The fire that started in a king's baker's oven on Pudding Lane burned for four days and left roughly 70,000 Londoners homeless; the Frenchman hanged for setting it had been at sea, and did not land in England until two days after it began.

Thomas Farriner raked out his bakehouse oven on Saturday night and went up to bed. He insisted on it afterward, to a parliamentary committee and again at the Old Bailey. What he could not account for was the smoke that woke his journeyman a few hours later.

How the Great Fire of London started

The fire took hold in Farriner's shop on Pudding Lane, in the parish of St Margaret New Fish Street, between one and two o'clock on the morning of Sunday, September 2, 1666. Farriner held the post of Conduct of the King's Bakehouse and supplied biscuit to the Navy; Samuel Pepys, writing later that same day, called the place simply "the King's baker's house in Pudding-lane."

For 357 years nobody knew who found the flames first. In 2023 Kate Loveman of the University of Leicester and Meriel Jeater of the London Museum named him: Thomas Dagger, a journeyman baker, identified from a letter the MP Sir Edward Harley wrote that October, now in the British Library. Dagger was "waked with ye choak of ye Smoke" and got out through a window. Farriner escaped the same way with his daughter, who was badly scorched.

Harley's next clause is seven words long. "His mayd was burnt in ye Hous."

No source anyone has found records her name. She was the first person the fire killed.

Why nobody pulled the houses down in time

The way to stop a city fire in the seventeenth century was demolition: fire hooks, and the authority to pull down other people's houses fast.

Sir Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor, was fetched there in the small hours and declined to act: the owners could not be found. The remark attributed to him ever since is "Pish! A woman might piss it out," which is the sort of line that survives because it is too good to check. The judgment underneath it was ordinary enough. London burned all the time.

By Sunday afternoon, when Pepys ran him down in Cannon Street, Bloodworth had nothing left: "Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it."

Charles II took the response away from the City and handed it to his brother James, Duke of York, who set up command posts and let the Navy blow firebreaks with gunpowder. The easterly wind that had driven the flames west along Thames Street since the first hour dropped on Tuesday night. That is what actually stopped it.

What the fire destroyed

Four days. Some 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall and St Paul's Cathedral, across 436 acres. Roughly 70,000 of the City's 80,000 residents lost their homes and camped in the fields toward Islington and Highgate.

John Evelyn wrote the sentence everybody still quotes on September 4, with the cathedral still burning: "the stones of Paul's flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream." Three days later he walked the ruins, the ground hot enough to burn his shoes.

Pepys was more practical. He spent Tuesday evening in his garden with Sir William Penn, digging a hole to bury their wine, and put his Parmesan cheese in with it. (Sir William Batten had dug an earlier one for his own wine, and Pepys laid his Navy Office papers in it.) Parmesan was an expensive import, and it has outlived every other line he wrote that week.

Who was Robert Hubert?

Nobody in London believed a bakehouse accident. Within days mobs were hunting foreigners, and Parliament had opened an inquiry.

Robert Hubert was a watchmaker from Rouen, roughly twenty-six, in poor health and, by the Earl of Clarendon's account, not sound in his mind. He confessed. First he said he had fired a building in Westminster; told the fire never reached Westminster, he moved the story to Pudding Lane and a grenade of gunpowder and brimstone pushed through a window, on the orders of a man he called Stephen Peidloe.

Farriner told the court there was no such window. Three members of the Farriner family sat on the jury. Hubert was convicted anyway and hanged at Tyburn on October 27, 1666, and a crowd tore his body apart as it was carried to the Barber-Surgeons for dissection.

The Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor at the time, recorded that neither the judges nor anyone else present believed him guilty, only that he was "a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life." The captain of the Swedish ship Maid of Stockholm testified afterward that he had put Hubert ashore two days after the fire began.

How many people died in the Great Fire?

Six. That is what the parish registers support, and it is the number on most museum panels.

It is also, almost certainly, wrong in a direction nobody can measure. Neil Hanson has argued the real toll runs to several hundred and quite possibly several thousand, counting the unregistered poor and those who died of exposure in the camps that winter. Jacob Field puts it lower: above six, but unlikely to reach the hundreds. Nobody can settle it: the parishes that kept the records burned with everything else.

The fire is also credited with ending the Great Plague, which had killed something like 100,000 Londoners the year before. That does not hold up either. The London Museum points out that plague deaths were already falling by the winter of 1665, and that the worst-hit parishes lay outside the burned area.

What the City built instead

Christopher Wren had a plan on the king's desk by September 11, nine days after the first sparks. John Evelyn submitted one too. Both died within weeks, killed by the thing that kills most grand urban schemes: freeholds. Thousands of freeholders wanted their own plots back.

So London went back up where it had stood, on its medieval street plan, governed by regulation rather than design. The Act for Rebuilding the City of London, signed in February 1667, banned timber on exterior walls, graded house types by the width of the street they faced, capped what workmen could charge, and paid for it with a duty on coal. It also authorized a column.

That column is the Monument: 202 feet of Portland stone by Wren and Robert Hooke, finished in 1677 and standing 202 feet from Farriner's oven. In 1681 the City cut an inscription into it blaming Catholic conspiracy; that came off in 1830, 149 years later, at the urging of Charles Pearson, then a Common Councilman for Bishopsgate.

What is left of it now

The fire produced the insurance industry more or less directly. Nicholas Barbon, a builder who made a fortune on the rebuild, opened the Fire Office behind the Royal Exchange in 1680 and hired men to put out fires at addresses he had covered. Their imitators' brigades merged in the 1830s into what became the London Fire Brigade.

At Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, where the fire stopped, a small gilded wooden boy sits under a sign explaining that it was "Occasion'd by the Sin of Gluttony" — because it ran from Pudding Lane to Pye Corner and somebody in the 1670s could not resist the symmetry. In 1986 the Worshipful Company of Bakers apologized to the Lord Mayor on Farriner's behalf, 320 years late.

The archive is not finished. Dagger's name came out of a letter catalogued in the British Library the whole time, and the Bakers' Company registers putting him in Farriner's shop by 1664 are at Guildhall Library. Everything needed to name the first man to see the fire sat on a shelf for three and a half centuries. The maid's name is probably on a shelf too.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Great Fire of London" and "Robert Hubert"
• Samuel Pepys, Diary, entries for 2–4 September 1666
• Kate Loveman and Meriel Jeater, "Great Fire of London: how we uncovered the man who first found the flames," The Conversation, 2023
• The London Museum, "Three myths about the Great Fire of London"
• The Monument, "The Great Fire of London FAQs"
• British Library, "Robert Hubert and the Great Fire of London"