The King’s Commission and the City’s Survey

Seen from above in the autumn of 1666, London was a city unmade. Across a vast plain of grey ash and rubble, the familiar streets had vanished, leaving men who had known them since childhood unable to find their bearings. The stone walls of guildhalls and churches stood like broken teeth amid the waste, while all timber had been consumed entirely. From the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow at Cheapside’s western end—its steeple spared by the fire’s last turn before the wind dropped—no smoke rose now; the scene was strangely still, the fires having been out for six weeks.

On Wednesday, 17 October, a clerk climbed the tower with a party of surveyors. He was twenty years old, a student at Westminster School, and he had come to see what his father’s generation had lost. From that height he counted the hollow shells of twenty churches. The spire of St. Paul’s was gone entirely. The cathedral’s walls stood open to the sky, its crossing a crater of fallen masonry. To the east, the Tower of London marked the fire’s limit, its white keep untouched. To the west, the smoking ground reached past the city wall to the Temple and the Inns of Court. He estimated that thirteen thousand houses had burned. He wrote the figure in his notebook without commentary. The number was already in circulation. What struck him was the silence. The city that had never slept lay empty of its roar. Only the wind moved through the ruins.

The silence was temporary. Already men were walking the ash with measuring chains and iron rods, establishing the first facts upon which everything else would depend.

—-

A royal commissioner stepped into a surviving building near the Guildhall in late October, seeking witnesses. Sir William Penn, father of the boy who would later found Pennsylvania, had received his commission on 11 October. The king’s warrant named him and three others to examine how the fire had begun and how it had spread. The wording was careful, procedural. The commission was a political instrument as much as a fact-finding body. Its establishment followed weeks of agitation in which the Dutch war, the Catholic question, and the mere fact of foreign residents had nearly produced mob justice in place of justice proper.

Robert Hubert had hanged at Tyburn on 27 October. His body was being handed to the Company of Barber-Surgeons for dissection when it was torn apart by a crowd of Londoners. The confession he had offered—that he had fired Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse at the instigation of the devil—had collapsed upon examination. He had been at sea when the fire began. The French consul had proved it. Yet the confession had served its purpose for those who needed a shape to place upon chaos.

The commissioners faced a different necessity. They needed a shape that would hold.

Their first sessions began in November, in rooms borrowed from surviving City buildings. The testimony they gathered would not be published. The proceedings were intended to inform the king’s government and to settle, quietly, what could not be settled by hanging. Thomas Farriner appeared before them in the second week of November. He was fifty-one years old, a churchwarden of St. Margaret’s, Fish Street, a man whose bakehouse had supplied ship’s biscuit to the Navy Office. His daughter Hanna came with him. She was twenty-three and had helped in the business. What they told the commissioners matched what they had told others in the fire’s immediate aftermath, but now their words were transcribed, attested, filed.

A short time after midnight on Sunday, 2 September 1666, a fire broke out at Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane, a small street running between Eastcheap and Thames Street. The occupants, save the family’s maidservant, who was too frightened to try, fled through an upstairs window to the house next door. When the house burned down, the maid perished, becoming the fire’s first victim. Farriner and his daughter survived.

The commissioners pressed for detail. Farriner described the bakehouse’s construction: the timber frame, the oven against the north wall, the flour and faggots stored in the adjoining chamber. He denied that any candle had been left burning. His man and his maidservant had raked the oven and gone to bed. He had checked the house himself. The fire, he insisted, had begun in the oven’s timbers, from retained heat or perhaps from a spark undetected in the raking.

Hanna Farriner confirmed her father’s account. She had been asleep in the chamber above the bakehouse. The smoke woke her. She had climbed through the window to the roof of the adjoining house, her father following with her brother. The maidservant, named only as the maid in the depositions, had refused to come. Whether she could not or would not, neither Farriner could say. The commissioners recorded her death without further inquiry. She was the only named victim of the fire’s origin, and her name has not survived.

