.
Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting res. The fears of the homeless focused on the French and Dutch, England's enemies
in the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War; these substantial immigrant groups became victims of lynchings and
street violence. On Tuesday, the re spread over most
of the City, destroying St. Pauls Cathedral and leaping
the River Fleet to threaten Charles IIs court at Whitehall,
while coordinated reghting eorts were simultaneously
mobilising. The battle to quench the re is considered to
have been won by two factors: the strong east winds died
down, and the Tower of London garrison used gunpowder
to create eective rebreaks to halt further spread eastward.

Detail of the Great Fire of London by an unknown painter, depicting the re as it would have appeared on the evening of Tuesday, 4 September 1666 from a boat in the vicinity of Tower
Wharf. The Tower of London is on the right and London Bridge
on the left, with St. Pauls Cathedral in the distance, surrounded
by the tallest ames.

The social and economic problems created by the disaster

were overwhelming. Evacuation from London and resettlement elsewhere were strongly encouraged by Charles
II, who feared a London rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees. Despite numerous radical proposals,
that swept through the central parts of the English city London was reconstructed on essentially the same street
of London, from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, plan used before the re.[5]
5 September 1666.[1] The re gutted the medieval City
of London inside the old Roman city wall. It threatened,
but did not reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster,
1 London in the 1660s
Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the sub[2]
urban slums. It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish
churches, St. Pauls Cathedral and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated to have
destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the Citys 80,000
inhabitants.[3] The death toll is unknown but traditionally
thought to have been small, as only six veried deaths
were recorded. This reasoning has recently been challenged on the grounds that the deaths of poor and middleclass people were not recorded, while the heat of the re
may have cremated many victims leaving no recognisable remains. A melted piece of pottery on display at the
Museum of London found by archaeologists in Pudding
Lane, where the re started, shows that the temperature
reached 1700 C.[4]
Central London in 1666, with the burnt area shown in pink.
The Great Fire started at the bakery of Thomas Farriner
(or Farynor) on Pudding Lane, shortly after midnight on By the 1660s, London was by far the largest city in
Sunday, 2 September, and spread rapidly west across the Britain, estimated at half a million inhabitants. Compar1

1 LONDON IN THE 1660S

ing London to the Baroque magnicence of Paris, John

Evelyn called it a wooden, northern, and inarticial congestion of Houses, and expressed alarm about the re
hazard posed by the wood and about the congestion.[6] By
inarticial, Evelyn meant unplanned and makeshift, the
result of organic growth and unregulated urban sprawl.
A Roman settlement for four centuries, London had become progressively more overcrowded inside its defensive city wall. It had also pushed outwards beyond the
wall into squalid extramural slums such as Shoreditch,
Holborn, and Southwark and had reached far enough to
include the independent City of Westminster.[7]
By the late 17th century, the City properthe area
bounded by the City wall and the River Thameswas
only a part of London, covering some 700.0 acres (2.833
km2 ; 1.0938 sq mi),[8] and home to about 80,000 people, or one sixth of Londons inhabitants. The City was
surrounded by a ring of inner suburbs, where most Londoners lived. The City was then as now the commercial
heart of the capital, and was the largest market and busiest port in England, dominated by the trading and manufacturing classes.[9] The aristocracy shunned the City and
lived either in the countryside beyond the slum suburbs,
or in the exclusive Westminster district (the modern West
End), the site of Charles II's court at Whitehall. Wealthy
people preferred to live at a convenient distance from the
trac-clogged, polluted, unhealthy City, especially after
it was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in
the Plague Year of 1665.

Panorama of the City of London in 1616 by Claes

Visscher. Note the tenement housing on London Bridge
(far right), a notorious death-trap in case of re, although
much would be destroyed in an earlier re in 1632.

1.1 Fire hazards in the City

The relationship between the City and the Crown was

very tense. During the Civil War, 16421651, the City of
London had been a stronghold of Republicanism, and the
wealthy and economically dynamic capital still had the
potential to be a threat to Charles II, as had been demonstrated by several Republican uprisings in London in the
early 1660s. The City magistrates were of the generation
that had fought in the Civil War, and could remember
how Charles Is grab for absolute power had led to that
national trauma.[10] They were determined to thwart any
similar tendencies of his son, and when the Great Fire
threatened the City, they refused the oers Charles made
of soldiers and other resources. Even in such an emergency, the idea of having the unpopular Royal troops ordered into the City was political dynamite. By the time
Charles took over command from the ineectual Lord
Mayor, the re was already out of control.[11]

Charles II.

The City was essentially medieval in its street plan, an

overcrowded warren of narrow, winding, cobbled alleys.
It had experienced several major res before 1666, the
most recent in 1632. Building with wood and roong
with thatch had been prohibited for centuries, but these
cheap materials continued to be used.[12] The only major stone-built area was the wealthy centre of the City,

3
where the mansions of the merchants and brokers stood
on spacious lots, surrounded by an inner ring of overcrowded poorer parishes whose every inch of building
space was used to accommodate the rapidly growing population. These parishes contained workplaces, many of
which were re hazardsfoundries, smithies, glaziers
which were theoretically illegal in the City, but tolerated
in practice. The human habitations intermingled with
these sources of heat, sparks, and pollution were crowded
to bursting point and their construction increased the re
risk: the typical six- or seven-storey timbered London
tenement houses had "jetties" (projecting upper oors):
they had a narrow footprint at ground level, but would
maximise their use of land by encroaching, as a contemporary observer put it, on the street with the gradually increasing size of their upper storeys. The re haz- Firehooks used to ght a re at Tiverton in Devon, England,
ard posed when the top jetties all but met across the nar- 1612.
row alleys was well perceived"as it does facilitate a
conagration, so does it also hinder the remedy, wrote
one observer[13] but the covetousness of the citizens
and connivancy [that is, the corruption] of Magistrates
worked in favour of jetties. In 1661, Charles II issued
a proclamation forbidding overhanging windows and jetties, but this was largely ignored by the local government.
Charles next, sharper, message in 1665 warned of the
risk of re from the narrowness of the streets and authorised both imprisonment of recalcitrant builders and demolition of dangerous buildings. It too had little impact.
The river front was important in the development of the
Great Fire. The Thames oered water for reghting
and the chance of escape by boat, but the poorer districts
along the riverfront had stores and cellars of combustibles
which increased the re risk. All along the wharves,
the rickety wooden tenements and tar paper shacks of
the poor were shoehorned amongst old paper buildings
and the most combustible matter of Tarr, Pitch, Hemp,
Rosen, and Flax which was all layd up thereabouts.[14]
London was also full of black powder, especially along
the river front. Much of it was left in the homes of private citizens from the days of the English Civil War, as the
former members of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army
still retained their muskets and the powder with which
to load them. Five to six hundred tons of powder were
stored in the Tower of London at the north end of Tower
Bridge.[15] The ship chandlers along the wharves also held
large stocks, stored in wooden barrels.

