So this is being used to explore the energy of fire and wind in my lower KS2 RE lesson. It also provides an abundance of cross-curricular links for the children to enjoy, to explore further and to keep them occupied. Perfect for Virtual Home Learning during COVID-19 lockdown!
@@longbeardbobson4710 As a teacher outside the UK my guess would be looking at how is fire used or diecussed in the bible. Why is the holy spirit tongues of flame, why do saints talk about the fire of God's love... fire is used literally or figuratively throughout the bible so this serves as a hook to get the kids interested in some of the ideas around why would fire be used /talked about like this.
@@longbeardbobson4710 firstly, lower KS2 is year 3-4 at primary school, which I believe is still Elementary school in the States. As such even lessons like RE are a general melange including history, sociology and human geography, which are all touched on in this video. Also, Chapter 4 in the video goes into the blame that was passed around at the time, which included the idea that the fire was God's Judgement on the sin and iniquity in the city. Plenty there for Primary school RE.
@@longbeardbobson4710I’m not sure but I assume it’s under the same heading as what we had: ‘PSHE - politics, sociology, history, economics’. If not, it should be called that for clarity.
Love how the baker was called Fariner. The Italian for flour is Farina. Wonder how far their family goes back as bakers to take the surname as Latin to distinguish families by trade
Now that's interesting. Here in Norway we also have the word farin, stemming from the same Latin word. However, somewhere along the way it changed its meaning here to sugar!
My lord, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn somehow had a child and she is a brilliant and entertaining historian. What a world we live in. I learned a lot, and I'm a history nerd, so teaching me new stuff isn't easy. 🙂
Great video, really enjoyed it Though Tom Scott has a video about the fire brigade plaques, in which he says that it might not actually be the case that the fire brigades wouldn't have let your house burn down if you didn't have their plaque
I live in Paris and what you said about Saint Paul's cathedral also happened to Notre Dame, to a lesser extent. Having experienced this, I can only imagine the terror Londoners must have felt
This is partly why Londoners were so protective if the Cathedral during the Blitz. The Germans could destroy their hones, their shops, their roads, but damn! if they’d take St. Paul’s away from them! It’s interesting what people will save from a fire. A summer job once asked “What would you grab if you have to escape a fire?” I pointed to the corner where I had a sleeping bag, two backpacks of my medical supplies snd clothes, and my dog. Coworkers asked if I wanted to stay with them until I could go home
@@icarusbinns3156idk, in the German City Mainz, there was a group dedicated to save the huge old cathedral during the allied bombardment as well. Made it, too. I see things like that as sensitive vs barbarians. Wars come and go, but buildings like those...
I viewed this being a survivor of the Campfire 2018 which saw the incineration of Paradise, California within but a handful of hours. Terrifying still. People from all over the world reached out to help. Luckily London had the King they did. I will leave it at that.
Paradise was awful. We are in Southern California and were on evacuation alert for the Bobcat Fire (in the San Gabriel Mountains) for a couple of weeks. Tough looking around your house and trying to figure out what you'll save and what you won't...
Love, love, love all of Ms. Draper’s videos. I’ve mostly seen the “shorts”. But I also wanted to point out what seems to be a linguistic difference between U. S. and British usage. Here in the U. S. we say “different from” and Ms. Draper always uses the “different to” form, which I had never before heard. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting tidbit. 😊
My nan is fluent in shorthand as she was a secretary from a young age. As kids we would reach our books outloud to her and she would write it down as we were reading in short hand, and then word for word could read back what we had just said to her. Because of her I happen to have a tattoo of a shorthand symbol 💜💜 we are from the west midlands, and when she would get mad when we were kids she would say "yum mekin me savage!!!!" So I got the shorthand symbol for savage tattooed for her 💜
In larger fires we still use fire breaks. A really good example was the great earthquake in San Francisco in the early 1900's. They were using dynamite to destroy houses which actually created more fires than the quake. In Wildland fires here in the US we use them all the time. I was a fire fighter for years and it is the only way to put out a huge fire like that.
We watched the firefighters fight the fires in the mountains our neighborhood faces. Several years on (the fire was 2020), you can still see the firebreaks they cut along the face of the mountain - a straight line where above, all was burned, and everything below was saved. (While the firebreaks were being cut, the helicopters were doing water drops as well, of course...)
Fun Fact: I was at Stonehenge in June and was chatting with a docent who mentioned that a couple famous Englishmen had scratched their name into the stones, including Christopher Wren. That sounds monstrous of course, but now it's an amazing bit of history in and of itself.
I studied English and American History in College back in the 1970s. A lot of what you went over I knew, some I had forgotten. A good bit of it I never knew. A wonderful video, and very professional. I have thought about doing one on our Civil War, in Virginia or South Carolina if I do, I hope I do even a third as well as your videos. I have also by the way thought of doing one on our Revolutionary War here in South Carolina as that has been mostly forgotten.
