Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/339

 12 s. viz. OCT. 2, 1920] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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coat, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass."

The dry weather, the high wind, and the extreme scantiness of the water supply rendered all attempts to extinguish the fire perfectly futile It was stayed in the end partly by blowing up with gunpowder houses in its path, partly by the fall of the wind, and when the people of London returned to the scene to sum up its ravages it was found that 373 acres had been devastated within the City walls and over 63 acres without. 13,200 houses were burnt ; 87 parish churches ; 52 halls of Companies ; the Royal Exchange ; the Custom House, the Guildhall and many other public buildings, while an immense quantity of wares of all sorts was destroyed.

The direct loss of life was almost incredibly small, amounting, apparently, to less than a score of persons. Hardly less striking was the absence of panic. The citizens had self-possession enough, even when the burning was close upon them, to save such of their goods as they could. Charles and his brother the Duke of York covered them- selves, as everyone knows, with glory. Regard- less alike of danger and of fatigue they were to be found where the fire was hottest and the press thickest ; and they displayed a power to lead and organize which was not conspicuous among the civic authorities. Another hero of the fire was Lord Craven, already endeared to London by his courage and activity during the Plague, who, it seems, in the Fire, acquired a taste for such scenes, so that it is said his horse came to know what was expected of him and when at a distance he smelt smoke would gallop off with his master

to the spot.

One of the most interesting exploits in

the

way of salvage was that of Hickes the acting- postmaster, who, at the last moment, conveyed as many postal packets as he could from Cloak Lane (Mr. Bell has satisfied himself that this was the site of the Post Office) to the Golden Lion outside Cripplegate. He was not able to convey away an extraordinary secret apparatus, devised by Samuel Morland, which enabled its wielder to tamper with, copy and forge, documents without any possibility of this being detected. The secret seems to have perished with the apparatus.

The citizens of London met the calamity with courage and even with composure. Using Gresham College for their Exchange they at once began to transact their foreign business again as if nothing had happened.

An Act of Parliament was passed erecting a Court of Fire Judges, whose decisions were to supersede ordinary agreements between landlord and tenant, and take the place of titles or deci- sions whereof the records had perished in the Fire. The Act was the work of the famous Sir Matthew Hale and it is to the great and lasting honour of the Judges of the period that it worked well the citizens having confidence hi their integrity

and fair judgment.

Three schemes for the

rebuilding of London

are given in some detail by Mr. Bell : Wren's, Evelyn's and that of a worthy named Valentine Knight who incurred the fury of the King and a term of imprisonment by a project of a canal, which should enter London from the Thames at Billingsgate ahd run north and west by Fenchurch Street and Lothbury to join the Fleet above

Holborn, and should bring in to the Crown near a quarter of a million as profit revenue with a still larger capital sum advanced by fines. This Charles repudiated as a suggestion that he should " draw a benefit to himself from so public a* calamity."

It is not difficult to see that both Wren's plan and Evelyn's are unpractical; it is equally easy to see that almost any plan laid down as a" whole would prove abortive. In the end London was- built up again very much on the old lines and' foundations though with a widening of streets and a reservation of a forty-feet strip along the river from the Tower to the Temple for a quay. Wren had little to do with the re-building : our author is of opinion that it was Charles himself who was " the active, agitating mind." Four types of houses were licensed to be erected, whereof the thickness of the walls, the heights of rooms, the depths of cellars, and other particulars- of construction were carefully determined. The erection of these marks yet another epoch hi the development of the City. The bricklayers, car- penters and other craftsmen of London were- altogether insufficient in numbers for the huge task. Their guild privileges could not be per-, mitted to stand in the way of the re-building of London, and in the Re-building Act was inserted with the consent of the Common Council a clause which broke for ever the monopoly in the building crafts, and with it ultimately the power of the Companies to keep out the " foreign "~ workman.

The book is well illustrated and contains- several interesting historical notes ; transcripts of letters giving accounts of the Fire (the Spanish Relacion, a lurid production, may be noted as remarkable) ; the official narrative of the Great

Fire from The Authorities.

London Gazette, and a list of/

The Captivity and Death of Edward of Carnarvon.- By T. F. Tout. (Manchester University Press ; London, Longmans, 2s. net.)

STUDENTS of English mediaeval history will not require any persuasion to induce them to read* a new study by Prof. Tout. The monograph before us is reprinted from the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. Its general outcome- leaves the fate of Edward II. much as it was. There seems less doubt than ever that he was murdered. At the same time Prof. Tout shows - that the great conspiracy to rescue him _ organized by the Dunheads, and engaging the activities of an extraordinary and numerous medley of persons met with real, though only

temporary success. confidential letter

The proof of this rests on a of John Walwayn to the

Chancellor stating that certain culprits indicted before him " were charged with having come violently to the Castle of Berkeley, with having ravished the father of our lord the king out of our guard, and with having feloniously robbed the said castle against the king's peace." This letter is a comparatively new discovery and was pub-- lished in The English Historical Review for 1916.. The king, it can scarcely be doubted, was soon recaptured, and the incident was not allowed to make its way into official documents. It helps to explain the somewhat mysterious fact that so many substantial and well-informed people were