1.2

17th century reghting

Fires were common in the crowded wood-built city with

its open replaces, candles, ovens, and stores of combustibles. There was no police or re department to call,
but Londons local militia, known as the Trained Bands,
was at least in principle available for general emergencies, and watching for re was one of the jobs of the
watch, a thousand watchmen or bellmen who patrolled
the streets at night.[16] Self-reliant community procedures

Advertisement for a comparatively small and manoeuvrable

seventeenth-century re engine on wheels: These Engins, (which
are the best) to quinch great Fires; are made by John Keeling in
Black Fryers (after many years Experience).

for dealing with res were in place, and were usually effective. Public-spirited citizens would be alerted to a dangerous house re by mued peals on the church bells,
and would congregate hastily to ght the re. The methods available for this relied on demolition and water. By
law, the tower of every parish church had to hold equipment for these eorts: long ladders, leather buckets, axes,
and rehooks for pulling down buildings (see illustration right).[17] Sometimes taller buildings were levelled to
the ground quickly and eectively by means of controlled
gunpowder explosions. This drastic method of creating
rebreaks was increasingly used towards the end of the
Great Fire, and modern historians believe it was what nally won the struggle.[18]

2 Failures in ghting the re

London Bridge, the only physical connection between the
City and the south side of the river Thames, was itself
covered with houses and had been noted as a deathtrap
in the re of 1632. By dawn on Sunday these houses

4
were burning, and Samuel Pepys, observing the conagration from the Tower of London, recorded great concern for friends living on the bridge.[19] There were fears
that the ames would cross London Bridge to threaten the
borough of Southwark on the south bank, but this danger
was averted by an open space between buildings on the
bridge which acted as a rebreak.[20] The 18 foot (5.5 m)
high Roman wall enclosing the City put the eeing homeless at risk of being shut into the inferno. Once the river
front was on re and the escape route by boat cut o, the
only exits were the eight gates in the wall. During the
rst couple of days, few people had any notion of eeing the burning City altogether: they would remove what
they could carry of their belongings to the nearest safe
house, in many cases the parish church, or the precincts
of St. Pauls Cathedral, only to have to move again hours
later. Some moved their belongings and themselves four
and ve times in a single day.[21] The perception of a
need to get beyond the walls only took root late on the
Monday, and then there were near-panic scenes at the
narrow gates as distraught refugees tried to get out with
their bundles, carts, horses, and wagons.
The crucial factor which frustrated reghting eorts was
the narrowness of the streets. Even under normal circumstances, the mix of carts, wagons, and pedestrians in
the undersized alleys was subject to frequent trac jams
and gridlock. During the re, the passages were additionally blocked by refugees camping in them amongst their
rescued belongings, or escaping outwards, away from the
centre of destruction, as demolition teams and re engine
crews struggled in vain to move in towards it.
Demolishing the houses downwind of a dangerous re
by means of rehooks or explosives was often an eective way of containing the destruction. This time, however, demolition was fatally delayed for hours by the Lord
Mayors lack of leadership and failure to give the necessary orders.[22] By the time orders came directly from the
King to spare no houses, the re had devoured many
more houses, and the demolition workers could no longer
get through the crowded streets.
The use of water to extinguish the re was also frustrated. In principle, water was available from a system
of elm pipes which supplied 30,000 houses via a high
water tower at Cornhill, lled from the river at high tide,
and also via a reservoir of Hertfordshire spring water in
Islington.[23] It was often possible to open a pipe near a
burning building and connect it to a hose to play on a re,
or ll buckets. Further, Pudding Lane was close to the
river. Theoretically, all the lanes from the river up to the
bakery and adjoining buildings should have been manned
with double rows of reghters passing full buckets up
to the re and empty buckets back down to the river.
This did not happen, or at least was no longer happening by the time Pepys viewed the re from the river at
mid-morning on the Sunday. Pepys comments in his diary that nobody was trying to put it out, but instead they
ed from it in fear, hurrying to remove their goods, and

DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIRE

leave all to the re. The ames crept towards the river
front with little interference from the overwhelmed community and soon torched the ammable warehouses along
the wharves. The resulting conagration not only cut o
the reghters from the immediate water supply from the
river, but also set alight the water wheels under London
Bridge which pumped water to the Cornhill water tower;
the direct access to the river and the supply of piped water
failed together.
London possessed advanced re-ghting technology in
the form of re engines, which had been used in earlier
large-scale res. However, unlike the useful rehooks,
these large pumps had rarely proved exible or functional
enough to make much dierence. Only some of them
had wheels, others were mounted on wheelless sleds.[24]
They had to be brought a long way, tended to arrive too
late, and, with spouts but no delivery hoses, had limited
reach.[25] On this occasion an unknown number of re engines were either wheeled or dragged through the streets,
some from across the City. The piped water that they
were designed to use had already failed, but parts of the
river bank could still be reached. As gangs of men tried
desperately to manoeuvre the engines right up to the river
to ll their reservoirs, several of the engines toppled into
the Thames. The heat from the ames was by then too
great for the remaining engines to get within a useful distance; they could not even get into Pudding Lane.

