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1666 AND LONDON'S FIRE HISTORY: A RE-EVALUATION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2016

DAVID GARRIOCH
DAVID GARRIOCH*
Affiliation:
Monash University
*
School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, 20 Chancellors Walk, Clayton Campus, Monash University, Australia3800[email protected]
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Abstract

While it is incontestable that the Great Fire led to a new awareness and to stronger measures to prevent and to fight fires, this was not because it was the worst in a long series of serious fires, but because it was one of the first. London had no really large fires in the four centuries before 1666, but was to experience fifty or more in the following 200 years. This article asks why. Alongside the obvious facts of rapid population growth and the resulting shoddy building, the continued use of timber for housing, and the inadequacy of fire prevention measures, it suggests that the growth of London's maritime trade and the concentration of stores of new types of highly flammable products, particularly along the river, created a new vulnerability to disaster that made earlier forms of fire control inadequate.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 319 - 338
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for funding that enabled me to undertake the research for this article, as part of a larger project on fire in early modern European cities. I wish to thank Adam Clulow, Barry Sturman, and the anonymous reviewers of the Historical Journal for their constructive comments on earlier drafts.

References

1 Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward, London: a social and cultural history, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 319. The most comprehensive history of the Great Fire, by Walter Bell, refers to ‘the spectacle of fire with which the populace were unhappily familiar’: The Great Fire of London in 1666 (London, 1920), p. 1.

2 See, for example, the two fine recent collections: Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, eds., Flammable cities: urban conflagration and the making of the modern world (Madison, WI, 2012); Martin Körner, Niklaus Bartlome, and Erika Flückiger, eds., Stadtzerstörung und Wiederaufbau: Zerstörungen durch Erdbeben, Feuer und Wasser; Destruction and reconstruction of towns: destruction by earthquakes, fire and water (2 vols., Bern and Vienna, 1999).

3 Christopher R. Friedrichs, The early modern city, 1450–1750 (Harlow, 1995), p. 276.

4 Stephen Porter, The Great Fire of London (Godalming, 1998; first published 1996), pp. 27–8.

5 Adrian Tinniswood, By permission of Heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London (London, 2003), p. 47.

6 Sven Lilja, ‘Wooden towns on fire: fire destruction and human reconstruction of Swedish towns prior to 1800’, in Körner, Bartlome, and Flückiger, eds., Stadtzerstörung und Wiederaufbau, i, pp. 255–75, at pp. 257–9.

7 Eric L. Jones, Stephen Porter, and Michael Turner, A gazetteer of English urban fire disasters, 1500–1900, Historical Geography Research Group of the Institute of British Geographers, Research Paper Series, no. 13 (Norwich, 1984); Robin Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution: fire insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 33–4.

8 Derek Keene, ‘Fire in London: destruction and reconstruction, a.d. 982–1676’, in Körner, Bartlome, and Flückiger, eds., Stadtzerstörung und Wiederaufbau, i, pp. 187–211, at p. 198; John Stow, The survey of London (1603), ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London, 1956), p. 85. See also John Schofield, London, 1100–1600: the archaeology of a capital city (Sheffield, 2011), p. 88.

9 John Entick, A new and accurate history and survey of London, Westminster, Southwark, and places adjacent (4 vols., London, 1766), i, p. 445; Diary of Henry Machyn, citizen and merchant-taylor of London, from a.d. 1550 to a.d. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols (London, 1898), p. 219; Stow, Survey, p. 188; John Hayward, Annals of the first four years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Bruce (London, 1840), pp. 87–8.

10 Keene, ‘Fire in London’, pp. 193–8; Bell, Great Fire, p. 25; Lilian J. Redstone, The church of All Hallows Barking, vol. xii of Survey of London (London, 1929), p. 45; Nehemiah Wallington, The notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: a selection, ed. David Booy (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 104–9, 112, 113.

11 The diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond Samuel De Beer (6 vols., Oxford, 1955), iii, p. 150 n. 4.

12 John Evelyn, A character of England as it was lately presented in a letter to a noble man of France (London, 1659), p. 29.

13 James Howel, Londinopolis (London, 1657), p. 398.

14 Sad and lamentable news from Wapping giving a true and just account of a most horrible and dreadful fire, which happened on Sunday the 19th. of Nov. 1682 (London, 1682); London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) CLA/040/02/007; Porter, Great Fire, p. 155; Anna Milford, London in flames: the capital's history through its fires (West Wickham, 1998), p. 72; Geoffrey Vaughan Blackstone, A history of the British fire service (London, 1957), p. 55.