The commission’s work proceeded through November and into December. They heard from neighbors, from watchmen, from the watermen who had first raised the alarm. They established a timeline: the fire discovered shortly after midnight, the parish constable summoned, the Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth roused from his bed and taken to see the blaze. They confirmed what the streets had known within hours. The fire had begun accidentally. No incendiary had been found. No foreign plot had left its traces in the ash. The conspiracy theory that had consumed Robert Hubert dissolved before methodical inquiry, not because the commissioners were lenient but because the evidence would not support it.

Their report, when it came, was brief and unequivocal. The fire had begun in Farriner’s bakehouse by accident. The wind from the east had driven it through narrow streets lined with combustible materials. The building practices of the old city had done the rest. The commissioners recommended no prosecution. The bakehouse’s destruction had been its own punishment, and Farriner’s losses, which he itemized for the record, were substantial. He had lost his house, his stock, his tools, his livelihood. He continued as churchwarden. In 1670 he would die and be buried at St. Magnus the Martyr, the church that had survived the fire at the foot of London Bridge. His bakehouse site, on the eastern side of Pudding Lane, would become part of the Monument’s foundation, the column that would mark where London burned.

—-

While the commissioners gathered testimony, other men measured the ground itself. The City Corporation, acting through its Court of Common Council, had authorized a survey of the destroyed area on 11 September, before the last embers cooled. The work fell to six established practitioners, men who had built and measured London before the fire. One was a master carpenter who had worked on the old St. Paul’s. Another was a surveyor of growing reputation. What they faced was without precedent: not the measurement of a single estate or the planning of a single development, but the mapping of a vanished city.

Their instructions were precise. They were to perambulate each burned parish, to establish the boundaries of every property, to note what walls stood and what had fallen, to measure the street widths and the spaces between buildings. Each surveyor took a district. One received the ward of Farringdon Within, including the ruins of Old St. Paul’s. Another took Bread Street and Cordwainer wards, the commercial heart of the city. They worked in pairs for verification, one man holding the chain, the other recording. Their notebooks filled with figures: frontages in feet and inches, depths to the rear boundaries, the compass orientation of each plot. They noted encroachments, projections, ancient violations of the building line that the fire had exposed. They marked where cellars survived and where they had collapsed. They distinguished between stone walls that might be repaired and timber frames that were ash.

The work was slow and physically demanding. The ground was still warm in places, the ash deep and treacherous. Cellars had filled with debris or with the water used to fight the flames. Walls that appeared solid proved hollow when probed. The surveyors carried iron rods for testing foundations and plumb lines for establishing verticals in a landscape where nothing stood straight. They worked six days a week, reporting their progress to the Common Council each Friday. By November they had covered most of the burned area. By December their maps were ready for engraving.

What they produced was not merely a record of destruction. It was a legal instrument, the first documentation of property rights in the new city. The fire had erased boundaries that had been fixed by custom and memory. Who owned what, where one plot ended and another began, whether a party wall had been shared or belonged to one householder alone—these questions, unresolved, blocked any reconstruction. The surveyors’ chains established facts that litigation would otherwise have disputed for decades. Their maps showed each property as a numbered plot, its dimensions fixed, its relation to the street and to neighboring holdings precisely located. These were the ground plots upon which the rebuilding would be based, and they remain in the London Metropolitan Archives, their ink faded but their lines still legible.

The surveys revealed patterns that testimony could not. The fire’s destruction had been uneven, shaped by building materials, street widths, and the wind’s direction. Stone structures had survived where timber had burned. Open spaces had acted as firebreaks where the official firebreaks had failed. The surveyors noted these survivals without comment, but their maps made visible what the commissioners’ depositions only implied. The city’s medieval fabric, its narrow lanes and overhanging stories, had concentrated the damage. The wider streets of the western wards, recently developed, had resisted better. The fire had moved faster where the buildings were densest and oldest. This was not a judgment the surveyors rendered. It was a pattern their measurements displayed.

—-

Samuel Pepys observed both processes from his position at the Navy Office. His house and office at Seething Lane had survived, on the fire’s eastern margin. In October he rode through the ruins with his wife Elizabeth, noting the sights with the mixture of horror and curiosity that characterized his response to catastrophe. On 11 October he recorded that the city resembled a French bastide town, all in ashes. On 15 November he visited the site of his father’s house in Salisbury Court, finding nothing but rubbish. The experience seems to have shaken him more than he admitted. His diary entries through the autumn show a preoccupation with order, with the securing of his papers, with the digging of a second pit in his garden to store wine against future disaster.