3 Development of the re
The personal experiences of many Londoners during the
re are glimpsed in letters and memoirs. The two most
famous diarists of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys (1633
1703) and John Evelyn (16201706), recorded the events
and their own reactions day by day, and made great eorts
to keep themselves informed of what was happening all
over the City and beyond. For example, they both travelled out to the Moorelds park area north of the City
on the Wednesdaythe fourth dayto view the mighty
encampment of distressed refugees there, which shocked
them. Their diaries are the most important sources for
all modern retellings of the disaster. The most recent
books on the re, by Tinniswood (2003) and Hanson
(2001), also rely on the brief memoirs of William Taswell
(165182), who was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy at
Westminster School in 1666.

3.1 Sunday
After two rainy summers in 1664 and 1665, London had
lain under an exceptional drought since November 1665,
and the wooden buildings were tinder-dry after the long
hot summer of 1666. A re broke out at Thomas Farriners bakery in Pudding Lane a little after midnight
on Sunday 2 September. The family was trapped up-

3.1

Sunday

5
Samuel Pepys, looking back on the events, wrote in his diary on 7 September 1666: People do all the world over
cry out of the simplicity [the stupidity] of my Lord Mayor
in general; and more particularly in this business of the
re, laying it all upon him.

Approximate damage by the evening of Sunday, 2 September.[26]

On Sunday morning, Pepys, who was a senior ocial in

the Navy Oce, ascended the Tower of London to view
the re from a turret, and recorded in his diary that the
eastern gale had turned it into a conagration. It had
burned down several churches and, he estimated, 300
houses and reached the river front. The houses on London Bridge were burning. Taking a boat to inspect the destruction around Pudding Lane at close range, Pepys describes a lamentable re, everybody endeavouring to
remove their goods, and inging into the river or bringing
them into lighters that lay o; poor people staying in their
houses as long as till the very re touched them, and then
running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs
by the water-side to another. Pepys continued westward
on the river to the court at Whitehall, where people come
about me, and did give them an account dismayed them
all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called
for, and did tell the King and Duke of Yorke what I saw,
and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be
pulled down nothing could stop the re. They seemed
much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to
my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare
no houses, but to pull down before the re every way.
Charles brother James, Duke of York, oered the use of
the Royal Life Guards to help ght the re.[29]

A mile west of Pudding Lane, by Westminster Stairs,

young William Taswell, a schoolboy who had bolted from
the early morning service in Westminster Abbey, saw
It made me weep to see it. Samuel Pepys (16331703) painted
some refugees arrive in hired lighter boats, unclothed and
by John Hayls in 1666, the year of the Great Fire.
covered only with blankets.[30] The services of the lightermen had suddenly become extremely expensive, and only
stairs, but managed to climb from an upstairs window the luckiest refugees secured a place in a boat.
to the house next door, except for a maidservant who The re spread quickly in the high wind. By mid-morning
was too frightened to try, and became the rst victim.[27] on Sunday, people abandoned attempts at extinguishing
The neighbours tried to help douse the re; after an hour the re and ed; the moving human mass and their bunthe parish constables arrived and judged that the adjoin- dles and carts made the lanes impassable for remen and
ing houses had better be demolished to prevent further carriages. Pepys took a coach back into the city from
spread. The householders protested, and the Lord Mayor Whitehall, but only reached St Pauls Cathedral before
Sir Thomas Bloodworth, who alone had the authority to he had to get out and walk. Handcarts with goods and
override their wishes, was summoned.
pedestrians were still on the move, away from the re,
When Bloodworth arrived, the ames were consuming heavily weighed down. The parish churches not directly
the adjoining houses and creeping towards the paper threatened were lling up with furniture and valuables,
warehouses and ammable stores on the river front. The which would soon have to be moved further aeld. Pepys
more experienced remen were clamouring for demoli- found Bloodworth trying to coordinate the re ghting eftion, but Bloodworth refused, on the argument that most forts and near to collapse, like a fainting woman, crying
premises were rented and the owners could not be found. out plaintively in response to the Kings message that he
Bloodworth is generally thought to have been appointed was pulling down houses. But the re overtakes us faster
to the oce of Lord Mayor as a yes man, rather than then [sic] we can do it. Holding on to his civic dignity,
Jamess oer of soldiers and then went home
for any of the needful capabilities for the job. He pan- he refused
[31]
[28]
King
Charles II sailed down from Whitehall in
to
bed.
Pressed,
icked when faced with a sudden emergency.
the
Royal
barge
to
inspect the scene. He found that houses
he made the often-quoted remark Pish! A woman could
were
still
not
being
pulled down, in spite of Bloodworths
piss it out, and left. After the City had been destroyed,

DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIRE

assurances to Pepys, and daringly overrode the authority

of Bloodworth to order wholesale demolitions west of the
re zone.[32] The delay rendered these measures largely
futile, as the re was already out of control.
By Sunday afternoon, 18 hours after the alarm was raised
in Pudding Lane, the re had become a raging restorm
that created its own weather. A tremendous uprush of
hot air above the ames was driven by the chimney effect wherever constrictions such as jettied buildings narrowed the air current and left a vacuum at ground level.
The resulting strong inward winds did not tend to put the
re out, as might be thought:[33] instead, they supplied
fresh oxygen to the ames, and the turbulence created by
the uprush made the wind veer erratically both north and
south of the main, easterly, direction of the gale which
was still blowing.
In the early evening, with his wife and some friends,
Pepys went again on the river and to the re up and
down, it still encreasing. They ordered the boatman to
go so near the re as we could for smoke; and all over
the Thames, with ones face in the wind, you were almost
burned with a shower of redrops. When the redrops
became unbearable, the party went on to an alehouse on
the South Bank and stayed there till darkness came and
they could see the re on London Bridge and across the
river, as only one entire arch of re from this to the other The London Gazette for 3 10 September, facsimile front page
with an account of the Great Fire. Click on the image to enlarge
side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of
and read.
above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. Pepys described this arch of re as a bow with Gods arrow in it
with a shining point.
re in the late afternoon, and was a smoking shell within
a few hours. John Evelyn, courtier and diarist, wrote:

