A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Great Plague and Great Fire of London
Join Kelli as she goes over the Great Plague of London, 1665-1666, which ended in part thanks to the Great Fire of London, 1666.
These are two big events that killed off a good chunk of London's population and destroyed four-fifths of the city. The new London that was built was better suited to withstand fires and plague, and though it still had some sanitation problems, the days of plague-infested roofs and damaging fires was over.
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The Great Fire of London
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
Before we begin, a quick reminder that you can support me and the show on Patreon. And subscribe to my YouTube channel to help the channel grow! I appreciate all the love and support, and all of the relevant links are in the description.
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So last week, for my fiftieth episode of the APHOUT podcast, I talked about my favorite topic - the Black Death. And in that episode, we learned all about that most famous of plague pandemics, which wiped out roughly ⅓ of the affected populations of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. But as we know, the Black Death was not the only instance of plague - it came back in waves time and time again. And there was a particularly bad one that affected London in 1665 and 1666. And a major reason plague stopped there and didn’t get any worse is because of the Great Fire of London.
So in today’s episode, I want to talk about the plague and the fire. What happened? How bad did things get? How many people died, from both plague and the fire? How are the two connected, and what happened to London as a result?
As always, we’ll start with the historical context to get a good sense of 17th-century London. From there, we’ll talk about the plague pandemic that ravaged the city, how the fire actually saved London from further death, and what changed as a result.
So let’s get started!
Historical Context
There was… well there was actually a lot going on in 17th-century England. This was the Stuart period in England, and a lot happened, like the English Civil Wars. Let me give you the briefest of tangential summaries, just to give you a sense of the times… sorry… in advance… to my editor…
The Englsh Civil Wars were conflicts between Parliament and King Charles I over the balance of power between the monarchy and the nobility. Essentially, Charles believed he and his family had divine right to rule over England, and that absolute monarchy was the only way to effectively run a government. The nobility, and more broadly the Parliament, disagreed. We can trace this balance of power conflict wayyy back - think of the Magna Carta, signed in 1215, when King John was essentially strong-armed into limiting the power of the monarchy, and also conceding that the King was not above the law. Charles I’s belief in divine right and absolute power over his people challenged the precedents set by the Magna Carta. And the people were not having it. As a result, three Civil Wars broke out between Charles and his Parliament.
Now in addition to the political tensions in this period, we also have religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants. This all started with King Henry VIII. You know, the one with six wives, who rejected Catholicism and established the Anglican church in the previous century - the 1500s. More specifically, 1534. But in the Stuart period, we have both Catholic and Protestant monarchs… my bigger point here is there was a lot of religious and political tension.
So much so, in fact, that King Charles I was tried and executed for committing treason - the text of this is, quote, “by the fundamental Laws of the Kingdom, it is treason in the King of England, for the Time being, to levy War against the Parliament and Kingdom of England.” They beheaded him on January 30th, 1649 for being a, quote, “tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy.” And for those of you wondering - it was a beheading by sword. And it was one, clean strike, which is good. Sometimes the executioner misses, or doesn’t chop all the way through, and it just gets extra bloody and horrific.
So that is the century of England we’re talking about here. And shortly after Charles I’s execution, his son and heir Charles II was chased away to mainland Europe, and Oliver Cromwell ruled as “Lord Protector” for a while - it was an 11-year period where England didn’t have a monarchy, but a republic, and we generally call that era in English history “the Protectorate”. That all ended in 1660; Cromwell died in 1658, his son was an ineffective ruler, so the Protectorate experiment clearly wasn’t working and Charles II was brought back over to rule.
Now if you listened to my previous episode on the Black Death, you might remember that many people in 14th-century Europe believed that the plague was a punishment from God - that they had done something wrong, and this was what they got. Or they weren’t pious enough.
And what’s really interesting to me is that that fear was alive and present during this political and religious chaos, too. What would God make of all this religious conflict? The Catholics were worried about the strength of Protestantism in England and what would happen as a result. The Protestants thought the same of the Catholic minority. How would God react to beheading a King? Especially one that preached divine right - that God chose him to rule. Loyalists, those who were in favor of a strong monarchy, were scared of the ramifications of Charles’ execution and the establishment of a Republic. The Parliamentarians feared that bringing Charles II back would unleash a plague on England. It was a tense time, and given England’s history with plague, the people were afraid they would be punished for all these indiscretions.
And then five years after Charles II came back into power, in 1665, plague arrived.
