Great Fire of London - Deaths and Destruction

Deaths and Destruction

Only a few deaths from the fire are officially recorded, and deaths are traditionally believed to have been few. Porter gives the figure as eight and Tinniswood as "in single figures", although he adds that some deaths must have gone unrecorded and that, besides direct deaths from burning and smoke inhalation, refugees also perished in the impromptu camps. Hanson takes issue with the idea that there were only a few deaths, enumerating known deaths from hunger and exposure among survivors of the holocaust, "huddled in shacks or living among the ruins that had once been their homes" in the cold winter that followed, including, for instance, the dramatist James Shirley and his wife. Hanson also maintains that "it stretches credulity to believe that the only papists or foreigners being beaten to death or lynched were the ones rescued by the Duke of York", that official figures say very little about the fate of the undocumented poor, and that the heat at the heart of the firestorms, far hotter than an ordinary house fire, was enough to consume bodies fully, or leave only a few skull fragments. The fire, fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, but also by the oil, pitch, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine, and gunpowder stored in the riverside district, melted the imported steel lying along the wharves (melting point between 1,250 °C (2,300 F) and 1,480 °C (2,700 F)) and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates (melting point between 1,100 °C (2,000 F) and 1,650 °C (3000 F)). Nor would anonymous bone fragments have been of much interest to the hungry people sifting through the tens of thousands of tons of rubble and debris after the fire, looking for valuables, or to the workmen clearing away the rubble later during the rebuilding. Appealing to common sense and "the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries", Hanson emphasises that the fire attacked the rotting tenements of the poor with furious speed, surely trapping at the very least "the old, the very young, the halt and the lame" and burying the dust and ashes of their bones under the rubble of cellars; making for a death toll not of four or eight, but of "several hundred and quite possibly several thousand."

The material destruction has been computed at 13,500 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Bridewell Palace and other City prisons, the General Letter Office, and the three western city gates, Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate. The monetary value of the loss, first estimated at £100,000,000 in the currency of the time, was later reduced to an uncertain £10,000,000 (over £1 billion in 2005 pounds). Evelyn believed that he saw as many as "200,000 people of all ranks and stations dispersed, and lying along their heaps of what they could save" in the fields towards Islington and Highgate.