Very interesting, for me this video helps bring the 1660s and Pepy's Diary a live (for the past 20 years I've been a regular Pepys's diary reader). Pepys intended his diary only to be read by him in his life time though in his old age full of ill health - kidney stones - he had it bound and put in his library for later generations to find. Pepys oddly only uses this phonic mixture of foreign languages (mostly Spanish) when he is referring to that day's extra marital sexual adventures - which he most definitely hides from his wife. The phonic mixture of foreign languages are alway just short phrases where the action gets hot, perhaps too hot for puritanical by modern standards Pepys - so perhaps he feels he can't write the hot action in his normal short hand. The rest of the diary is all in short code and so totally unreadable to the causal reader (unfamiliar with the short hand Pepys uses) but the actually fairly rare (every week or two after the fire, may be roughly every 2 or 3 weeks before) phonic mixture that appears in diary entries is in regular a to z letters and so stands out. This is odd because his wife is French and so is fluent in French and English - any casual reader with a gift for European languages can read these phrases! Btw Pepys's diary entries for the fire of London are worth reading as of course is his diary - though it takes a while to get use to the old English language style.
@@catofthecastle1681 Pretty sure they meant "the old style of [Modern] English", not "Old English". And, regardless, "Middle English" gives way to "Early Modern English" by the late 15th century, and "Modern English" in the mid-to-late 17th century.
I absolutely love your videos. You could be on television or schoolchildren’s videos you are so captivating. I am just a mom of 9! children in New Jersey USA who loves all things England! I hope to visit someday. Your stories and your delivery give me bits of joy- thank you. ❤
It seems that these are lessons that need to be learned by every city anew, every city seems to start by building with wood, then has a major disastrous fire, then bans wood for a time. My own city is much more modern than London. But still had a major fire in the early 1900s after which would construction was banned. Here, they used sandstone. But over time that fell out of favor, and wood made a comeback. About 20 years ago we had a spate of fires in four story wood apartment buildings. All brand new construction. After outrage, many new fire suppression bits were mandated. But instead of learning the lesson, they are in the process of changing the building code to allow wood structures of up to 10 stories instead of only four. Wood is a nice easy material to work with, but history is full of major fires showing, that just maybe, we should look at other ways of building our cities.
Thank you for this detailed video. I live in regional south east Australia so a lot of the things you mention about fire are very familiar, only this is an urban setting, rather than a rural one. Things like hot weather leading up to it, lots of dry kindling, windy day, fire breaks, building fire proof structures after, homelessness.... and yeah, the sudden disappearance of leadership during the fire.
Only just watched this now. I've just signed up to be a patron. Thank you for making your videos, very impressed with the layout and how well you explain things 😊
Hanging was used a punishment for many crimes at that time, he was probably found guilty of other things than wholesale arson. If the judge HAD found him guilty of wholesale arson it most probably would have considered terrorism, an act against the Crown/State, and he would have been 'hung, drawn and quartered' . Very 'nasty' ,so really he was lucky 💀
It's interesting you mention the death toll shortly after listing the prisons burning down. Would they have let the prisoners out to spare them a horrible death? Would the prisoners have been able to escape through collapsing walls? Or would they just not include prisoners in the death toll
This was fantastic! I still can't believe only two people are supposed to have died in the fire... I'm sure the lack of proper certification meant that perhaps deaths went unnoticed?
So recent research has shown the fire brigades worked differently - they would not ignore fires from another insurers policy. When any of them saw a fire they would note the number on the plaque before extinguishing the fire and then send an invoice to the correct insurer. There was a system of fixed fees for these transfers between insurers. However if a fire crew turned up and a rival crew was already in action, there were sometimes fights as the first crew wanted to prevent the second crew arriving in time to claim part of the fee.
Just for fun I wanted to share with you the name of an older woman whom I met in Alabama in the United States. Her name was Lovey Jane Three Links In A Chain Every Link In Jesus's Name Cribs Tyree. Until I watched this video I had never heard of anyone else with this kind of name. It must have been more common than I realized. She was an African American whose great- grandparents were slaves, though I do not know if that is relevant to the lengthy religious name.
We think that only old cities can burn but, in fact, anything can burn given the right conditions. Witness the fires in thoroughly modern suburbs north of Denver, Colorado. These are built on high prairie with minimal biomass (no forest), just grassland. But the humidity is in single digits and winds exceeding 140 km an hour. If these well spaced, modern suburbs can burn, any human settlement can.
5:57 I wish people would stop using the word "panic" to describe perfectly logical reactions. In fact, it took considerable presence of mind to behave the way the citizens did.
One correction: it is apparently not true that fire brigades wouldn't put out fires on buildings that weren't insured by their company. When there was a fire, all six brigades would rush to be the first ones there, because the first company there got most of the pay. The second company got some, the third company got none, so sometimes you would see the third brigade to arrive just sort of stand there and not do anything, because the first two had it handled, and they weren't getting paid anyway. There's also the problem that a fire in an uninsured building can very easily spread to an insured building, especially in a place as dense as London. Tom Scott (ugh) did a video on it and pointed out that there are no primary sources indicating that firefighters would just let uninsured buildings burn. In short, no pay, no spray was simply too cruel and short sighted for Olden London. The rural US in the modern day will do that, but not Charles Dicken's London.
Thomas faryner and Mrs. Oleary. People who led to giant fires. I feel like Mrs oleary didn't necessarily start the Chicago fire. But it is what the song says.
Wonderful video, I really enjoyed it. Small correction: even though the artist Wenceslaus (Wenzl) Hollar spent some time in Holland, he was originally Czech (Bohemian, "Böhme") and, as a protestant, was forced to flee during a period of recatholisation.
This is fabulous, I like so many people cant/wont return to London cause of Covid, my family is here in Australia and also there in London and about. . . These videos I’m loving, makes your feel like you’re there. I think you’re so interesting and knowledgeable. I came over from your TicTok account. Not sure how to encourage you accept you have one super fan here cheering you on . . Ps: i hope my family contact you for a Freelance tour. . .
