The Things I’ve Seen

“I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed.” - Marco Polo on his deathbed, 1324, apparently? Uncharted said so.

“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Pierre de Fermat, though that was about maths.

I need to take a step back and write some simpler articles for a bit. I tend to see things and ask questions and then, well, I end up sifting through Cold War body counts or property records of tourist areas. While I think that’s part of the charm, the other part is actually giving you a peek into that on a timely basis. As G.I. Joe said, “Knowing is half the battle,” but the other half has to include showing up in the first place. To that end, by request, I dug into my archive of seen things to pull up a pretty cool monument in the heart of London. This issue, we discuss the Monument to the Great Fire of London in 1666.

How we got here

The Great Fire of London was one of those things which is Great in the sense that it was expansive. With the successful adoption of a sense of goodness, or at least general approval, the word “great” has become a bit confusing at times. This fire was terrible, not good, not to be approved of. It was, however, large in scope, and as such, it’s Great in that sense.

Anyway, we’ll get to that. I don’t want to minimise¹ this tragedy, but lots of cities have had great fires, and I’ll be honest, I really didn’t know much other than there was a big bakery fire in the mid mumbles something hundreds. So, when I went to London for a work trip, I wasn’t really looking for…you know, a Great Fire of London museum. I did, however, go on a bit of a walkabout. I saw the HMS Belfast, supped and drank at the Prospect of Whitby² , and in general just walked around seeing. This is a city that’s been around for around 2000 years³ which definitely isn’t the oldest, but it puts it up there. One can trip over history, quite literally, more so when you’re a clumsy oaf like me.

Imagine my surprise when I did not need to scuff my toe cap or risk a fall when I came across this plaque on the side of a building at the corner of Pudding Lane and, I kid you not, Monument Street:

I couldn’t really put to words what I felt at the time, but it felt like a bit of a letdown. This is it? Wasn’t that a really big fire? I couldn’t remember, but I could remember that it was a fire. When you get a fire with a name and schoolchildren hear about it, that’s a massive historical touch point. That leaves a scar on its people. It changes the course of a city. If it was such a Great (size not quality) event…why does it only merit a plaque?

A bit of background

I see multiple references to the Great Fire of London burning from 2-5 September of 1666. As we’ll find out later, though, these dates are etched into artifacts created before 1752. On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1752, residents of English territories went to sleep and woke up on Thursday, September 14th. England was joining much of Europe in moving from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar. I promised I wouldn’t get off topic, and calendar changes are for the most part not a thing I’ve seen⁴ , so I didn’t pursue this further. It’d probably be about 10 days off in 1666 if a quick DuckDuckGo-ing is accurate, so in our current calendar that was probably 12-15 September…ish? Bad me! No calendar segues!

The specific date is far less interesting than the fact that it burned across four days, which is calendar agnostic unless you have a calendar that defies the Sun itself. When the last smoldering bits were cooling, most of Central London (inside the Roman Walls, or what we’d call Londinium) had burned, including a bit to the West of the Roman Walls which had escaped. Despite racist⁵ rumors about foreigners setting the fire for various and quite dubious reasons, and the public’s willingness to spread them with no critical thought⁶ , the truth remained that Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane, at roughly the location of the plaque above, went up in flames shortly after midnight.

Thomas Farriner, his family, and their maidservant found themselves in a rapidly progressing fire. They attempted to flee by jumping to an adjoining house through an upstairs window. The maidservant was too afraid to enact an action hero level scene, and sadly, was the first life to be claimed by the fire. Their neighbors acted quickly and sensibly, attempting to douse the fire. Parish constables judged the fire could not be fought, and the neighboring houses should be demolished to prevent further spread⁷ .

This is where things took a turn that would let the fire spread out of control. Had the houses been demolished, the fire would very likely have been contained. Several families and businesses would have seen a total loss of their livelihoods, but the odds are good that would be it. The homeowners, perhaps understandably, objected, and the Lord Mayor was summoned to review the situation. By the time of his arrival, the neighbors houses were burning and the fire was starting to spread. The Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, refused to allow a firebreak to be built, as it would now need to be larger, and most of the newly threatened properties were rented, the owners unavailable to approve.