3.2

Monday

By dawn on Monday, 3 September, the re was principally expanding north and west, the turbulence of the
re storm pushing the ames both further south and further north than the day before.[34] The spread to the south
was in the main halted by the river, but had torched the
houses on London Bridge, and was threatening to cross
the bridge and endanger the borough of Southwark on
the south bank of the river. Southwark was preserved
by a pre-existent rebreak on the bridge, a long gap between the buildings which had saved the south side of the
Thames in the re of 1632 and now did so again;[35] ying embers started a re in Southwark but it was quickly
stopped. The res spread to the north reached the nancial heart of the City. The houses of the bankers
in Lombard Street began to burn on Monday afternoon,
prompting a rush to get their stacks of gold coins, so crucial to the wealth of the city and the nation, to safety before they melted away. Several observers emphasise the
despair and helplessness which seemed to seize Londoners on this second day, and the lack of eorts to save the
wealthy, fashionable districts which were now menaced
by the ames, such as the Royal Exchangecombined
bourse and shopping centre and the opulent consumer
goods shops in Cheapside. The Royal Exchange caught

Evelyn lived four miles (6 km) outside the City, in

Deptford, and so did not see the early stages of the disaster. On Monday, joining many other upper-class people, he went by coach to Southwark to see the view that
Pepys had seen the day before, of the burning City across
the river. The conagration was much larger now: the
whole City in dreadful ames near the water-side; all the
houses from the Bridge, all Thames-street, and upwards
towards Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes, were now
consumed.[37] In the evening, Evelyn reported that the
river was covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods. He observed a great exodus of
carts and pedestrians through the bottleneck City gates,
making for the open elds to the north and east, which
for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts,
and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods
they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous
spectacle!"[37]
Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the re
was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and
burning akes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs
and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house
res to break out far from their source and giving rise to
rumours that fresh res were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspects because of the cur-

3.2

Monday

7
gious alarms of renewed Gunpowder Plots. As suspicions
rose to panic and collective paranoia on the Monday, both
the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused
less on re ghting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and any odd-looking people, and arresting
them or rescuing them from mobs, or both together.

Approximate damage by the evening of Monday, 3 September.

John Evelyn (16201706) in 1651.

rent Second Anglo-Dutch War. As fear and suspicion

hardened into certainty on the Monday, reports circulated of imminent invasion, and of foreign undercover
agents seen casting reballs into houses, or caught with
hand grenades or matches.[38] There was a wave of street
violence.[39] William Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of
a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched
in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in
the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar.
The fears of terrorism received an extra boost from the
disruption of communications and news as facilities were
devoured by the re. The General Letter Oce in
Threadneedle Street, through which post for the entire
country passed, burned down early on Monday morning.
The London Gazette just managed to put out its Monday
issue before the printers premises went up in ames (this
issue contained mainly society gossip, with a small note
about a re that had broken out on Sunday morning and
which continues still with great violence). The whole
nation depended on these communications, and the void
they left lled up with rumours. There were also reli-

The inhabitants, especially the upper class, were growing

desperate to remove their belongings from the City. This
provided a source of income for the able-bodied poor,
who hired out as porters (sometimes simply making o
with the goods), and especially for the owners of carts and
boats. Hiring a cart had cost a couple of shillings on the
Saturday before the re; on the Monday it rose to as much
as 40, a fortune (equivalent to over 4000 in 2005).[40]
Seemingly every cart and boat owner within reach of London made their way towards the City to share in these
opportunities, the carts jostling at the narrow gates with
the panicked inhabitants trying to get out. The chaos at
the gates was such that the magistrates ordered the gates
shut on Monday afternoon, in the hope of turning the inhabitants attention from safeguarding their own possessions to the ghting of the re: that, no hopes of saving
any things left, they might have more desperately endeavoured the quenching of the re.[41] This headlong and
unsuccessful measure was rescinded the next day.
Even as order in the streets broke down, especially at the
gates, and the re raged unchecked, Monday marked the
beginning of organised action. Bloodworth, who as Lord
Mayor was responsible for coordinating the re-ghting,
had apparently left the City; his name is not mentioned in
any contemporary accounts of the Mondays events.[42] In
this state of emergency, Charles again overrode the City
authorities and put his brother James, Duke of York, in
charge of operations. James set up command posts round
the perimeter of the re, press-ganging any men of the
lower classes found in the streets into teams of well-paid
and well-fed remen. Three courtiers were put in charge
of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order
demolitions. This visible gesture of solidarity from the
Crown was intended to cut through the citizens misgivings about being held nancially responsible for pulling
down houses. James and his life guards rode up and down
the streets all Monday, rescuing foreigners from the mob
and attempting to keep order. The Duke of York hath
won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the
Fire, wrote a witness in a letter on 8 September.[43]
On the Monday evening, hopes were dashed that the massive stone walls of Baynards Castle, Blackfriars, the western counterpart of the Tower of London, would stay the
course of the ames. This historic royal palace was completely consumed, burning all night.[44]
A contemporary account said that, that day or later, King
Charles in person worked manually to help to throw water
on ames and to help to demolish buildings to make a
rebreak.

3.3

Tuesday

Tuesday, 4 September, was the day of greatest

destruction.[45] The Duke of Yorks command post at
Temple Bar, where Strand meets Fleet Street, was supposed to stop the res westward advance towards the
Palace of Whitehall. Making a stand with his remen
from the Fleet Bridge and down to the Thames, he hoped
that the River Fleet would form a natural rebreak. However, early on Tuesday morning, the ames jumped over
the Fleet, driven by the unabated easterly gale, and outanked them, forcing them to run for it. There was consternation at the palace as the re continued implacably westward: Oh, the confusion there was then at that
court!" wrote Evelyn.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE FIRE

and watched as the ames crept round the cathedral and

the burning scaolding ignited the timbered roof beams.
Within half an hour, the lead roof was melting, and the
books and papers in the crypt caught with a roar. The
stones of Pauls ew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements
glowing with ery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was
able to tread on them, reported Evelyn in his diary. The
cathedral was quickly a ruin.
During the day, the ames began to move eastward from
the neighbourhood of Pudding Lane, straight against the
prevailing east wind towards Pepyss home on Seething
Lane and the Tower of London with its gunpowder stores.
After waiting all day for requested help from Jamess ofcial remen, who were busy in the west, the garrison at
the Tower took matters into their own hands and created
rebreaks by blowing up houses in the vicinity on a large
scale, halting the advance of the re.