Very informative & nicely done. I learnt quite a bit. Where do you get your info? I love your enthusiasm for history, I think you will be the next Bethany Hughes, see you on the box soon👍
I love England and English people, I’m from Japan, English are one of the nicest people I’ve ever seen out side of where I’m from, I’m Asian, I was a student there and I thought I’d be discriminated but non of that happened and I traveled to Paris for a week and I was discriminated in day 3. 😅
Of course I know this video is 2 years old. But I,m jsut discovering your channel and I had to comment on the video that started my discovery. Merci from a Quebec historian.
Watching these older videos (Love them) since discovering your Shorts and you definitely have progressed. Your enthusiasm and passion come out more in your recent videos, and that makes the information that much more enjoyable to consume. Keep on keeping on because you make good content
Not entirely related, but since thatched roofs were banned in London in 1189 or 1212, why did the Globe have a thatched roof? Was it considered enough outside the city when the original was constructed?
Yes, the City's jurisdiction ended at the south end of London Bridge. Southwark was a somewhat nefarious area which provided brothels and bearbaiting as well as theatres.
The birth of Building Regs as we know them. Nicholas Hawksmoor built some lovely churches after the fire too, such as the sublime Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Holy crap.... In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, the Fire Department would go around the city setting fire to houses that did not pay for fire protection. As usual, Pratchett's satire was not nearly as far from the truth as you might expect.
As an Australian who lives in Melbourne, this is fascinating. Bushfires are a huge threat here. It's interesting seeing the Parallels with black saturday fires and 2020 fires. Thanks for your passion and knowledge.
As a Californian, 100% agree and understand. Our wildfires have burned an entire town to the ground and even tiny fires are horrifying bc they spread so quick across our parched land. We often spend entire summers indoor bc the fires make smoke and ashes so thick you can't breathe outside
I'm a Canadian and the forest and bush fires have been so bad this year. Here in Alberta the fires started before the plants greened up for Spring. This made everything so dry that the fires spread fast. I am still not going outside unless absolutely necessary because the smoke is bad here. We are so greatful for all the foreign countries that have sent help including Spain and Portugal from Europe. Now poor Europe is suffering from fires in the south. The summer has been hotter than normal there as well as here. Hopefully everything can be under control soon.
I remember reading Pepys diary, or at least the part about the great fire, in my US high school brit lit class. This is a great video explaining the fire! Thank you.
One benefit of the Great Fire was that it ended the periodic incidence of the plague. This was still an issue in London with the last outbreak in 1665. The fire probably helped to clear out the plague, one useful benefit at least.
5:03 Pepys' London house is now longer there. I believe his house near Huntingdon (in Cambridgeshire) is very much still there (or maybe I'm wrong, I'm not very clever)
We, the Dutch, were not amused for being accused falsely. So we stole your flagship. Eat that, mr. Pepys. Anyway, a few years later we decided it was a good idea to eat one of the guys responsible for stealing your flagship. These were weird times...
Very weird. But the funny thing is about Pepys, he’s mostly remembered for his fascinating diary these days, but if he’d never written it, he’d be an important footnote in histories of the British navy. It was in such a mess when he started his job that your lot did indeed embarrass us by pinching the flagship, but Pepys was an excellent administrator who turned things around and left it in reasonable fighting shape.
It seems the story about insurance companies declining to put out fires in buildings insured by rivals is not quite true. Most brigades would put out a fire in case it set fire to adjoining properties which might include properties insured by the attending brigade.
I would have thought the biggest, most noticeable difference between London today and London then would have been the gigantic cherubs flying overhead.
Interestingly, there was an increase in obesity and intestinal blockages in the 17th century, which you can guess by looking at portraits of fashionable young men of the era. Some blame the availability of sugar, a very chic condiment/seasoning/ingredient among the better sort. Or possibly it was just drinking lots of sugar-based rum🤷?
14:55 You might want to add a pinned comment regarding this, considering Tom Scott (who made a similar video) did some more research and found out, that's not what really happened, people just thought it did
My 9th great uncle Sir John Knight was Sargent surgeon to Charles ii, he was a very good friend of Samuel Pepys and mentioned in his diaries. When my distant uncle died in 1685, some of his books were bequeathed to Samuel Pepys.
14:57 - This is sort of how Marcus Licinius Crassus made his money in Republican Rome: He ran a "for-profit fire brigade". He hired 500 men who would rush to a burning building, whereupon Crassus would negotiate with the owner of the building to buy the property. A "fire sale", if you will. If the owner sold, Crassus' men would put out the fire, if not, they would leave, letting the building burn.
Discovered your channel only 3 days ago. I am struck by all the stories I've binged so far, your diction and pronunciation, your charm AND the sticker on your laptop saying it kills fascists. 😉
That comment about the Dutch... I have to ask! I was recently reading a story, I can't remember now if Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood, I'm reading a lot of both right now, but they make the comment in a story to the effect of how awful it would be to be confused for being Dutch. Now the story was published in 1922, IIRC, so I thought it was maybe some corruption of Deutsch, i.e. German (like the Pennsylvania Dutch in the USA are actually of German descent, not Dutch), and given WW1 I can easily imagine no Englishman would want to be called as German at that time, but now I have to reconsider. What is the English dislike for the Dutch? I mean, I can understand in the 17th century, there's going to be intense economic and naval competition with the Dutch, sure, but even into the 20th century such sentiment is still lingering? Really? What is that about?
