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On the morning of 6 September 1666, fires still burned across London. However, they were either contained or such that could be put out one-by-one. The Great Fire of London, as a single conflagration, had been tamed. At this point, it was possible to begin reckoning the extent of the damage. Mercifully, very few people, perhaps just half a dozen in fact, had lost their...
As dawn broke on Wednesday 5 September 1666, 355 years ago today, some 60 per cent of the city of London had been laid waste by the greatest fire ever to have engulfed England's biggest and most important city. We have already seen how, on the previous day, things had begun to move in the Londoners' favour. By blowing up entire streets with gunpowder, those fighting the...
When they woke on Tuesday 4 September 1666, Londoners must have felt like they had spent the last two days in hell. Incredibly, things would get worse before they got better. The king, the duke of York and many of London's aldermen and governors continued to lead the containment operation from the front, but the fire seemed unstoppable. By the end of this third day,...
As morning broke on this day 355 years ago, few Londoners had slept well. Certainly, Samuel Pepys was up at 4am, with the rest of his household, loading his possessions into a cart to remove them from London. Even at that hour, the streets were crowded with people doing the same. There had been no respite from the fire overnight and more Londoners faced the...
355 years ago today, Samuel Pepys was woken by Jane, one of his maids, at 3 o’clock in the morning. Pepys was no stranger to nocturnal liaisons with the staff, but this was no time for a fumble. Jane had seen ‘a great fire’ close to London Bridge and she was worried enough to wake her master. Pepys pulled on a nightgown, went to his...
Recently, I walked the route of London’s old city walls using an app called Relive to trace and then map my walk. The stone walls, which surrounded London to the east, north and west were built early in the third century when Britain was under Roman rule. They were maintained and used throughout the Middle Ages, only becoming obsolete in the sixteenth century. The route...
As King Henry II passed December 1170 in Normandy, France, he began to receive reports of Thomas Becket’s inflammatory behaviour in England. Because many of our sources for the denouement of the quarrel between Henry and Becket are contradictory, the exact sequence of events is hard to reconstruct with certainty. It seems that Henry, although a man famous for his temper, was not provoked to anger – initially...
On 30 November 1170, that is 850 years ago today, Thomas Becket set sail for England from Wissant in the county of Boulogne. On 1 December he landed at Sandwich in Kent. He had not set foot in England for six years following his clash with King Henry II and subsequent exile. He came back to a mixed reception. Becket’s biographers play up the warmth shown to him by the...
There has been, this year, more attention paid to the meaning and importance of monuments and statues in the public realm than in any year I can remember. While I would not say that the debate has always been constructive and reasoned, as someone interested in these material historical sources, I am glad that more of us are now thinking about the memorials which we...