Pepys had no direct part in the commission or the survey, but he knew the men involved. Sir William Penn was his colleague at the Navy Office. His diary records conversations about the fire’s origin, about the Dutch war, about the king’s plans for rebuilding. On 28 October he noted Hubert’s execution without comment on the man’s guilt or innocence. The entry concerned the crowd’s violence, the tearing of the body, the general madness of the people. Pepys was a man who trusted procedure. The commission and the survey represented, for him, the return of procedure after the chaos of September.

John Evelyn, writing from his house at Deptford, took a longer view. His Fumifugium, published in 1661, had proposed the removal of noxious trades from London to improve the air. The fire, he wrote in his diary on 7 September, had accomplished by violence what his pamphlet had urged by reason. In October he toured the ruins with the king, noting Charles’s sad expression and his determination to rebuild with more glory. Evelyn had no patience for the conspiracy theories. His correspondence through the autumn urged a rational response: wider streets, uniform building, the creation of public spaces. He would serve on the commission that planned the rebuilding, and his influence would appear in the designs that followed. But in the immediate aftermath he was a witness, like Pepys, to the labor of establishing fact.

The two diarists represent the poles of contemporary response. Pepys, immersed in administration, valued the practical work of measurement and testimony. Evelyn, the virtuoso and reformer, saw opportunity in destruction. Both understood that the fire had exposed the city’s vulnerabilities, and both looked to the crown and the Corporation for remedies. Neither recorded doubt about the commission’s findings or the survey’s accuracy. The procedures they observed were, for them, the alternative to the violence that had killed Hubert and threatened others.

—-

The commission’s report and the surveyors’ maps converged toward a single necessity. The fire’s origin had been established as accident. The ground’s condition had been established by measurement. What remained was the allocation of responsibility for rebuilding, and this required a further institution. The Common Council, meeting in January 1667, would establish a court to adjudicate the claims of landlords and tenants, of ground landlords and leaseholders, of those who wished to rebuild and those who wished to sell. The court’s work would last for a decade, untangling property rights that the fire had complicated and the survey had clarified.

This was the pattern of London’s recovery: fact first, then law, then construction. The commission and the survey laid the foundation. Without the finding of accidental cause, rebuilding would have proceeded under the shadow of arson, with every foreign resident suspect and every Catholic feared. Without the ground plots, rebuilding would have reproduced the confusion of the medieval street plan, with boundaries disputed and encroachments multiplied. The two processes, investigative and cartographic, answered different questions but served a single purpose. They made the future possible by establishing what had happened and what remained.

The men who carried out this work have left few personal traces. We know one surveyor’s measurements, not his opinions. We know the commission’s warrant, not its members’ conversations with each other. The depositions survive in summary, not in full transcription. What we can reconstruct is the shape of their labor: the walking of streets that no longer existed, the questioning of witnesses whose memories were already adjusting to loss, the reduction of chaos to figures that could be entered in registers and reproduced on copper plates. This was governance as paperwork, the empire’s characteristic response to crisis. It lacked the drama of the fire itself or the hunt for culprits. It produced no martyrs and no villains. But it made possible everything that followed.

—-

On a November morning, one of the surveyors stood at the crossing of what had been St. Paul’s Churchyard. The cathedral’s walls rose around him, their windows empty, their vaulting fallen. He had measured sacred space before, but never sacred space in ruins. His chain ran across rubble that included fragments of tombs, scraps of monuments, the debris of three centuries. He noted the dimensions of the surviving walls, their height and thickness, their capacity to bear weight. His figures would inform the debate over whether to repair or replace. The architect who would redesign the cathedral would consult them in 1668 when he made his first designs. The decision to demolish what remained and build anew would come later, after further survey, after the failure of repairs attempted in 1667.