Pepys' wife: "Dear husband, is there something you're trying to keep from me" Pepys': "No dear why would you say that?" *Continues writing diary in a code that wouldn't be deciphered for hundreds of years*
Actually the insurance company fire brigades were a bit more complicated then that. If you weren't insured but your neighbor was they'd usually put the fire out still to keep it from spreading to the insured property. Sometimes the man in charge would try to get you to pay up for your first month of insurance and then they'd put it out cause he got a commission for new clients. All sorts of odd deals like that.
Re: the death toll - I agree it sounds too low. One thing I wondered about in particular were those in the prisons. Would the guards/wardens been decent enough to let prisoners out so they wouldn’t die?
I wondered about that too. But given the weird informality of some period prisons, the security likely wasn’t that tight, and I’m not sure that period gaolers were necessarily sadistic monsters. They were likely more interested in taking bribes from prisoners to allow small luxuries in, and would have liked the ones who paid well. Plus, many of those prisoners would have had friends or family on the outside, who might have turned quite nasty on anyone who let them burn to death.
You'll see me next time? You have... cameras in here? HOW DO YOU KNOW!? Wait... wait... figure of speech. Right. See you too. Oh... wait... I actually will see you. Well this is one sided. That's not right. You should send a camera so you can see me just... leave it off Tuesday nights... it's... Just leave it off.
I wonder if the story of the Three Little Pigs could have come from the fact that the king's men would pull down houses made from wood instead of brick? Maybe they're pigs to represent gluttony?
This reminds me a lot of the Great Chicago Fire, which killed 300 people over 3 days and destroyed over 3 square miles of the city. It had a lot of similar conditions to this, like a very dry summer and lots of wooden buildings. It only stopped when a rainstorm came in to put out the fire. The famous myth for how the fire started was that an Irish woman, Catherine O' Leary, was milking her cow when it tipped over a lantern, starting the fire, though there are many conflicting stories of how it actually started.
One reason for each story being wider than the one below is that the wall pushing down on the floor beam create a lift on the center of the beam so it doesn't sag as much.
Well there wouldn't be many burials since the fire was hot enough to burn bone. There wouldn't be anything left. I'm sure more died. People who didn't have family that would look for them, or maybe an entire family died. Also the amount of foreigners who no one would've been looking for. They just never came back. The people had to worry about no place to live, & the weather isn't fit to sleep outside year around. The baroque style is how all of the capitol buildings in Washington D.C.
So this is being used to explore the energy of fire and wind in my lower KS2 RE lesson. It also provides an abundance of cross-curricular links for the children to enjoy, to explore further and to keep them occupied. Perfect for Virtual Home Learning during COVID-19 lockdown!
MISS PREE
This is Elinam on my moms account since it didn't work on my google account
What has any of that to do with RE?
@@longbeardbobson4710 As a teacher outside the UK my guess would be looking at how is fire used or diecussed in the bible. Why is the holy spirit tongues of flame, why do saints talk about the fire of God's love... fire is used literally or figuratively throughout the bible so this serves as a hook to get the kids interested in some of the ideas around why would fire be used /talked about like this.
@@longbeardbobson4710 firstly, lower KS2 is year 3-4 at primary school, which I believe is still Elementary school in the States. As such even lessons like RE are a general melange including history, sociology and human geography, which are all touched on in this video.
Also, Chapter 4 in the video goes into the blame that was passed around at the time, which included the idea that the fire was God's Judgement on the sin and iniquity in the city. Plenty there for Primary school RE.
@@longbeardbobson4710I’m not sure but I assume it’s under the same heading as what we had: ‘PSHE - politics, sociology, history, economics’. If not, it should be called that for clarity.
Love how the baker was called Fariner. The Italian for flour is Farina. Wonder how far their family goes back as bakers to take the surname as Latin to distinguish families by trade
I thought the same! I'm from Valencia in Spain and in valencian/catalan it is also called farina (like many other words we have in common).
Came to say this…
It makes me wonder if his family name came from the trade.
Could also come from the french (farine), as is the case with many food names : pork, mutton etc. words brought by the kings from normandy
It's similar in French as well: farine
Now that's interesting. Here in Norway we also have the word farin, stemming from the same Latin word. However, somewhere along the way it changed its meaning here to sugar!
I love the way you frame these stories and how you narrate them.
My lord, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn somehow had a child and she is a brilliant and entertaining historian. What a world we live in. I learned a lot, and I'm a history nerd, so teaching me new stuff isn't easy. 🙂
Fancy meeting you here!
Yes she is a pretty great presenter. London is a lovely place to visit for all the layers of history.
I know! Isn’t she lovely!
Is that what happened after the 1964 Oscars? (Kidding.)
I so wish I could visit London. I would get a wheelchair if necessary to see all of the museums I could.
Oh my goodness - exactly, that’s exactly who she looks like. ❤
Spot on, well done 🙂
Great video, really enjoyed it
Though Tom Scott has a video about the fire brigade plaques, in which he says that it might not actually be the case that the fire brigades wouldn't have let your house burn down if you didn't have their plaque
Yes. Rather it was more a competition between the various brigades, who could get there first.
Thanks, I was to make the same comment. :D
+1
I'm so confused, that was like a triple negative
@@user9267 "wouldn't" should be "would".