15 Jones, Porter, and Turner, Gazetteer, p. 46; Peter Guillery, The small house in eighteenth-century London: a social and architectural history (London and New Haven, CT, 2004), p. 46.

16 P. G. M. Dickson, The Sun Insurance Office, 1710–1960 (London, 1960), p. 129.

17 Pearson, Insuring, pp. 34, 58–9.

18 Guillery, Small house, pp. 40, 72. For examples from Middlesex coroners' reports, LMA MJ/SP/C/W/0147–191.

19 For the early modern period, see particularly Alain Cabantous, Histoire de la nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2009), and Craig Koslofsky, Evening's empire: a history of the night in early modern Europe (Cambridge and New York, NY, 2011).

20 LMA COL/SJ/02/029–031, 6 Anne c. 31, §3, 8 June 1708, reissued by Court of Common Council, 24 Mar. 1725 and 19 Apr. 1748; LMA ACC/0076/0334, poster concerning the negligence of servants, issued by County Fire Office, n.d. [early nineteenth century], advertising Building Act, 14 Geo. III, c. 78, §84; Pearson, Insuring, p. 84. On arson, Dickson, Sun Insurance, pp. 141–3; Pearson, Insuring, pp. 35–6. The classic study is Robert Scribner, ‘The mordbrenner fear in sixteenth-century Germany: political paranoia or the revenge of the outcast?’, in Richard J. Evans, ed., The German underworld: deviants and outcasts in German history (London, 1988), pp. 29–56.

21 Keene, ‘Fire in London’, p. 193; Porter, Great Fire, pp. 16–19. On population figures, Harding, Vanessa, ‘The population of London, 1550–1700: a review of the published evidence’, London Journal, 15 (1990), pp. 111–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Baer, William C., ‘Housing the poor and mechanick class in seventeenth-century London’, London Journal, 25 (2000), pp. 13–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 17–18, see also pp. 20–2; Guillery, Small house, pp. 40–8.

23 Schofield, London, 1100–1600, p. 241; Neil Hanson, The Great Fire of London in that apocalyptic year, 1666 (London, 2001), p. 9.

24 Pearson, Insuring, 58–60; Robin Pearson, ‘The impact of fire and fire insurance on eighteenth-century English town buildings and their populations’, in Carole Shammas, ed., Investing in the early modern built environment: Europeans, Asians, settlers and indigenous societies (Leiden, 2012), pp. 67–93, at pp. 74–8, 90–2; Schofield, London, 1100–1600, pp. 242–9; Guillery, Small house, pp. 70, 127, 65, 282–3, see also figs. 48, 109, 110, 112, 141, 145.

25 Pearson, Insuring, pp. 60, 85; Hawksmoor to George Clarke, quoted in Elizabeth McKellar, The birth of modern London: the development and design of the city, 1660–1720 (Manchester, 1999), p. 30; Guillery, Small house, pp. 52, 70–3. For an example where wooden outbuildings contributed to a fire in St Bartholomew's Close (next to today's Barbican) in 1768, LMA ACC/1017/1029.

26 Holinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (6 vols., London, 1807–9), iii, p. 532.

27 Diary of Henry Machyn, p. 309, 13 June 1563. Machyn also records a fire at Holborn in 1559 and at Barbican in 1563 at pp. 211, 308.

28 Entick, New and accurate history, ii, p. 50.

29 LMA ACC/1017/1029; Brian Wright, Insurance fire brigades, 1680–1929: the birth of the fire service (Stroud, 2008).

30 Pearson, Insuring, p. 34. On parish fire engines, LMA Q/SHR/91, LMA P69/EDK/B/032/MS20396.

31 Metropolitan Water Board, The water supply of London (London, 1949), p. 32; Blackstone, British fire service, pp. 61, 78, 158; Rosemary Weinstein, ‘New urban demands in early modern London’, in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., Living and dying in London (London, 1991), pp. 29–40, at pp. 34, 39; Pearson, Insuring, pp. 79, 83–4; W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale edition of Horace Walpole's correspondence (48 vols., London, 1937–83), xxv, p. 577 and n. 5, Walpole to Mann, 7 May 1785. The best study of London's water supply is Carry van Lieshout, ‘London's changing waterscapes – the management of water in eighteenth-century London’ (Ph.D., London, 2012). I am grateful to Carry van Lieshout for allowing me to read her excellent thesis. Mark S. R. Jenner, ‘From conduit community to commercial network? Water in London, 1500–1725’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner, eds., Londinopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London (Manchester, 2000), pp. 250–72. On Amsterdam, the best source, despite its self-promotional tone, remains Jan van der Heyden, A description of fire engines with water hoses and the method of fighting fires now used in Amsterdam, trans. and introd. by Lettie Stibbe Multhauf (Canton, MA, 1996; orig. publ. 1690).

