Plague and Fire

In the last days of October 1666, a watchmaker from Rouen named Robert Hubert was hanged at Tyburn for setting fire to London. He had confessed, first to starting it at Westminster, which had not burned, and then to pushing a fireball through a window in Pudding Lane. The judges who heard him did not believe him, and the master of the ship that had carried him later testified that he had not landed until the fire was two days old. He was hanged anyway, on the strength of his own story, because the city needed one.

That need is the subject of this book. In eighteen months London buried something like a hundred thousand of its people and then lost four-fifths of its walled centre, and from the first week the survivors began assigning the two disasters a meaning: God's judgment on a sinful city, then a Catholic plot, and later, when nobody believed in judgments or plots, a useful purge that burned out the plague and gave London a clean brick start. None of them describes what happened.

What happened is better documented than any urban disaster before it, because a navy clerk named Samuel Pepys wrote it down in shorthand every night, and John Evelyn watched both from the river.

Plague, Fire, and the City Rebuilt Where It Stood

Plague and Fire: The Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the City Wren Rebuilt, 1665–1723 tells the two disasters and the rebuilding as three movements of equal weight. Plague books end before the fire; fire books treat the rebuilding as an epilogue. Here each gets its due.

The first movement is the plague year: the disease and what ancient DNA from a Crossrail excavation confirmed about it in 2016; the weekly Bills of Mortality and John Graunt, who turned them into the first statistics; the orders that shut the sick in their own houses for a month behind a painted red cross; the flight of the court and the handful who stayed; Pepys's plague year; and Eyam. The second is the fire, told day by day and nearly street by street from Farriner's bakehouse at one in the morning on Sunday 2 September to the dropped wind on the Wednesday, then into the camps on Moorfields and Hubert's gallows.

The third movement is the one most books cut, and it is the most surprising. Wren, Evelyn and Hooke all drew grand new street plans within days, and all were rightly set aside. A Fire Court sitting at Clifford's Inn, without juries or lawyers' delay, settled thousands of disputes over who should pay to rebuild which house. A Rebuilding Act made London brick. And an Oxford astronomer who had designed a couple of buildings was handed fifty-one parish churches and a cathedral, and worked on them until his death in 1723.

Why I Wrote This

I had already written about the Black Death, and the question I kept being asked was where the plague went. England's answer, the one I was told at the foot of the Monument, was that the Great Fire burned it out. The first time I put the weekly Bills beside a map of what burned, that answer fell apart in an afternoon: the plague had died away a year before the fire, in suburbs the fire never reached. What held me was the question underneath: why Londoners needed the two disasters to be one. And then there was the Fire Court. A few judges sat in a hall off Fleet Street and settled thousands of property disputes in a handful of years, mostly without lawyers and without appeal, and the city got rebuilt because of it. Nobody had ever told me that story. I wanted to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Great Fire of London really end the Great Plague?

No. Weekly plague deaths peaked at 7,165 in mid-September 1665 and were below two hundred a week by the turn of the year; the whole of 1666 added about two thousand plague deaths to the Bills, against 68,596 the year before. The fire burned the walled City, whose parishes had recorded a little under ten thousand plague deaths, and left untouched the suburbs that had recorded nearly sixty thousand. Why plague left England for good after the 1660s is a real open question, and the book leaves it open.

How many people died in the Great Plague and the Great Fire?

The Bills recorded 68,596 plague deaths and 97,306 burials of all causes in London in 1665. The true plague toll was higher, because Quakers and Nonconformists fell outside the parish system and families hid cases to avoid being shut up; a figure near a hundred thousand is a common estimate, and only an estimate. The fire's recorded death toll is six. Neil Hanson has argued it was far higher; the book presents his case and concludes that the honest answer is unknown, and probably more than six.

Do I need to read The Black Death or The English Civil War first?

No. This is a standalone book. The Black Death is pointed to once, where Chapter 1 explains what the disease was and how it had kept returning for three centuries, and The English Civil War is named where the Introduction sketches the London that Charles II rode back into in 1660. Neither is required.

Does the book cover Eyam, the plague village?

Yes, in a full chapter: the cloth from London, the tailor's assistant George Viccars, the rector William Mompesson, the cordon of June 1666, and Catherine Mompesson's death that August. It also sets out the modern doubts about the traditional toll of about 260 and about what the cordon achieved, and how much of the familiar telling was shaped by nineteenth-century writers.

How much of the book is about Christopher Wren and the rebuilding?

Roughly a third. Part Three runs from the plans of September 1666 through the Fire Court and the Rebuilding Act to the fifty-one City churches, the Monument and St Paul's. Robert Hooke gets equal billing, and the question of how much of Wren's church work was his is left open, as the evidence leaves it.

If You Liked This, You Might Like

• The Black Death — the same disease at its first arrival three centuries earlier, the book this one looks back to when it asks what plague was and where it went.
• The Antonine Plague — another capital counting its dead, and another society deciding what the epidemic meant.
• Justinian and Theodora — plague in sixth-century Constantinople, and a ruler who answered it with a dome that still stands.
• Cahokia — a city bigger than medieval London that vanished without a diarist, the measure of what Pepys and Evelyn gave us.

Two disasters, one city, and the fifty-eight years it took to decide what they meant and to rebuild on the same streets as before.

A standalone history on the English shelf, five years after The English Civil War ends.