I live in Paris and what you said about Saint Paul's cathedral also happened to Notre Dame, to a lesser extent. Having experienced this, I can only imagine the terror Londoners must have felt
This was St. Paul's second fire, the first one destroyed the spire a hundred or so years earlier.
This is partly why Londoners were so protective if the Cathedral during the Blitz. The Germans could destroy their hones, their shops, their roads, but damn! if they’d take St. Paul’s away from them!
It’s interesting what people will save from a fire. A summer job once asked “What would you grab if you have to escape a fire?” I pointed to the corner where I had a sleeping bag, two backpacks of my medical supplies snd clothes, and my dog. Coworkers asked if I wanted to stay with them until I could go home
@@icarusbinns3156idk, in the German City Mainz, there was a group dedicated to save the huge old cathedral during the allied bombardment as well. Made it, too. I see things like that as sensitive vs barbarians. Wars come and go, but buildings like those...
@@Weirdkauz wars often target buildings. Doesn’t have to be a particularly useful structure, either
Ore saint stephonse in 1945
This was really good, thank you for making it. Please make more.
Well presented, good production and very educational thanks for the upload.
I viewed this being a survivor of the Campfire 2018 which saw the incineration of Paradise, California within but a handful of hours.
Terrifying still. People from all over the world reached out to help.
Luckily London had the King they did. I will leave it at that.
The fires that California goes through sound truly terrifying, my heart goes out to you.
Paradise was awful. We are in Southern California and were on evacuation alert for the Bobcat Fire (in the San Gabriel Mountains) for a couple of weeks. Tough looking around your house and trying to figure out what you'll save and what you won't...
Love, love, love all of Ms. Draper’s videos. I’ve mostly seen the “shorts”. But I also wanted to point out what seems to be a linguistic difference between U. S. and British usage.
Here in the U. S. we say “different from” and Ms. Draper always uses the “different to” form, which I had never before heard.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting tidbit. 😊
why did i just discover this channel? this is exactly my nerdy definition of evening entertainment :D
Really enjoyed this, even though I studied the great fire of London in school I still learnt a lot here.
You deserve a lot more subscribers
My nan is fluent in shorthand as she was a secretary from a young age. As kids we would reach our books outloud to her and she would write it down as we were reading in short hand, and then word for word could read back what we had just said to her. Because of her I happen to have a tattoo of a shorthand symbol 💜💜 we are from the west midlands, and when she would get mad when we were kids she would say "yum mekin me savage!!!!" So I got the shorthand symbol for savage tattooed for her 💜
Respect... now that is a meaningful tattoo!
That's killer, love it! You helped her live on in spectacular fashion ❤
In larger fires we still use fire breaks. A really good example was the great earthquake in San Francisco in the early 1900's. They were using dynamite to destroy houses which actually created more fires than the quake. In Wildland fires here in the US we use them all the time. I was a fire fighter for years and it is the only way to put out a huge fire like that.
We watched the firefighters fight the fires in the mountains our neighborhood faces. Several years on (the fire was 2020), you can still see the firebreaks they cut along the face of the mountain - a straight line where above, all was burned, and everything below was saved. (While the firebreaks were being cut, the helicopters were doing water drops as well, of course...)
Fun Fact: I was at Stonehenge in June and was chatting with a docent who mentioned that a couple famous Englishmen had scratched their name into the stones, including Christopher Wren. That sounds monstrous of course, but now it's an amazing bit of history in and of itself.
I studied English and American History in College back in the 1970s. A lot of what you went over I knew, some I had forgotten. A good bit of it I never knew. A wonderful video, and very professional. I have thought about doing one on our Civil War, in Virginia or South Carolina if I do, I hope I do even a third as well as your videos.
I have also by the way thought of doing one on our Revolutionary War here in South Carolina as that has been mostly forgotten.
Very interesting, for me this video helps bring the 1660s and Pepy's Diary a live (for the past 20 years I've been a regular Pepys's diary reader).
Pepys intended his diary only to be read by him in his life time though in his old age full of ill health - kidney stones - he had it bound and put in his library for later generations to find.
Pepys oddly only uses this phonic mixture of foreign languages (mostly Spanish) when he is referring to that day's extra marital sexual adventures - which he most definitely hides from his wife. The phonic mixture of foreign languages are alway just short phrases where the action gets hot, perhaps too hot for puritanical by modern standards Pepys - so perhaps he feels he can't write the hot action in his normal short hand.
The rest of the diary is all in short code and so totally unreadable to the causal reader (unfamiliar with the short hand Pepys uses) but the actually fairly rare (every week or two after the fire, may be roughly every 2 or 3 weeks before) phonic mixture that appears in diary entries is in regular a to z letters and so stands out. This is odd because his wife is French and so is fluent in French and English - any casual reader with a gift for European languages can read these phrases!
Btw Pepys's diary entries for the fire of London are worth reading as of course is his diary - though it takes a while to get use to the old English language style.
Middle English more likely!
@@catofthecastle1681 Pretty sure they meant "the old style of [Modern] English", not "Old English". And, regardless, "Middle English" gives way to "Early Modern English" by the late 15th century, and "Modern English" in the mid-to-late 17th century.
@@catofthecastle1681 "old" isn't capitalized so they just mean the "old form of English spoken at this time". Not "Old English" by name.
