Fire! Fire! When the Great Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane on 2 September 1666, no one could have imagined that it would destroy 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, and most of the City’s civic buildings. Perhaps 70,000 people lost their homes. There were relatively few recorded deaths, although it is likely that, in the chaos, many went unrecorded. Foreigners and Catholics were indiscriminately blamed for the fire, and there are claims that many were lynched in the streets. It might be added that many of London’s parish registers and other records were lost in the blaze.

London in the summer of 1666 was a tinder-box waiting for a match. The streets were narrow, the houses were tightly packed together, and built of timber. The summer had been hot, and there had been a prolonged drought.

Fires were common in London. They were frequently dealt with by demolishing nearby houses in order to create fire breaks. However, when the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, arrived at the Pudding Lane fire, he declared that ‘a woman might piss it out’, and refused to order demolitions. His failure to do so meant that this fire, fanned by a strong easterly wind, had time to spread and to grow. It proved impossible to put the flames out for five days, by which time most of the city had been demolished. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, was fortunate. His house lay to the east of Pudding Lane. The wind blew the fire in the opposite direction.

The city, however, was in gridlock. Thousands of people were trying to carry their entire possessions through the streets and alleys, and to escape through the bottlenecks that were the eight gates in the old Roman wall. Others desperately tried to find a boat. John Evelyn, another diarist, commented that the Thames was ‘covered with goods floating, all the barges & boates laden with what some had time & courage to save’.

The fields and villages around London ‘for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, & Tents erecting to shelter both people & what goods they could get away’.

Whilst Evelyn watched from the safety of the South Bank, Pepys headed for Whitehall, and brought news of the fire to the King. Charles II instructed his brother, James, Duke of York, to take charge, although even the King is said to have been manually involved in fire-fighting. Eventually, the wind dropped, and the men press-ganged by James were able to create fire-breaks stopping the flames reaching the royal court at Whitehall. The fire lasted from Sunday until Thursday, although isolated fires continued for weeks afterwards. Rain on the following Sunday put some of them out, but Pepys claimed to have seen embers from the conflagration still burning in cellars several months later.

Rebuilding the city took half a century. Sir Christopher Wren took charge, and was himself responsible for the design of 51 new city churches. One of them, of course, was St Paul’s Cathedral, his great masterpiece. Old St Paul’s was not totally destroyed. Some repairs were made, and services continued to be conducted in the ruins. However, the building had been in a bad state of repair even before the fire. Indeed, even before the fire Christopher Wren was proposing to replace the old central crossing with a dome. The fire meant that more drastic action was needed, as became evident when part of the nave collapsed in 1668. The remnants of the old church had to be demolished. Their demolition resulted in more deaths than were actually recorded during the Great Fire itself.

Appeals for funds
Rebuilding, however, required funding. And funds were lacking. A tax on coal entering London was instigated in 1667 to raise money for the reconstruction of the city’s roads and public buildings, a portion of which was designated for the cathedral. It was not enough. When Wren was appointed as surveyor of the cathedral in 1669, his initial plans were relatively modest – too modest, thought the Dean and Chapter. However, they gradually evolved into the building that can be seen today.

The cathedral was finally completed in 1711. The coal tax had been expanded, and other financial expedients had been adopted, in order to raise the necessary money. Amongst those financial expedient was the issue of a brief, that is, an official letter appealing for donations. Briefs were regularly issued for charitable purposes. They might appeal for funds to redeem Englishmen enslaved by North African corsairs, for the repair of bridges and harbours, for losses by flood and fire, and for a multitude of other purposes. Briefs were directed to parish clergy, who read them to their congregations. Churchwardens then collected contributions. Many briefs can be found amongst parish records, and they are occasionally mentioned in wills, churchwardens’ accounts and other sources.

The response to the 1678 brief for rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral was huge. Some 3,300 returns from parishes throughout England and Wales still survive amongst the archives of St Paul’s Cathedral, formerly held by Guildhall Library, but now in London Metropolitan Archives. They were written on single or double sheets of paper, or in some cases in account books, and have been repaired and bound up into 28 separate guard files.

Parish returns
These returns record the amounts collected in each parish. Most include the names of contributors; a few also include the names of those who refused to contribute. Clergy and churchwardens are usually identified, and sometimes the status of other contributors is noted, although occupations are infrequently given. Some – especially those recording non-contributors – are effectively lists of heads of households. Most contributors gave a few pence, although clergy and the gentry were more generous. In Wiltshire, the vicar of Avebury, John White, gave two shillings. Christopher Willoughby, esquire, of Bishopston, gave the wholly exceptional sum of £50, and his servants another £1. It was not just the rich who responded; in Lydiard Tregoze, a shilling – an enormous amount for a pauper – was ‘given by a poor man who lives altogether upon charity and desires to have his name concealed’. Others were less generous. The parishioners of Sutton Benger gave nothing. Their vicar, William Aust, reported that they needed funds to repair their own church, which was falling down, and would be ‘a great charge to the whole parish’ if not ‘speedily prevented’. Even he made no contribution. No similar justification is given for the failure of Staverton to make any contribution.

These returns are invaluable sources for locating ancestors in time and space, and for seeing how generous they were. Occasionally, information concerning this collection may also be found amongst diocesan and parish records; for example, a list of contributors is written into the Oaksey parish register. Disasters do sometimes generate useful information for family historians, even if they also cause much destruction.