In
1666 most of medieval London was destroyed by a catastrophic
fire. The fire began on the night of 2 September about 2 am
in Pudding Lane in the hearth of the house of a merchant supplier
called Thomas Farriner. From there it spread slowly westwards
through the city for the next three days, driven by "unnatural"
easterly winds, and destroying most of medieval London. It
is just as well it spread westwards; if it had gone east then
it would have consumed the Tower of London, which was used
at that time as an ammunition dump.
That's
the modern explanation. But Georgian Londoners, like their
seventeenth-century counterparts, believed a different story.
Not only was Farriner convincing in explaining that he had
carefully checked his hearths on the night of the fire, and
there was no means by which they could have caught fire, a
man called Robert Hubert admitted setting the fire by throwing
bombs into Farriner's house. Not only that, he claimed to
have had accomplices had stopped the water cocks for the water
supply of London so that the fire could not be fought effectively
(during the fire the reservoirs of water kept in the city
for such an eventuality were strangely dry). Hubert (who claimed
he was an agent for the French) was tried and executed for
the crime ... but today both trial and guilty plea are forgotten,
and everyone blames the open door of Farriner's oven.