I absolutely love your videos. You could be on television or schoolchildren’s videos you are so captivating. I am just a mom of 9! children in New Jersey USA who loves all things England! I hope to visit someday. Your stories and your delivery give me bits of joy- thank you. ❤
Shout out to a fellow New Jerseyan! I too love her videos and hope to see you again in the comments.
Nine? Good gods, woman, when do you sleep?
Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barbon.
It seems that these are lessons that need to be learned by every city anew, every city seems to start by building with wood, then has a major disastrous fire, then bans wood for a time. My own city is much more modern than London. But still had a major fire in the early 1900s after which would construction was banned. Here, they used sandstone. But over time that fell out of favor, and wood made a comeback.
About 20 years ago we had a spate of fires in four story wood apartment buildings. All brand new construction. After outrage, many new fire suppression bits were mandated. But instead of learning the lesson, they are in the process of changing the building code to allow wood structures of up to 10 stories instead of only four. Wood is a nice easy material to work with, but history is full of major fires showing, that just maybe, we should look at other ways of building our cities.
There are so many very funny, very cute parts of this video... about... a great fire
"He was a big wig, literally he had a big wig"😂❤
This is FASCINATING! Thank you for pulling this all together. Love the narrative style.
Thank you for this detailed video. I live in regional south east Australia so a lot of the things you mention about fire are very familiar, only this is an urban setting, rather than a rural one. Things like hot weather leading up to it, lots of dry kindling, windy day, fire breaks, building fire proof structures after, homelessness.... and yeah, the sudden disappearance of leadership during the fire.
Only just watched this now. I've just signed up to be a patron. Thank you for making your videos, very impressed with the layout and how well you explain things 😊
great video, very well done. thank you!
Your presentations are so educational and entertaining. Once I start I usually end up binge-watching. I guess you could say I'm a J.Draper-aholic.
I do the same.
I'm an old world cockney swine but I enjoyed every minute of it, thank you Ma'am
12:21 had me rolling 😂😂😂😅😂
“The judge thought he was mad… he hanged him anyway”
Welcome to the 1600's
@@Firegen1 I would like a refund
Hanging was used a punishment for many crimes at that time, he was probably found guilty of other things than wholesale arson.
If the judge HAD found him guilty of wholesale arson it most probably would have considered terrorism, an act against the Crown/State, and he would have been 'hung, drawn and quartered' .
Very 'nasty' ,so really he was lucky 💀
It's interesting you mention the death toll shortly after listing the prisons burning down.
Would they have let the prisoners out to spare them a horrible death? Would the prisoners have been able to escape through collapsing walls? Or would they just not include prisoners in the death toll
I was wondering that, also.
This was fantastic! I still can't believe only two people are supposed to have died in the fire... I'm sure the lack of proper certification meant that perhaps deaths went unnoticed?
Fantastic work. Great video. Well done
You need your own show on the BBC.
She's a bit white for that. Though if she's a lesbian.............
So recent research has shown the fire brigades worked differently - they would not ignore fires from another insurers policy. When any of them saw a fire they would note the number on the plaque before extinguishing the fire and then send an invoice to the correct insurer. There was a system of fixed fees for these transfers between insurers. However if a fire crew turned up and a rival crew was already in action, there were sometimes fights as the first crew wanted to prevent the second crew arriving in time to claim part of the fee.
Just for fun I wanted to share with you the name of an older woman whom I met in Alabama in the United States. Her name was Lovey Jane Three Links In A Chain Every Link In Jesus's Name Cribs Tyree. Until I watched this video I had never heard of anyone else with this kind of name. It must have been more common than I realized. She was an African American whose great- grandparents were slaves, though I do not know if that is relevant to the lengthy religious name.
We think that only old cities can burn but, in fact, anything can burn given the right conditions. Witness the fires in thoroughly modern suburbs north of Denver, Colorado. These are built on high prairie with minimal biomass (no forest), just grassland. But the humidity is in single digits and winds exceeding 140 km an hour. If these well spaced, modern suburbs can burn, any human settlement can.
5:57 I wish people would stop using the word "panic" to describe perfectly logical reactions. In fact, it took considerable presence of mind to behave the way the citizens did.
One correction: it is apparently not true that fire brigades wouldn't put out fires on buildings that weren't insured by their company. When there was a fire, all six brigades would rush to be the first ones there, because the first company there got most of the pay. The second company got some, the third company got none, so sometimes you would see the third brigade to arrive just sort of stand there and not do anything, because the first two had it handled, and they weren't getting paid anyway. There's also the problem that a fire in an uninsured building can very easily spread to an insured building, especially in a place as dense as London. Tom Scott (ugh) did a video on it and pointed out that there are no primary sources indicating that firefighters would just let uninsured buildings burn.
In short, no pay, no spray was simply too cruel and short sighted for Olden London. The rural US in the modern day will do that, but not Charles Dicken's London.
Why ugh to Tom Scott?
You're so good at this
Do you think there's a chance that Thomas's cheese and wine is still buried under Seething Lane?
Well if it is, it will be past its sell by date.
Great video! You missed my favorite quote from the mayor who- early on- said that "a woman could piss it out." And so he did nothing.
Thomas faryner and Mrs. Oleary. People who led to giant fires. I feel like Mrs oleary didn't necessarily start the Chicago fire. But it is what the song says.
Wonderful video, I really enjoyed it. Small correction: even though the artist Wenceslaus (Wenzl) Hollar spent some time in Holland, he was originally Czech (Bohemian, "Böhme") and, as a protestant, was forced to flee during a period of recatholisation.