The Great Plague, 1665
Now we have some excellent primary sources about the Great Plague of London - chroniclers like Samuel Pepys [peeps] lived through Charles I’s execution, Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and also an attack by the Dutch in 1666 as part of the Anglo-Dutch Wars - that’s a whole thing too, but not the focus of today’s episode. Like I said, there was a lot going on in 17th-century England.
Much of the primary source information we have comes from men like Pepys. There were later works too, like Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, but that was written decades later in 1722. And if the name Daniel Defoe sounds familiar to you… he also wrote Robinson Crusoe.
Now after the Black Death, there were several other “bigger” plague epidemics in England. In 1563, around 18,000 people died in London alone. It was so intense that Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, left London with her Court to quarantine at Windsor, and threatened execution if anyone from London followed them there. She was super afraid of getting the plague - and rightly so.
In 1592, another plague epidemic came rolling around. But this time, the winter was mild, so the plague lasted through to the next year, and again about 18,000 Londoners died.
The next big plague epidemic in London was 1625, and following cues from the previous ones, everyone who could flee the city… fled. It was the only way to make sure they didn’t get sick. Around 40,000 Londoners died during this one.
Sure, there were some minor outbreaks in the in-between years, but they were nothing compared to the Great Plague of 1665.
The first hints that this would be a big plague epidemic came that June, when a big fair was canceled. According to Samuel Pepys’ diary, the plague was ravaging Amsterdam across the English Channel in 1663, and most feared that it would hop over to England. I mean, Amsterdam is only 180 miles, give or take, from the entrance to the Thames; even closer to East Anglia. It didn’t take long for it to appear in London.
Now I’ve already gone over the plague, how it spreads, its symptoms, and whatnot in my previous video on the Black Death, so for more specifics on Yersinia pestis, go listen to that episode. The plague spread mostly in the same way - infected fleas, who bring infected plague blood from a rodent to humans through their bites. What I’m more concerned with in today’s episode is how the plague connects to the fire. And the best way to explore that connection is to look at how the city tried to combat the plague.
From previous examples, we know that those who could afford to leave the city… left. And that was no exception here. But most people in London didn’t have a summer palace, or the opportunity to leave, so they were stuck. The plague also likely started in St. Giles-in-the-field, a poor and densely populated area north of Westminster, only a few blocks away from where the British Museum is today. So what did they have to deal with, and how did the city try to prevent the spread of the plague?
Well, we get some good insight from Samuel Pepys, who was there. Quote:
“I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me.” End quote.
Red crosses were painted on the doors of houses that had plague inside. When plague appeared in a house, the household was sealed with the whole family inside, essentially condemning the whole family to die, unless someone had a great immune system and fought off the infection. And the quarantine would last 40 days. So if you walked around London, and saw a red cross painted on the door, you knew to avoid that area like the plague. Hah. Sorry, I couldn’t resist :)
Now according to Daniel Defoe, who again wrote his story decades later, so we have to take this with a grain of salt, there were men who went around at night with carts collecting the dead bodies. If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that scene with the bring out your dead! criers was inspired by this. Daniel Defoe, in his book, writes, quote,
“It is to be noted here that the dead-carts in the city were not confined to particular parishes, but one cart went through several parishes, according as the number of dead presented; nor were they tied to carry the dead to their respective parishes, but many of the dead taken up in the city were carried to the burying-ground in the out-parts for want of room.” End quote.
In short - the dead were taken to wherever to be buried. Wherever there was room. And we know, through lots of archaeological evidence and church records, that many were thrown into communal plague pits - mass graves where the dead would be buried en masse because there was just no room and no time for individual burials. It reminds me of my episode on the Catacombs of Paris; they had the same problem with all the dead bodies from the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.
Now in London, there was a big pit called the Great Pit at Aldgate, just north of the Tower of London, and another northwest of that in Finsbury Fields. Archaeologists discovered a mass grave in 2015 at the Bedlam burial ground in East London, associated with the 1665 plague, and were able to confirm that it was in fact plague that was killing people. This particular pit had about 3,500 bodies in it.
It was a rough job carting the dead out of the city; you’d be walking around all night, loading up a cart with the heavy weight of multiple corpses, then wheel it out of the city and dump them into the pits before going back for more. They wouldn’t go into any red cross houses if they still had anyone left alive inside. They would just ring a bell to let families know the cart was outside. If the family had a body, they’d bring it out.
To help ward off the plague, the cart men would soak a cloth in vinegar and wear it across their face to ward off miasma - bad, stinky air that most believed caused disease. But of course that didn’t actually help, and those wheeling the plague carts would die off, and the city would employ the next guy looking for work and willing to risk his life for it. And soon enough, they’d start collecting bodies by day, because there were just too many to do at night alone. This is according to Samuel Pepys, anyway.