3.4 Wednesday

Approximate damage by the evening of Tuesday, 4 September.

The re did not spread signicantly on Wednesday, 5 September.

Ludgate in ames, with St. Pauls Cathedral in the distance

(square tower without the spire) now catching ames. Oil painting by anonymous artist, ca. 1670.

Working to a plan at last, Jamess reghters had also created a large rebreak to the north of the conagration. It
contained the re until late afternoon, when the ames
leapt across and began to destroy the wide, auent luxury shopping street of Cheapside.
Everybody had thought St. Pauls Cathedral a safe refuge,
with its thick stone walls and natural rebreak in the form
of a wide, empty surrounding plaza. It had been crammed
full of rescued goods and its crypt lled with the tightly
packed stocks of the printers and booksellers in adjoining Paternoster Row. However an enormous stroke of
bad luck meant that the building was covered in wooden
scaolding, undergoing piecemeal restoration by a then
relatively unknown Christopher Wren. The scaolding
caught re on Tuesday night. Leaving school, young
William Taswell stood on Westminster Stairs a mile away

The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, and the rebreaks created by the garrison nally began to take effect on Wednesday 5 September.[46] Stopping the re
caused much re and demolition damage in the lawyers
area called the Temple. Pepys walked all over the
smouldering city, getting his feet hot, and climbed the
steeple of Barking Church, from which he viewed the destroyed City, the saddest sight of desolation that I ever
saw. There were many separate res still burning themselves out, but the Great Fire was over. Pepys visited
Moorelds, a large public park immediately north of the
City, and saw a great encampment of homeless refugees,
poor wretches carrying their good there, and every body
keeping his goods together by themselves, and noted that
the price of bread in the environs of the park had doubled.
Evelyn also went out to Moorelds, which was turning
into the main point of assembly for the homeless, and
was horried at the numbers of distressed people lling
it, some under tents, others in makeshift shacks: Many
[were] without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or
board... reduced to extremest misery and poverty.[47]
Evelyn was impressed by the pride of these distressed
Londoners, tho' ready to perish for hunger and destitu-

James Shirley
James, Duke of York, later James II.

tion, yet not asking one pennie for relief.

Fears of foreign arsonist and of a French and Dutch invasion were as high as ever among the traumatised re
victims, and on Wednesday night there was an outbreak
of general panic in the encampments at Parliament Hill,
Moorelds and Islington. A light in the sky over Fleet
Street started a story that 50,000 French and Dutch immigrants, widely rumoured to have started the re, had
risen and were marching towards Moorelds to nish
what the re had begun: to cut the mens throats, rape
the women, and steal their few possessions. Surging into
the streets, the frightened mob fell on any foreigners they
happened to encounter, and were, according to Evelyn,
only with innite pains and great diculty[48] appeased
and pushed back into the elds by the Trained Bands,
troops of Life Guards, and members of the court. The
mood was now so volatile that Charles feared a full-scale
London rebellion against the monarchy. Food production and distribution had been disrupted to the point of
non-existence; Charles announced that supplies of bread
would be brought into the City every day, and safe markets set up round the perimeter. These markets were for
buying and selling;[49] there was no question of distributing emergency aid.

The LONDONERS Lamentation, a broadside ballad published

in 1666 giving an account of the re, and of the limits of its
destruction. Click on the image to enlarge and read.

must have gone unrecorded and that, besides direct deaths

from burning and smoke inhalation, refugees also perished in the impromptu camps.[51] Hanson takes issue
with the idea that there were only a few deaths, enumerating known deaths from hunger and exposure among
survivors of the holocaust, huddled in shacks or living
among the ruins that had once been their homes in the
cold winter that followed, including, for instance, the
dramatist James Shirley and his wife. Hanson also maintains that it stretches credulity to believe that the only
papists or foreigners being beaten to death or lynched
4 Deaths and destruction
were the ones rescued by the Duke of York, that ocial
gures say very little about the fate of the undocumented
Only a few deaths from the re are ocially recorded, poor, and that the heat at the heart of the restorms, far
and deaths are traditionally believed to have been few. hotter than an ordinary house re, was enough to consume
Porter gives the gure as eight[50] and Tinniswood as bodies fully, or leave only a few skull fragments. The re,
in single gures, although he adds that some deaths fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, but also by

10

5 AFTERMATH

the oil, pitch, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine,

and gunpowder stored in the riverside district, melted the
imported steel lying along the wharves (melting point between 1,250 C (2,300 F) and 1,480 C (2,700 F)) and
the great iron chains and locks on the City gates (melting
point between 1,100 C (2,000 F) and 1,650 C (3000
F)). Nor would anonymous bone fragments have been of
much interest to the hungry people sifting through the
tens of thousands of tons of rubble and debris after the
re, looking for valuables, or to the workmen clearing
away the rubble later during the rebuilding. Appealing to
common sense and the experience of every other major
urban re down the centuries, Hanson emphasises that
the re attacked the rotting tenements of the poor with
furious speed, surely trapping at the very least the old,
the very young, the halt and the lame and burying the
dust and ashes of their bones under the rubble of cellars;
making for a death toll not of four or eight, but of several
hundred and quite possibly several thousand.[52]
The material destruction has been computed at 13,500
houses; 87 parish churches; 44 Company Halls; the
Royal Exchange; the Custom House; St. Pauls Cathedral; the Bridewell Palace and other City prisons; the
General Letter Oce; and the three western city gates,
Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate.[53] The monetary
value of the loss, rst estimated at 100,000,000 in the
currency of the time, was later reduced to an uncertain
10,000,000[54] (over 1 billion in 2005 pounds).[55] Evelyn believed that he saw as many as 200,000 people of all
ranks and stations dispersed, and lying along their heaps
of what they could save in the elds towards Islington
and Highgate.[54]

Aftermath

John Evelyn's plan, never carried out, for rebuilding a radically

dierent City of London.