I can see bakers naming their street "Pudding Lane." I can't imagine anyone naming their street "Seething." 7:12
This is fabulous, I like so many people cant/wont return to London cause of Covid, my family is here in Australia and also there in London and about. . . These videos I’m loving, makes your feel like you’re there. I think you’re so interesting and knowledgeable. I came over from your TicTok account. Not sure how to encourage you accept you have one super fan here cheering you on . . Ps: i hope my family contact you for a Freelance tour. . .
I thought the flour in the air court fire 🔥
Very informative & nicely done. I learnt quite a bit. Where do you get your info? I love your enthusiasm for history, I think you will be the next Bethany Hughes, see you on the box soon👍
I love England and English people, I’m from Japan, English are one of the nicest people I’ve ever seen out side of where I’m from, I’m Asian, I was a student there and I thought I’d be discriminated but non of that happened and I traveled to Paris for a week and I was discriminated in day 3. 😅
The English people keep throwing things at River Thames that if in the future it dries up, it'll be a tremendous archeological treasure bed.
Already is
I'm reminded of Good Omens's Adultery Pulsifer.
How did the fire not get across the river? London Bridge was covered in buildings.
Jenny, your delivery is flawless. I could watch/ listen to you for hours.
Of course I know this video is 2 years old. But I,m jsut discovering your channel and I had to comment on the video that started my discovery. Merci from a Quebec historian.
Watching these older videos (Love them) since discovering your Shorts and you definitely have progressed. Your enthusiasm and passion come out more in your recent videos, and that makes the information that much more enjoyable to consume. Keep on keeping on because you make good content
"The judge thinks he's was mad.. they hanged him anyway." IDK why that made me laugh so hard.
Not entirely related, but since thatched roofs were banned in London in 1189 or 1212, why did the Globe have a thatched roof? Was it considered enough outside the city when the original was constructed?
Yes, the City's jurisdiction ended at the south end of London Bridge. Southwark was a somewhat nefarious area which provided brothels and bearbaiting as well as theatres.
Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultury Pulsifer seems a much more reasonable name now
The birth of Building Regs as we know them.
Nicholas Hawksmoor built some lovely churches after the fire too, such as the sublime Christ Church, Spitalfields.
Holy crap.... In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, the Fire Department would go around the city setting fire to houses that did not pay for fire protection.
As usual, Pratchett's satire was not nearly as far from the truth as you might expect.
That was Ankh-Morpork, which is partly based on historical London, but does rather dial the bad bits up to 11 for the sake of comedy.
Fireman here we train day after day and pray something like the blitz or the great fire will never happen again
I thoroughly enjoyed being educated by you about all things London!
As an Australian who lives in Melbourne, this is fascinating. Bushfires are a huge threat here. It's interesting seeing the Parallels with black saturday fires and 2020 fires. Thanks for your passion and knowledge.
As a Californian, 100% agree and understand. Our wildfires have burned an entire town to the ground and even tiny fires are horrifying bc they spread so quick across our parched land. We often spend entire summers indoor bc the fires make smoke and ashes so thick you can't breathe outside
I'm a Canadian and the forest and bush fires have been so bad this year. Here in Alberta the fires started before the plants greened up for Spring. This made everything so dry that the fires spread fast. I am still not going outside unless absolutely necessary because the smoke is bad here. We are so greatful for all the foreign countries that have sent help including Spain and Portugal from Europe. Now poor Europe is suffering from fires in the south. The summer has been hotter than normal there as well as here. Hopefully everything can be under control soon.
I remember reading Pepys diary, or at least the part about the great fire, in my US high school brit lit class. This is a great video explaining the fire! Thank you.
One benefit of the Great Fire was that it ended the periodic incidence of the plague. This was still an issue in London with the last outbreak in 1665. The fire probably helped to clear out the plague, one useful benefit at least.
Can we just point out that after all Charles II did, and he was still stuck with the reputation as the "merry monarch"?
2:19 - this pronunciation tickled my brain a lot. Just love the way her English accent rolled out that word “ Firestarter “. ❤️ #Prodigy
She's good. Really good.
Are there records of what happened to prisoners in those destroyed prisons? Were they freed? Were they burned to death?
I wonder what they would have blamed the fire on had it ended at Cock Lane...?
I very recently discovered that a distant relative of mine died in London during September 1666.
I'm only watching cos of the ICONIC HAT! Positively in love with that hat!
5:03 Pepys' London house is now longer there. I believe his house near Huntingdon (in Cambridgeshire) is very much still there (or maybe I'm wrong, I'm not very clever)
As everyone knows the Great Fire of London was caused by accident as the Doctor was in the act of defeating the Terileptils.
Yes, I believe you are correct. It's a pity there's only the one primary source for that tidbit. Everyone goes for the usual explanation instead.
We, the Dutch, were not amused for being accused falsely.
So we stole your flagship. Eat that, mr. Pepys.
Anyway, a few years later we decided it was a good idea to eat one of the guys responsible for stealing your flagship.
These were weird times...
Very weird. But the funny thing is about Pepys, he’s mostly remembered for his fascinating diary these days, but if he’d never written it, he’d be an important footnote in histories of the British navy. It was in such a mess when he started his job that your lot did indeed embarrass us by pinching the flagship, but Pepys was an excellent administrator who turned things around and left it in reasonable fighting shape.
