England under Charles II. from the Restoration to the Treaty of Nimeguen, 1660-1678: English History from Contemporary Writers
Taylor, W. F.
1889
Another account of the Fire, how it got such firm hold.
Narrative of the late Fire in London. Edw. Waterhouse, Lond., . | |
The time when it began . . .was about three of the clock on a Sunday morning, a time when most persons, especially of the poorer sort, were but newly in bed and in their first deep sleep. . . The place wherein it first began . . was Pudding Lane | |
. . this little pitiful lane, crowded behind Little Eastcheap on the west, St. Botolph's Lane on the east, and Thames Street on the south of it was the place where the fire originated, and that forwarded by a baker's stack of wood in the house, and by all the neighbouring houses, which were as so many matches to kindle and carry it on . . . thus the fire meeting with the Star Inn on Fish Street Hill on the back of it, and that inn full of hay and other combustibles, and with the houses opposite to it, and closed with it at the top, burned three ways at once, into Thames Street (the lodge of all combustibles, | |
73 | oil, hemp, flax, pitch, tar, cordage, hops, wines, brandies, and other materials favourable to fire, all heavy goods being warehoused there near the water side) . . . and in all this savage progress met with no opposition from engines or other artifices |
. . There being no rain of a long time before the fire, and both the springs low and the waterworks at the Bridgefoot which carried water into that part of the city burnt down the first day of the fire . . . This . . . fire took into its possession 81 parish churches and at least six or seven chapels and other churches answerable to them, amongst which the famous cathedral of St. Paul was one, so incinerating the glory and emasculating the vigour and firmness of them that the standing walls are (for the most part) unable to bear new roofs, the sturdy supporters of them being enervated, the monuments in them burnt to powder, the bells in the steeples melted, the vaults underneath pierced, the stones of the outside so scaled as if the fire was greedy to eat out all firmness in them. | |
Flagellum Dei. London, . | |
In three days and three nights, of about four hundred and sixty acres of ground on which the city of London stood it destroyed three hundred and fifty, which is at the rate of four parts in five, it consumed about twelve thousand houses, eighty-seven parish churches, besides six or seven consecrated chapels, and the magnificent cathedral church of St. Paul's, the public and most excellent buildings of the Exchange, Guildhall, Customhouse, and almost all the | |
74 | halls belonging to every private company, besides an innumerable quantity of goods of all sorts. |