32 John Strype, A survey of the cities of London and Westminster (2 vols., London, 1720), i, pp. 227–8.

33 Cornel Zwierlein, Der gezähmte Prometheus: Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne (Göttingen, 2011), p. 108.

34 Macadam, Joyce, ‘English weather: the seventeenth-century diary of Ralph Josselin’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 43 (2012), pp. 221–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 237; Christian Pfister, Klimageschichte der Schweiz: 1525–1860; das Klima der Schweiz von 1525–1860 und seine Bedeutung in der Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Landwirtschaft (3rd edn, 2 vols. in 1, Bern and Stuttgart, 1988); Manley, Gordon, ‘Central England temperatures: monthly means 1659 to 1973’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 100 (1974), pp. 389–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du climat (2 vols., Paris, 2004–6), ii, p. 197 and passim.

35 Gideon Harvey, An historical narrative of the great and terrible Fire of London, September 2nd 1666 (London, 1769), p. 74; J. Bruce Williamson, History of the Temple (London, 1924), p. 525; Wright, Insurance fire brigades, p. 31.

36 Strype, Survey, i, p. 227.

37 Quoted in William Maitland, The history and survey of London from its foundation to the present time (2 vols., London, 1754), i, p. 437. Unknown correspondent to Lord Conway, undated [Sept. 1666], in Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton, eds., The Conway letters: the correspondence of Anne, Viscountesse Conway, Henry More, and their friends, 1642–1684 (revised edn, Oxford, 1992), p. 276.

38 Hanson, Great Fire, pp. 49–50; Roy Porter, London, a social history (London, 1994), p. 85; Porter, Great Fire, p. 54.

39 Keene, ‘Fire in London’, pp. 194, 199.

40 David Ormrod, The rise of commercial empires: England and the Netherlands in the age of mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 143–4.

41 Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the pines: the naval stores industry in the American South (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004), pp. 5–6; Bell, Great Fire, pp. 329, 331.

42 Ralph Davis, The rise of the English shipping industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (London, 1962), pp. 19–20, 219; Price, Jacob M., ‘What did merchants do? Reflections on British overseas trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History, 49 (1989), pp. 267–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 274.

43 Davis, Rise of English shipping, pp. 10, 15, 27, 304; Bucholz and Ward, London, p. 87.

44 Jones, Porter, and Turner, Gazetteer, pp. 16–26, 40.

45 Redstone, All Hallows Barking, p. 45; K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: the study of an early joint-stock company, 1600–1640 (London, 1965), p. 189; David Cressy, Saltpetre, the mother of gunpowder (Oxford, 2013), pp. 31–2, 91, 140. On continuing imports of saltpetre from India, see K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘The English East India Company’, in Jaap R. Bruijn and Femme S. Gaastra, eds., Ships, sailors and spices: East India companies and their shipping in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 49–80, at pp. 61–3.

46 Bell, Great Fire, p. 81. I have been unable to confirm the location of the East India Company's saltpetre warehouse. In the early 1670s, significant stocks were kept both at Woolwich and in the Minories, just outside the area burned in the Great Fire: Cressy, Saltpetre, p. 139.

47 Gerald Kutney, Sulfur: history, technology, applications & industry (2nd edn, Toronto, 2013), p. 44; LMA COL/CA/01/02/004, fo. 2 (1630). After 1666, squibs were banned almost every year: LMA COL/SJ/27/002–008.

48 Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 189; Nuala Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies: London and the Atlantic economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 253–5; L. M. Cullen, The brandy trade under the ancien regime : regional specialisation in the Charente (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 4–5.

49 Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Richard Griffin Braybrooke (2 vols., London and New York, NY, 1879; orig. publ. 1825), 5 and 6 Sept. 1666.

50 Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642–1650 (Aldershot, 2004), p. 182; Bucholz and Ward, London, p. 87; also Robert Brenner, Merchants and revolution: commercial change, political conflict, and London's overseas traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 43.

51 Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies, pp. 142, 218.

52 Coates, Impact of the English Civil War, pp. 10–12, 87; Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies, pp. 57, 64, 143; Brenner, Merchants and revolution, p. 113.