It seems the story about insurance companies declining to put out fires in buildings insured by rivals is not quite true. Most brigades would put out a fire in case it set fire to adjoining properties which might include properties insured by the attending brigade.
Is the fire fighters not putting down the fires part correct? What if a insured house next to an uninsured house caught fire?
I would have thought the biggest, most noticeable difference between London today and London then would have been the gigantic cherubs flying overhead.
Interestingly, there was an increase in obesity and intestinal blockages in the 17th century, which you can guess by looking at portraits of fashionable young men of the era. Some blame the availability of sugar, a very chic condiment/seasoning/ingredient among the better sort. Or possibly it was just drinking lots of sugar-based rum🤷?
Interesting video and well presented. Thank you, J D.
Excellent job. Very informative. Thank you.
14:55 You might want to add a pinned comment regarding this, considering Tom Scott (who made a similar video) did some more research and found out, that's not what really happened, people just thought it did
Yes. Rather it was more a competition between the various brigades, who could get there first.
@@christianellegaard7120 And to get prize money for being first
My 9th great uncle Sir John Knight was Sargent surgeon to Charles ii, he was a very good friend of Samuel Pepys and mentioned in his diaries. When my distant uncle died in 1685, some of his books were bequeathed to Samuel Pepys.
14:57 - This is sort of how Marcus Licinius Crassus made his money in Republican Rome: He ran a "for-profit fire brigade". He hired 500 men who would rush to a burning building, whereupon Crassus would negotiate with the owner of the building to buy the property. A "fire sale", if you will. If the owner sold, Crassus' men would put out the fire, if not, they would leave, letting the building burn.
Love this! Thank you so much for doing this!
Discovered your channel only 3 days ago. I am struck by all the stories I've binged so far, your diction and pronunciation, your charm AND the sticker on your laptop saying it kills fascists. 😉
You make incredible videos! Absolutely loved this
That comment about the Dutch... I have to ask! I was recently reading a story, I can't remember now if Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood, I'm reading a lot of both right now, but they make the comment in a story to the effect of how awful it would be to be confused for being Dutch. Now the story was published in 1922, IIRC, so I thought it was maybe some corruption of Deutsch, i.e. German (like the Pennsylvania Dutch in the USA are actually of German descent, not Dutch), and given WW1 I can easily imagine no Englishman would want to be called as German at that time, but now I have to reconsider. What is the English dislike for the Dutch? I mean, I can understand in the 17th century, there's going to be intense economic and naval competition with the Dutch, sure, but even into the 20th century such sentiment is still lingering? Really? What is that about?
And it was the last time in London history when it didn't rain for 5 days.
Pepys' wife: "Dear husband, is there something you're trying to keep from me"
Pepys': "No dear why would you say that?" *Continues writing diary in a code that wouldn't be deciphered for hundreds of years*
His maid knew though!
omg my child loves to wac about history and so do i
Actually the insurance company fire brigades were a bit more complicated then that. If you weren't insured but your neighbor was they'd usually put the fire out still to keep it from spreading to the insured property. Sometimes the man in charge would try to get you to pay up for your first month of insurance and then they'd put it out cause he got a commission for new clients. All sorts of odd deals like that.
Re: the death toll - I agree it sounds too low. One thing I wondered about in particular were those in the prisons. Would the guards/wardens been decent enough to let prisoners out so they wouldn’t die?
I wondered about that too. But given the weird informality of some period prisons, the security likely wasn’t that tight, and I’m not sure that period gaolers were necessarily sadistic monsters. They were likely more interested in taking bribes from prisoners to allow small luxuries in, and would have liked the ones who paid well. Plus, many of those prisoners would have had friends or family on the outside, who might have turned quite nasty on anyone who let them burn to death.
Absolutely Outstanding. Excellent video. Have read about the Great Fire of London but you have brought it to life.
Fabulous! I know this is on the KS2 curriculum so I can see myself showing it to children at some point.
You'll see me next time? You have... cameras in here? HOW DO YOU KNOW!? Wait... wait... figure of speech. Right. See you too. Oh... wait... I actually will see you. Well this is one sided. That's not right. You should send a camera so you can see me just... leave it off Tuesday nights... it's... Just leave it off.
"ThAt'S ALriGhT. It'S JUst A LiTTlE FiRE. It'Ll BE OuT By MOrnINg." ... little did he know.
I wonder if the story of the Three Little Pigs could have come from the fact that the king's men would pull down houses made from wood instead of brick? Maybe they're pigs to represent gluttony?
This reminds me a lot of the Great Chicago Fire, which killed 300 people over 3 days and destroyed over 3 square miles of the city. It had a lot of similar conditions to this, like a very dry summer and lots of wooden buildings. It only stopped when a rainstorm came in to put out the fire. The famous myth for how the fire started was that an Irish woman, Catherine O' Leary, was milking her cow when it tipped over a lantern, starting the fire, though there are many conflicting stories of how it actually started.
One reason for each story being wider than the one below is that the wall pushing down on the floor beam create a lift on the center of the beam so it doesn't sag as much.
Well there wouldn't be many burials since the fire was hot enough to burn bone. There wouldn't be anything left. I'm sure more died. People who didn't have family that would look for them, or maybe an entire family died. Also the amount of foreigners who no one would've been looking for. They just never came back. The people had to worry about no place to live, & the weather isn't fit to sleep outside year around. The baroque style is how all of the capitol buildings in Washington D.C.
Wonderful video. Really interesting!! Thanks a lot..