An example of the urge to identify scapegoats for the re

is the acceptance of the confession of a simple-minded
French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, who claimed he was
an agent of the Pope and had started the Great Fire in
Westminster.[56] He later changed his story to say that he
had started the re at the bakery in Pudding Lane. Hubert was convicted, despite some misgivings about his

tness to plead, and hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666. After his death, it became apparent that he
had not arrived in London until two days after the re
started.[57] These allegations that Catholics had started
the re were exploited as powerful political propaganda
by opponents of pro-Catholic Charles IIs court, mostly
during the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis later in his
reign.[58]
Abroad in the Netherlands the Great Fire of London was
seen as a divine retribution for Holmess Bonre, the
burning by the English of a Dutch town during the Second
Anglo-Dutch War.[59]

Wrens rejected plan for the rebuilding of London

In the chaos and unrest after the re, Charles II feared

another London rebellion. He encouraged the homeless
to move away from London and settle elsewhere, immediately issuing a proclamation that all Cities and Towns
whatsoever shall without any contradiction receive the
said distressed persons and permit them the free exercise
of their manual trades. A special Fire Court was set up
to deal with disputes between tenants and landlords and
decide who should rebuild, based on ability to pay. The
Court was in session from February 1667 to September
1672. Cases were heard and a verdict usually given within
a day, and without the Fire Court, lengthy legal wrangles
would have seriously delayed the rebuilding which was so
necessary if London was to recover.
Encouraged by Charles, radical rebuilding schemes for
the gutted City poured in. If it had been rebuilt under
some of these plans, London would have rivalled Paris
in Baroque magnicence (see Evelyns plan on the right).
The Crown and the City authorities attempted to establish
to whom all the houses and ground did in truth belong
to negotiate with their owners about compensation for
the large-scale remodelling that these plans entailed, but
that unrealistic idea had to be abandoned. Exhortations
to bring workmen and measure the plots on which the
houses had stood were mostly ignored by people worried
about day-to-day survival, as well as by those who had left
the capital; for one thing, with the shortage of labour following the re, it was impossible to secure workmen for
the purpose. Apart from Wren and Evelyn, it is known

11
that Robert Hooke, Valentine Knight and Richard New- during the events of the re.[66]
court proposed rebuilding plans.
The Great Fire was released on ITV television in 2014.
With the complexities of ownership unresolved, none of It was shown in four episodes. It constructs a ctional
the grand Baroque schemes for a City of piazzas and av- scenario involving the Pudding Lane bakers family in an
enues could be realised; there was nobody to negotiate alleged popish plot.[67]
with, and no means of calculating how much compensation should be paid. Instead, much of the old street
plan was recreated in the new City, with improvements 7 Notes
in hygiene and re safety: wider streets, open and accessible wharves along the length of the Thames, with no
houses obstructing access to the river, and, most impor- See Category:Former buildings and structures in the City
tantly, buildings constructed of brick and stone, not wood. of London.
New public buildings were created on their predecessors
sites; perhaps the most famous is St. Pauls Cathedral and [1] All dates are given according to the Julian calendar. Note
that when recording British history it is usual to use the
its smaller cousins, Christopher Wrens 50 new churches.
On Charles initiative, a Monument to the Great Fire
of London, designed by Christopher Wren and Robert
Hooke, was erected near Pudding Lane. Standing 61 metres (200 ft) tall and known simply as The Monument, it
is a familiar London landmark which has given its name to
a tube station. In 1668 accusations against the Catholics
were added to the inscription on the Monument which
read, in part:

dates recorded at the time of the event. Any dates between

1 January and 25 March have their year adjusted to start
on the 1 January according to the New Style.
[2] Porter, 6980.
[3] Tinniswood, 4, 101.
[4] Pottery. Museum of London. Retrieved 14 November
2014.

Aside from the four years of James II's rule from 1685
to 1689, the inscription remained in place until 1830 and
the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act.[60]

[5] Reddaway, 27.

Another monument, the Golden Boy of Pye Corner in

Smitheld, marks the spot where the re stopped. According to the inscription, the fact that the re started at
Pudding Lane and stopped at Pye Corner was an indication that the Fire was evidence of Gods wrath on the City
of London for the sin of gluttony.

[7] Porter, 80.

[6] John Evelyn in 1659, quoted in Tinniswood, 3. The section London in the 1660s is based on Tinniswood, 111,
unless otherwise indicated.

[8] 330 acres is the size of the area within the Roman wall
according to standard reference works (see, for instance,
Sheppard, 37), although Tinniswood gives that area as a
square mile (667 acres).

The Great Plague epidemic of 1665 is believed to

have killed a sixth of Londons inhabitants, or 80,000
people,[61] and it is sometimes suggested, as plague epi- [9] Hanson (2001), 80.
demics did not recur in London after the re,[62] that the
re saved lives in the long run by burning down so much [10] See Hanson (2001), 8588, for the Republican temper of
London.
unsanitary housing with their rats and their eas which
transmitted the plague. Historians disagree as to whether
the re played a part in preventing subsequent major out- [11] Neil Wallington (2005). In Case of Fire. Jeremy Mills
Publishing. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-9546484-6-6.
breaks. The Museum of London website claims that there
was a connection,[63] while historian Roy Porter points [12] Hanson (2001), 7780. The section Fire hazards in the
out that the re left the most insalubrious parts of LonCity is based on Hanson (2001), 77101 unless otherwise
don, the slum suburbs, untouched.[64]
indicated.
Following the Fire, the thoroughfares of Queen Street and [13] Rege Sincera (pseudonym), Observations both Historical
King Street were newly laid out, cutting across more anand Moral upon the Burning of London, September 1666,
cient thoroughfares in the City, creating a new route up
quoted by Hanson (2001), 80.
from the Thames to the Guildhall; they were the only notable new streets following the res destruction of much [14] Letter from an unknown correspondent to Lord Conway,
September 1666, quoted by Tinniswood, 4546.
of the City.[65]
[15] Neil Hanson (2011).
The Dreadful Judgement.
Transworld. p. 111. ISBN 978-1-4464-2193-2.