A stiff wind from the East fed the fire delicious, delicious oxygen. Slumlords, ignoring the King’s decrees for London, built their tenements and such out of combustible materials. In a bid to increase their capacity, many buildings had cantilevered upper floors which would reach out over the narrow streets, nearly connecting buildings like a sky bridge in the most severe cases. Once a few blocks were on fire by the morning light, containment was no longer an option for the firefighters of the time.

There was one more factor which played into the fire: the English Civil War. Waged from 1642-1651, between Royalists and Parliamentarians, uncivil discourse broke out into uncivil battles across the country and large demonstrations in London which would sometimes be put down violently. It was a massive war for its era, which required a lot of bodies. Not willing to disarm, apparently it was common in Central London for folks to have significant stores of powder on their premises. The bank of the Thames, serving all sorts of ships, had plenty of gunpowder stores as well. Much of this powder went up. That put The Tower of London at risk. It was a full-scale armory, with 500-600 tons of powder ready to go. The Tower is on the Thames, along the East wall, and over the next few days the fire was getting closer and closer. Londinium was a literal powder keg, in a slow-motion explosion.

The Tower of London stores were put to good use, though: despite a relative unwillingness to set fire breaks earlier, the garrison made their own fire breaks by literally blowing up whole streets of buildings with their powder stores. The fire break was effective, and the fire’s Eastward progression was stopped. Firefighters had been working on fire breaks elsewhere in the city, and by Wednesday the winds died down. This gave responders the edge they needed to finally contain the fire and avoid further breakouts. The fire was left to tire itself out, and the city left to rebuild. Yes, the unfounded and racist fears of arsonist foreigners continued to spread, though the Lord Mayor did get his share of the blame eventually.

Rebuilding could have happened in many different ways. Much of Central London could simply have been redeveloped into something entirely new. However, the area was rebuilt mostly on its original plan, a street layout going back to at least Medieval times (and older in some places). One exception was made: a plaza was set up on what would become Monument Street, intersecting Pudding Lane, to memorialize the fire.

Jean Luc Picard Facepalm dot Jay Peg

So those of you familiar with the area have probably been foaming at the screen, calling me an idiot, and rightfully so. About 200 feet to the west of me, down — once again, MONUMENT STREET — stood a massive monument to memorialize the massive moment.

So, I came North on Pudding Lane from Lower Thames Street, and just about kept walking North on Pudding Lane. Looking to my right, I saw this plaque. I got lucky and looked left, or I would have totally missed this thing, which, fortunately, I was able to see. There’s a monument! A real, honest-to-goodness monument, and it has inscriptions and translations for the Latin inscriptions and such. It also has an observation deck. It’s a thing you can visit! I for whatever reason did not go into the monument. I can’t remember why: I may not have noticed, as the entrance was on the other side. Maybe it was busy and I never came back. I’d like to go back and check this out at some point, though. What I can say, it’s pretty clear that there’s a whole monument, a massive one, a great one if you will, in all senses of the world, to match the scale of the Great Fire of London 1666. It was there the whole time, and I just hadn’t thought to turn around.

The Monument

I’ll leave it to the monument to describe itself, with the transcription below:

Translation of a Latin Inscription

I don’t have a picture of this inscription, sadly. I’m not sure what happened! But I do have the translation of the inscription somehow:

A thing about the thing I saw

“Popish frenzy” you say? Added in 1681 and removed in 1830 you say? So it turns out, England had a complicated relationship with the Catholic church in this period⁸ . Remember the racist conspiracy theories mentioned earlier? The French and the Dutch, having their own internal tensions with the Catholic Church, were tied like red string across pins on a cork-board, to Catholic plots to destroy England. This was a long-standing issue in England, and that made for some convenient scapegoats for people who were in the process of losing everything. The Popish Plot was probably the most relevant to this inscription though: it was a conspiracy theory created by Titus Oates between 1678 and 1681, in which Jesuits were planning to assassinate King Charles II which would allow them to restore Catholic rule to England. I’m sure proper historians have spilled plenty of ink on this, but it certainly looks like Titus Oates’ conspiracy theory of a Catholic plot to overthrow England and establish something akin to a New World Order across Europe borrowed the convenient willingness to blame the fire on foreigners to bring the Great Fire of London into the conspiracy. And it worked! By God, it worked! They quite literally carved in stone, on an existing monument, that Popish horrors brought the frenzy of the Great Fire of London. Whether you want to believe that’s allegory, they carved it into the monument. What a massive rhetorical win for its time, a time before podcasts and social media platforms, to co-opt a massive society changing event to further push straight up lies.⁹ Of course, we’re getting away from the thing I saw, but at least it’s directly relevant to a curious part of its history. And if it helps, Oates was eventually convicted of perjury for the Popish Plot.

It’s also interesting the monument refers to where the fire started in feet, showing its age. The British government discussed the metric system since at least the early 1800s, though broad adoption was a later 20th century (1960s and later) effort. Measurement systems are fascinating, but like calendars, not relevant to the topic at hand and I’m just going to point that out and move on. See? I’m learning!

Until next time

I hope you had a good time with this one! I did this one on request to do something a bit further afield for me, and I’m glad I did! I have plenty of material, but it’s too easy to fall into exhausting one bucket before moving on. Sprinkling topics around is kinda fun. There are definitely times when things I’ve seen have a theme and tie together over weeks, but geography alone isn’t enough to tie issues together. I’m open to other ideas, though I will try to steer towards simpler things I’ve seen to try to get back to a regular delivery cadence.

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalis_Ecclesiae

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popish_Plot

• www.themonument.org.uk

Thanks for joining me, where I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000! I hope you enjoyed it. Here’s all the beehiiv stuff that is required to be here.

— Lou

1  respect.

2  which claims to have the longest pewter bar still in service in London, and I’d believe it.

3  Londinium came around during the Claudian Invasion, after Caesar bravely ran away then “called it a draw”. It cemented (see what I did there) its place in history after Boudica razed it, but she was then routed. It took advantage of one of history’s most valuable assets, a navigable river.

4  Eastman Kodak used the International Fixed Calendar until 1989 for all internal purposes. Imagine trying to book time off on two different calendars! But, it was only for internal purposes at the company. The calendar never caught on with any country, and there was no need for it to bleed to far into home life.

5  It’s true! While the Romans mentioned the white color of other Europeans’ skin, they definitely did not see others as their equals. Race was not a concept that existed in the West through the middle ages. The concept of “those people” was though, defined by multiple axes including culture, customs, language, descent, and who was ruling over your patch of mud. The othering of people from a different king with a different language WAS the prejudice-ism, the construct used since there was no race concept. Eventually the concept of race, and that of a European White, came together. However, inter-state racism such as Londoners visited upon the Dutch and French with their fire rumors, was common for a long time and was leaned on where convenient. They were just more common to see, and thus, easier to other and blame “those people” for all the world’s woes.

6  It seems some things never change.

7  Firefighting at this time heavily relied on fire breaks, as fires could easily get too big to fight to extinguish. Firebreaks are still well used in certain scenarios today, though heavy flows of water are commonly available in many developed places. In the U.S. at least, your homeowner’s insurance is tied to your local fire department’s ISO rating (not the standards organization, a subsidiary of Verisk). Much of the ISO rating is determined by how much water a fire department can deliver, and how quickly.

8  I’d like to believe King Henry VIII’s God-given right to have a son, at all costs, was part of this undercurrent…but that was over a hundred years earlier, and there’s more timely explanations.

9  Indeed…I guess some things really do never change.