To make sure that people didn’t escape from a quarantine house, there were watchmen posted on street corners. But the watchmen would also inform the cart pushers if nobody else in the house responded, so they could go in and clear it out.
But despite London trying to quarantine the sick, and keep them from moving around, plague still spread throughout London and beyond. A bundle of cloth was sent from London to Eyam [ayy-um], in Derbyshire, which is in the Peak District in the triangle of land between Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield. The cloth bundle was infested with plague-y fleas, and up to 80% of the village died. It would have been worse, but the local clergyman named William Mompesson persuaded the villagers not to flee, but to stay, get sick, and prevent it from spreading outside the village. And it worked. 260 people died in Eyam, earning it the nickname Village of the Damned and sometimes Plague Village. But the town-wide quarantine stopped it from spreading any further, saving a lot of lives.
So this tells us, then, that despite the quarantining measures, despite their attempts to remove the dead, ward off “miasma”, and police the sick so they didn’t leave and spread the disease… it got out anyway. And because we know now that it was the fleas spreading plague, and fleas lived on rats, it was the areas where rats congregated that were most affected by plague. The dirty, cramped, overly-populated areas of London. Which happened to be where the poor lived and were relegated. So of course, many of the upper classes who were able to isolate or leave the city, and therefore didn’t get plague, associated plague with the poor, not the real cause - bad sanitation.
In September 1665, it was reported that 7,165 Londoners died in one week. The total London death toll for this plague epidemic is recorded as 68,596, though I’ve seen some historians estimate that it is probably closer to 100,000. But about 15% of the population died - which is massive.
Plague cases lessened over the winter of 1665-1666, because the cold killed off a lot of the fleas that spread bubonic plague, but it was still lingering around in 1666. The epidemic in London only really ended with the Great Fire of London.
The Fire Begins
In the early morning hours on September 6th, 1666, the fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane. Yes, it was a bakery on Pudding Lane. I love it when stuff like that happens. :)
We’re not 100% sure what caused the fire, but most believe it was a spark from the oven that jumped out and ignited a nearby pile of kindling and/or wood. Regardless of how it happened, the whole bakery slash house was soon on fire.
And just to circle back to my context - Thomas Farriner was King Charles II’s personal baker! The Stuart King exiled to the mainland for a while until loyalists brought him back after Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate failed. And Charles II factors into the Great Fire story as well, so I’ll get back to him in a bit.
Now fires were common enough that they wouldn’t always warrant a massive response. So when the Lord Mayor of London was notified, he dismissed it and apparently said, quote, “Pish! A woman might [pee] it out!”
Rude. And untrue. Because the fire started rapidly spreading. The summer had been hot and dry, so the fire danger was pretty high. And many of the buildings were either made of wood, or made of brick with wooden roofs, so there was plenty to burn. Some of the houses were also built in the wattle and daub style - a mixture of reeds, animal dung, straw, and water. Pretty flammable stuff. 300 houses quickly caught fire and collapsed, and a wind pushed the fire East, demolishing more structures in its path.
Today, our immediate thoughts go to a fire department, right? Couldn’t the firemen just go out there and help? I’ve got a good friend who's a fireman - HI BRYAN! - so that’s where my brain goes.
But in 17th century London, there wasn’t a fire department. Or specific firefighters who would be sent in to save the day. Instead, it was citizens, those watchmen, soldiers, whoever was around, with buckets of water or hand-operated water pumps. Think, like, a giant super soaker water gun that took three people to operate.
But the primary way to prevent the spread of fire in 17th century London was to employ firebreaks - basically, tear down walls, buildings, whatever you could around the fire so it has nowhere to travel. Then you could focus on putting out the contained fire with buckets of water. We still do firebreaks today with forest fires. You’re essentially drawing a line around the fire to contain it to one area, then focusing on putting it out. But in the act of doing this, people’s homes and businesses would be destroyed, right? So it wasn’t a great solution for the middle of a crowded city that was still dealing with plague, mind you, and you couldn’t just decide to do this anyway. You needed the Lord Mayor’s permission.
But the Lord Mayor wasn’t having it, because, and I’ll paraphrase his words again, he thought the fire was so weak that a woman might be able to pee it out. So a firebreak was not employed right away.
It was actually King Charles II who ordered the firebreak, and it was our friend and chronicler Samuel Pepys who informed him of the fire. But by the time Londoners started to employ firebreaks, it was too late; the fire was too big.