In culture

William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Old St. Pauls is set

[16] Hanson (2001), 82. The section Fire hazards in the City
is based on Tinniswood, 4652, and Hanson (2001), 75
78 unless otherwise indicated.

12

[17] A rehook was a heavy pole perhaps 30 feet (9 m) long

with a strong hook and ring at one end, which would be
attached to the roof trees of a threatened house and operated by means of ropes and pulleys to pull the building
down. (Tinniswood, 49).
[18] Reddaway, 25.
[19] All quotes from and details involving Samuel Pepys come
from his diary entry for the day referred to.

7 NOTES

[44] Walter George Bell (1929) The Story of Londons Great

Fire: 109-11. John Lane: London.
[45] The section Tuesday is based on Tinniswood, 7796.
[46] The section Wednesday is based on Tinniswood, 101
10, unless otherwise indicated.
[47] Quoted Tinniswood, 104.
[48] Evelyn (1854), 15.

[20] Robinson, Bruce, Londons Burning: The Great Fire

[21] Gough MSS London14, the Bodleian Library, quoted by
Hanson (2001), 123.
[22] Bludworths failure of nerve was crucial (Tinniswood,
52).
[23] See Robinson, London:Brighter Lights, Bigger City and
Tinniswood, 4849.
[24] Compare Hanson (2001), who claims they had wheels
(76), and Tinniswood, who states they did not (50).
[25] The re engines, for which a patent had been granted in
1625, were single-acting force pumps worked by long handles at the front and back (Tinniswood, 50).
[26] The information in the day-by-day maps comes from Tinniswood, 58, 77, 97.
[27] Tinniswood, 4243.
[28] Tinniswood, 44: He didn't have the experience, the leadership skills or the natural authority to take charge of the
situation.
[29] Pepys diary, 2 September 1666.
[30] Tinniswood, 93.

[49] Hanson (2002), 166.

[50] Porter, 87.
[51] Tinniswood, 13135.
[52] Hanson (2001), 32633.
[53] Porter, 8788.
[54] Reddaway, 26.
[55] Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1264 to 2005
[56] The section Aftermath is based on Reddaway, 27 . and
Tinniswood, 21337, unless otherwise indicated.
[57] Tinniswood, 16368.
[58] Porter, Stephen (October 2006). The great re of London. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford
University Press. Retrieved 28 November 2006.
[59] England and the Netherlands: the ties between two nations. Memory of the Netherlands. Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Retrieved 8 November 2010.
[60] Wilde, Robert. The Great Fire of London 1666.
About.com. Retrieved 28 November 2006.

[31] Tinniswood, 53.

[32] London Gazette, 3 September 1666.
[33] See restorm and Hanson (2001), 102105.
[34] The section Monday is based on Tinniswood, 5874,
unless otherwise indicated.
[35] Robinson, Londons Burning: The Great Fire.

[61] Porter, 84.

[62] Hanson (2001), 24950.
[63] Ask the experts, Museum of London, accessed 27 October 2006. Archived August 27, 2006 at the Wayback
Machine

[37] Evelyn, 10.

[64] The plague-ravaged partsextramural settlements

like Holborn, Shoreditch, Finsbury, Whitechapel and
Southwark that housed the most squalid slumswere,
sadly, little touched by the Fire (burning down was what
they needed)" (Porter, 80).

[38] Hanson (2001), 139.

[65] London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd, 2000, p 115

[39] Reddaway, 22, 25.

[66] Colligan, Mimi (2002). Pompeii in Australia. Canvas

Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenthcentury Australia and New Zealand. Melbourne University Press. p. 151. Retrieved 13 December 2014 via
Google Books.

[36] All quotes from and details involving John Evelyn come
from his Diary.

[40] Hanson (2001), 15657.

[41] Quoted by Hanson (2001), 158.
[42] Tinnisworth, 71.
[43] Spelling modernised for clarity; quoted by Tinniswood,
80.

[67] Rahim, Sameer (16 October 2014). The Great Fire review, ITV: 'historical hokum'". The Telegraph. Retrieved
13 December 2014.

13

References
Evelyn, John (1854). Diary and Correspondence of
John Evelyn, F.R.S.. London: Hurst and Blackett.
Retrieved 5 November 2006.
Hanson, Neil (2001). The Dreadful Judgement:
The True Story of the Great Fire of London. New
York: Doubleday. For a review of Hansons work,
see Lauzanne, Alain. Revue pluridisciplinaire du
monde anglophone. Cercles. Retrieved 12 October 2006.

Great Fire of London on In Our Time at the BBC.

(listen now)
BBC history site
Museum of London answers questions
Channel 4 animation of the spread of the re
Child-friendly Great Fire of London site
Fire of London website produced by the Museum
of London, The National Archives, the National
Portrait Gallery, London Fire Brigade Museum and
London Metropolitan Archives for Key Stage 1
pupils (ages 57) and teachers

Hanson, Neil (2002). The Great Fire of London: In

That Apocalyptic Year, 1666. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons. A substantially dierent version of Hansons The Dreadful Judgement Coordinates:
0.0921W
(front matter).
Leasor, James (2011) [1961]. The Plague and the
Fire. ISBN 978-1-908291-22-6.
Morgan, Kenneth O. (2000). Oxford Illustrated History of Britain. Oxford: Oxford.
Pepys, Samuel (1995). Robert Latham and William
Matthews (eds.), ed. The Diary of Samuel Pepys,
Vol. 7. London: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-00499027-7. First published between 1970 and 1983,
by Bell & Hyman, London. Quotations from and
details involving Pepys are taken from this standard,
and copyright, edition. All web versions of the diaries are based on public domain 19th century editions and unfortunately contain many errors, as the
shorthand in which Pepys diaries were originally
written was not accurately transcribed until the pioneering work of Latham and Matthews.
Porter, Roy (1994). London: A Social History.
Cambridge: Harvard.
Reddaway, T. F. (1940). The Rebuilding of London
after the Great Fire. London: Jonathan Cape.
Robinson, Bruce. London: Brighter Lights, Bigger
City. BBC. Retrieved 12 August 2006.
Sheppard, Francis (1998). London: A History. Oxford: Oxford.
Tinniswood, Adrian (2003). By Permission of
Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London. London: Jonathan Cape.
Old St. Pauls, A Tale of the Plague and the Fire,
novel by Harrison Ainsworth