He worked methodically. He had begun at the west end, where the tower had fallen, and progressed eastward through the choir. The chapter house was gone entirely. The cloisters were heaps of stone. Only the outer walls of the nave stood to their full height, and these were cracked and leaning. He measured the deviation from vertical: fourteen inches at the southwest corner. The structure was unsound. His report would say so without rhetoric.

Other surveyors worked nearby. In the ward of Cheap, one man plotted the sites of the burned Goldsmiths’ Hall and the Mercers’ Hall, establishing the boundaries of properties that had been landmarks before they were ruins. In Tower Street, another measured the surviving walls of the Customs House, damaged but potentially salvageable. Each man’s work fed into a composite map, the Great Map of London that would be engraved and published in 1667. The map showed the burned area as a blank, the unburned streets as they had been. It was not accurate in every particular—the surveyors had worked quickly, and some errors persisted—but it established the scale of destruction as no verbal description could.

The map also showed what survived. The Tower, the Mint, the Exchange’s replacement. The churches on the margin: St. Andrew Undershaft, St. Katherine Cree, St. Giles Cripplegate. The houses of the wealthy in the western wards, where the fire had been stopped by blowing up houses in the path. These survivals were politically significant. They proved that the fire had been stoppable, that human intervention had mattered, that the catastrophe was not simply an act of God beyond mitigation. The surveyors’ chains had measured limits as well as losses.

—-

The winter of 1666-67 brought no reconstruction. The ground was too disturbed, the claims too numerous, the plans too uncertain. Men walked the ruins still, but now they were scavengers, collecting lead from melted roofs, iron from burned warehouses, stone that could be reused. The Corporation attempted to regulate this trade, requiring licenses for removal of materials, but enforcement was impossible. The ruins were too vast, the poverty too pressing. Pepys noted in December that the poor people were all in the fields about London, and that many were digging in the ash for whatever they could find.

The commission completed its work in January. The surveyors filed their final returns in February. The facts were established, the ground was measured, the preconditions for law were in place. What followed would be the work of the court: the adjudication of claims, the ordering of priorities, the gradual emergence of a rebuilt city from the legal and physical chaos. The court would sit for ten years, processing thousands of cases, its decisions shaping the property relations of the new London. Its records, like the surveyors’ notebooks, survive in the archives, evidence of the labor of making order from destruction.

The surveyors had not intended to document failure. Their task was practical, their method empirical. Yet their maps display what the fire revealed: the concentration of damage in the oldest, densest quarters; the survival of newer, more spacious development; the vulnerability of a city built for a smaller population and a slower economy. These patterns, visible in the numbered plots and measured frontages, contradicted the official narrative of accident without culpability. The fire had been accident in its origin. Its extent had been the product of structure: of building regulations unenforced, of street widths inadequate, of water supply insufficient, of fire-fighting arrangements that collapsed before the scale of the emergency. The commission found no individual responsible for these conditions. The surveyors named no names. But their work preserved the evidence that later reformers would use, the facts that would justify the Rebuilding Act of 1667 and the regulations that followed.

Thomas Farriner returned to baking. He established a new bakehouse in Pudding Lane, on the site where his first had burned. The commission’s finding of accident protected him from prosecution, but not from loss. He claimed compensation from the court, as did thousands of others. His deposition remained in the files, a brief account of a night’s terror that had changed the city. The maid who died in his house had no memorial. Her death, like her name, disappeared into the general catastrophe.

The surveyors moved on to other work. One would build houses in the new streets, adapting his measurements to the regulations that the fire had made necessary. Another would survey estates in the country, his reputation established by his London labor. Their chains and rods were put to other uses, their notebooks filed and largely forgotten. What they had made possible was not yet visible: the new streets, the uniform houses, the churches that would rise in the coming decades. The ground was still ash. The facts were still new. And in the Guildhall, clerks were already preparing the dockets for the court that would turn those facts into judgments, those judgments into property, that property into a city rebuilt.

The ruins of London had been surveyed. The official story of accident had been constructed. The handoff from rumor to fact was complete. The next task was to turn those facts into law, to adjudicate the thousands of dissolved contracts in a city where every lost boundary meant a dispute, and every burned house a dissolved contract.