53 Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies, p. 267; Brenner, Merchants and revolution, p. 25.

54 Ian S. Hornsey, A history of beer and brewing (Cambridge, 2003), p. 371; Steve Rappaport, Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989), p. 143; John Hatcher, The history of the British coal industry, i:Before 1700: towards the age of coal (Oxford, 1993), pp. 439–41; Bell, Great Fire, p. 227.

55 Hatcher, British coal industry, pp. 440–502; Bell, Great Fire, p. 175.

56 French, Christopher J., ‘“Crowded with traders and a great commerce”: London's domination of English overseas trade, 1700–1775’, London Journal, 17 (1992), pp. 27–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Rise of English shipping, pp. 183–4; K. N. Chaudhuri, The trading world of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 343–53; Cressy, Saltpetre, p. 147.

57 Bucholz and Ward, London, p. 89; M. Dorothy George, London life in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1966; first publ. 1925), pp. 42–3.

58 Hatcher, British coal industry; Randall Monier-Williams, The tallow-chandlers of London (4 vols., London, 1970–7), iii, pp. 90–112; Beverly Lemire, Fashion's favourite: the cotton trade and the consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991). See the survey of the London economy, 1680–1730, in Peter Earle, The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989), pp. 17–51.

59 Daniel Defoe, A review of the state of the British nation, iv, p. 606, 31 Jan. 1708.

60 Lorna Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain 1660–1760 (2nd edn, London and New York, NY, 1996), pp. 8, 25–8, 48–51; Earle, Making, pp. 292–300. See also Guillery, Small house, p. 9. This was not confined to London: Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 122–85.

61 Jones, Porter, and Turner, Gazetteer, table 12; Margaret Makepeace, The East India Company's London workers: management of the warehouse labourers, 1800–1858 (Woodbridge, 2010), p. 19.

62 Entick, New and accurate history, ii, p. 375; Lewis, ed., Walpole's correspondence, xxv, p. 577, Walpole to Mann, 7 May 1785.

63 Entick, New and accurate history, ii, p. 516, iii, pp. 30, 127, 161, 221.

64 Fire Office Union, kept in Gutter-Lane by Cheapside, for insuring goods and merchandizes by mutual contribution, on the same easy terms with the Hand-in-Hand office for houses (London, Apr. 1735), Guildhall Library, Broadside 11.91; Clive Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance and the development of British insurance, i:1782–1870 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 334–42.

65 LMA MJ/SP/0/001; Fire Office Union, Guildhall Library, Broadside 11.91; see also Broadside 32.66, Abstract of the deed of settlement of the amicable contributionship, or, Hand-in-Hand Fire Office, ‘May 30, 1772’; Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane and Thébaud-Sorger, Marie, ‘Risque d'incendie en milieu urbain et “industrious revolution”: le cas de Londres dans le dernier tiers du XVIIIe siècle’, Le Mouvement Social, 249 (2014), pp. 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 26, 27.

66 Dickson, Sun Insurance, p. 83 n. 1.

67 The British chronologist, comprehending every material occurrence, ecclesiastical, civil, or military, relative to England and Wales, from the invasion of the Romans to the present time (3 vols., London, 1775), iii, 1 May 1755; LMA CLA/047/LJ/13/1715/005; The case of the merchants-sufferers in the late dreadful fire, by the burning of sugar, ginger, oil, and sarsaparilla ([London],1715); Entick, New and accurate history, ii, p. 878, 15 Mar. 1720.

68 Trebilcock, Phoenix Assurance, i, pp. 57–9, 335. On the distribution of many industries that posed a significant fire risk, see David Barnett, London, hub of the Industrial Revolution: a revisionary history, 1775–1825 (London, 1998).

69 Jones, Porter, and Turner, Gazetteer, pp. 16–26, 44; British chronologist, ii, 4 Dec. 1716.

70 M. J. Power, ‘East London housing in the seventeenth century’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and order in English towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972), pp. 237–62, at pp. 237–46.

71 LMA inventory 60.225, ‘Middlesex County Records, Calendar of Session Rolls’, followed by ‘Middlesex Sessions Books’, nos. 769 (Jan. 1718/19), 1039 (Jan. 1746/7).

72 Pearson, Insuring, pp. 79–80.

73 Ibid., pp. 59–60; Blackstone, British fire service, p. 90; James Braidwood, Fire prevention and fire extinction (London, 1866), p. 40.