External links

513057N 00532W / 51.5157N

14

10

10
10.1

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AnomieBOT, Espe00, YeshuaDavid, JackieBot, Piano non troppo, AdjustShift, Kingpin13, Flewis, Citation bot, Mattsibson, ArthurBot,
Woolnut12345, Xqbot, Cureden, Conay, Capricorn42, Sellyme, Ute in DC, Brandon5485, RibotBOT, Moxy, Chongkian, Schekinov Alexey
Victorovich, Elemesh, Nicolas Perrault III, Londonlnd, Not Going Out, Kirbyblue96, MALA2009, Michael93555, Hodgy1996, Andy2k9,
CanadianNine, Oriel95, Ntse, Pinethicket, Danieltburling, RedBot, Lars Washington, Hello kitty and betty boop, Bisshu, Dinamik-bot, Vrenator, Memaster3, Tbhotch, RjwilmsiBot, Bento00, DASHBot, EmausBot, WikitanvirBot, ZroBot, John Cline, F, AvicAWB, Wayne
Slam, Rcsprinter123, Kgsbot, Ruskinmonkey, Herk1955, Alacante45, Whoop whoop pull up, Petrb, ClueBot NG, Rich Smith, Shylocksboy,
Kathyshawtyyy, Ilikemondays, Aloknm, Alexmason04, Kipperx, Opmadaration, Niico, Jobin RV, Ragova, Minsbot, BattyBot, Cloptonson,
Dexbot, Quiet Editor, Frosty, Schetnikova Anna, Xxbizxx, Froglich, Valetude and Anonymous: 601

10.2

Images

File:1744_Wren_Map_of_London,_England_-_Geographicus_-_London-wren-1744.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/

wikipedia/commons/9/95/1744_Wren_Map_of_London%2C_England_-_Geographicus_-_London-wren-1744.jpg License:
Public
domain Contributors: This le was provided to Wikimedia Commons by Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a specialist dealer in rare maps
and other cartography of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, as part of a cooperation project. Original artist: Christopher Wren
File:Big_Ben_Clear_Skies.JPG Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Big_Ben_Clear_Skies.JPG License: CC
BY-SA 3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Lachlan Fearnley

10.3

Content license

15

File:Charles_II_of_England_cropped.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Charles_II_of_England_

cropped.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Christopher_Wren_by_Godfrey_Kneller_1711.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Christopher_
Wren_by_Godfrey_Kneller_1711.jpg License: Public domain Contributors:
National Portrait Gallery: NPG 113
Original artist: Sir Godfrey Kneller
File:Commons-logo.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg License: ? Contributors: ? Original
artist: ?
File:Cscr-featured.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Cscr-featured.svg License: ? Contributors: ? Original
artist: ?
File:Fire_thumb_monday.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Fire_thumb_monday.png License: CCBY-SA-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Fire_thumb_sunday.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Fire_thumb_sunday.png License: CC-BYSA-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Fire_thumb_tuesday.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Fire_thumb_tuesday.png License: CCBY-SA-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Firehooks.1612.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Firehooks.1612.png License: Public domain
Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Folder_Hexagonal_Icon.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Folder_Hexagonal_Icon.svg License: Cc-bysa-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Great_Fire_London.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Great_Fire_London.jpg License: Public
domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Great_fire_of_london_map.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Great_fire_of_london_map.png
License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: Originally from the english wikipedia; description page is/was here. Original artist: Original uploader was Bunchofgrapes at the english wikipedia
File:James.II.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/James.II.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: http:
//www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/405673/james-ii-1633-1701-when-duke-of-york Original artist: Peter Lely
File:James_Shirley.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/James_Shirley.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:John_Evelyn{}s_plan_rebuilding_London_Great_Fire_1666.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/
dd/John_Evelyn%27s_plan_rebuilding_London_Great_Fire_1666.png License: Public domain Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:John_Evelyn1651.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/John_Evelyn1651.jpg License: Public domain
Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Keeling-fire-engine-illustration.jpg
Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/
Keeling-fire-engine-illustration.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Display in Museum of London, copy from Pepys Library in
Magdalene College, Cambridge Original artist: Unknown
File:London-gazette.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/London-gazette.png License: Public domain
Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Londoners-Lamentation.gif Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Londoners-Lamentation.gif License:
Public domain Contributors: EEBO Original artist: ?
File:Monumentfireoflondon.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Monumentfireoflondon.jpg License:
Public domain Contributors: Own work Original artist: User:Padraig
File:Padlock-silver.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Padlock-silver.svg License: CC0 Contributors:
http://openclipart.org/people/Anonymous/padlock_aj_ashton_01.svg Original artist: This image le was created by AJ Ashton. Uploaded
from English WP by User:Eleassar. Converted by User:AzaToth to a silver color.
File:Panorama_of_London_by_Claes_Van_Visscher,_1616_no_angels.jpg Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/3/35/Panorama_of_London_by_Claes_Van_Visscher%2C_1616_no_angels.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: ?
Original artist: Claes Van Visscher
File:Samuel_Pepys.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Samuel_Pepys.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Flickr Original artist: John Hayls (16001679)
File:The_Great_Fire_of_London,_with_Ludgate_and_Old_St._Paul{}s.JPG Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/f/fb/The_Great_Fire_of_London%2C_with_Ludgate_and_Old_St._Paul%27s.JPG License: Public domain Contributors: The
painting was photographed in the Yale Center for British Art Original artist: Anonymous

10.3

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0