The fire spread to the London Bridge, and it destroyed a massive waterwheel there, cutting off a big source of water that the people needed to fight the fires. And no, this is not when the London Bridge fell down, from that nursery rhyme; that was during a fire in 1135, and the thing was destroyed. It was later rebuilt with stone, so it survived ensuing fires. And actually, during this 1666 Great Fire, the bridge acted as a firebreak - there were some gaps in the market stands and houses and whatnot lining the bridge at the time, and these gaps stopped the fire from crossing south across the Thames.
Now not only did King Charles II authorize firebreaks and do his best to control the fires with the law, but he was also there. He had originally left London for Hampton Court, and later Oxford, to isolate from the plague. But he had returned in February 1666, when plague numbers were slightly less awful. So after ordering for firebreaks, he sailed down the Thames to check out the progress. When he saw that the fire was still raging, he called for even more drastic fire breaks. I’ve even read sources that say he helped with manning some water buckets, boosting the morale of his people and encouraging them to keep working hard. So that’s pretty neat.
Several important buildings were destroyed by the fire, including St. Paul’s Cathedral. The original Cathedral was first built in 1087 and finished in 1314. It had survived several fires before this and was in the process of restoration at the time of the Great Fire. Because of the English Civil Wars, progress on the restoration had paused. But earlier that year, 1666, restoration had begun again, only for the whole thing to be swallowed up with fire and destroyed in the summer. Bummer. It was demolished and rebuilt, and that St. Paul’s Cathedral is the one you can visit today.
Now luckily, the fire only really burned for four days. The winds subsided, the firebreaks were finally working, and there was no fuel left for the fire to grow. Londoners were able to use their water buckets and hand pumps to put out the now-contained fire, and the whole crisis ended on September 5th, 1666. And though hundreds of thousands of people were now made homeless, it is reported that - miraculously - only 6 people died in the fire. I bet more died that weren’t reported or found, but still. The official death toll is six.
But the city itself was destroyed; only one-fifth of London was left standing. Which is massive. I mean we also need to consider that London was much, much smaller back then than it is now, but still. Four-fifths of London was destroyed. The loss of property was estimated at 5-7 million pounds, which is huge for the 17th century, right? A quick calculation in a British pound inflation calculator tells me that that is upwards of 1.3 billion pounds today.
But the fire also had the added benefit of burning much of the filth, hay, and other places where plague rats and their fleas lived, helping to end the plague epidemic that was definitely winding down by this point, but wasn’t completely gone. So that’s a bonus.
Post-Fire London
After the fire ended, things clearly had to change for London. The political and religious tensions in the Stuart period were bad enough. Alongside these horrible years of 1665-1666, also consider that you’ve got groups of settlers leaving England for settlements in the New World during this whole century, right? I mean Jamestown was alive and kicking by this point, and the Puritan colonies in New England are also going strong. So that’s all happening in the background. And then there was the English Civil Wars, the Protectorate… Like I’ve said a few times now, there was a lot going on in 17th-century England. But on top of all of this, the future threats of plague and now fire had to be dealt with decisively.
The King ordered several changes in London’s city planning to prevent future fires, and these changes also happened to help prevent infestations of rats and therefore outbreaks of plague. He called for buildings to be built with brick instead of wood, as it was clear that brick could survive a fire a lot better than something flammable. So the King essentially decreed that you must build your house with brick or stone, and if you don’t, it will be torn down.
Then, he called for all streets to be wide enough to serve as firebreaks - wide enough so that fires can’t jump from one house to another. Which is great, because prior to this, London streets were cramped. Houses leaned towards each other over the tiny narrow streets, giving a very claustrophobic effect while walking down them. And on that note, the King also decreed that no lanes or alleys should be built unless really needed. He didn’t want any houses near the river, presumably for better access to water for putting out fires, and certain trades should be placed together, like brewers, dyers, or bakers, so their fires would be contained to one area.
These are all really sensible ideas. Not only would they help in future fire outbreaks, but without knowing, they also helped the general sanitation levels in London - there would be fewer cramped places for rats and fleas to hide out. The new London was cleansed from its old, cramped past, and though it still had some room for improvement - see my episode on the London cholera epidemic - it was certainly a New London, and better than before. Today, you can find a monument near Pudding Lane where the fire began, a stark reminder of those terrible years, 1665 to 1666, when London had to deal with the plague and its worst fire. But at least it helped London grow from the vestiges of its cramped, dirty, medieval past to a new, early modern future.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Great Fire of London. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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