This post came about as a result of writing my book about The Great Fire of Northampton – available now on Amazon!
When we look at the Great Fire of Northampton, the obvious lessons seem to be about fire itself: thatched roofs catch quickly, strong winds carry sparks, and wooden towns are tinderboxes waiting to go up.
But using primary sources is a bit like going into an abandoned diamond mine. You might set out to find the jewels, but on the way down you notice other things: the workers’ cottages, the transport links, the tools and techniques left behind. The surroundings tell you just as much about the world that produced the diamonds as the stones themselves.
(Or maybe it’s simpler to say if you look at planets, you’ll learn about telescopes?)
It’s the same with the pamphlets, letters, and sermons written in the wake of Northampton’s fire. They don’t just describe flames and losses. They reveal how people thought, what they feared, who they blamed, and how their society worked.
The Hand of God
Almost every account of the fire is quick to explain why it happened, and for most writers the answer was clear: God was angry. The unfortunate woman whose house the blaze started in was not just unlucky – she was a moral lesson.
She was a single mother, and her child was “illegitimate.” That detail crops up again and again, until it becomes impossible to separate the flames on St Mary’s Street from the flames of judgement. Some writers even imagined her sinful hands stoking the blaze as punishment for a town that had grown lax – not attending church enough, or not punishing her harshly enough.
To us it might sound cruel, even absurd. But to a seventeenth-century audience, her “sin” and the town’s suffering were two sides of the same coin.
Every event – from the wind’s direction to whose houses survived – was read as God’s judgement or mercy. That reliance on providence as explanation shaped how 17th-century people saw not just fires, but plague, war, and weather.
Suspicion of the Poor
Accusations of looting, combined with the singling out of the unmarried mother, show us how quickly disaster narratives turned into moral policing.
Poverty and “vice” were often conflated.
Urban Design and Building Materials
Repeated references to “timber-framed” houses, thatch, and narrow streets show how vulnerable towns were. Houses with thatched roofs were referred to as a lesser option, signifying how that material was being phased out.
When later rebuilding stressed brick and tile, it wasn’t just fashion – it was seen as moral and civic responsibility.
Slow News
Northampton had no newspaper of its own. Most towns didn’t. There weren’t any widespread national newspapers, not in the same way as what came later.
Instead, news spread through small printed pamphlets: single-event “journals” that could be dashed off and sold quickly. Several of these have been transcribed and annotated in the book!
These were meant to licensed by church or government censors, and approved before publication; this wasn’t enforced too strongly, and breaches were rarely punished.
One particularly interesting unlicensed pamphlet admits that it was written to “correct” what the author saw as mistakes in other reports. Once the author had set the record straight, he turned to pages of moralising about God and sin; perhaps a strategic way to soften the eyes of any censor who might come across it.
This a reminder that “news” in this period was never neutral: it was always a mixture of information, persuasion, and preaching.
Fire fighting
One pamphlet almost sighs at the absence of fire engines – these would have been mobilised tanks of water, with hand pumps used to quell flames.
Others wonder if blowing up houses (as had been done in London nine years earlier) could have stopped the spread; the idea being that the fire couldn’t use the house to spread itself further, or perhaps that the explosion would “spend” the fire’s energy. The answer to that particular question is “probably not” – at least one house was detonated by a store of gunpowder, and this didn’t stop the fire’s progress.
These pamphlets remind us how little infrastructure towns like Northampton had to cope with a blaze. Buckets, blankets, and desperate prayers were the main tools.
The very fact that people debated these “what ifs” tells us that firefighting was only just beginning to be imagined as something systematic.
Economy and Timing
The timing could not have been worse. The fire came just after harvest, when barns were full of hay and grain, and merchants had stocked up with goods from Sturbridge Fair, then the largest fair in Europe.
So when the flames came, they didn’t just burn houses – they incinerated people’s savings, their winter supplies, and their livelihoods in a single afternoon.
That detail reveals how seasonal life was. A September blaze hit harder than a February one, because people had more to lose.
Hearth Tax
The Hearth Tax was introduced in 1662, under Charles II, as a way to raise steady income for the crown after the Restoration. The money went directly to Charles, without passing through Parliament.
Instead of taxing land or income, it taxed households according to the number of hearths (fireplaces) they had.
Every householder had to pay two shillings per hearth, twice a year. So a grand house with ten hearths paid much more than a modest cottage with one.
Fireplaces were seen as a visible measure of wealth and comfort. You couldn’t easily hide them, and collectors could count them when they came to inspect your house.
Charles suspended these payments after the fire for three years, to leave the residents with more money in their pockets to help them rebuild and recover from the fire.
Quirk of the Calendars
A local historian, George Baker, was writing about the fire just over a century later. He described the fire as happening on the 25th September. At a glance this looks like an error, but it could be due to a quirk with the country’s evolving calendar and dating system.
When Northampton burned on 20 September 1675, England was still using the old Julian calendar. Most of Europe had already switched to the more accurate Gregorian calendar (introduced in 1582), which ran 10 days ahead.
So by today’s reckoning, the “true” anniversary of the fire would fall on 30 September. Britain didn’t officially change calendars until 1752, when eleven days had to be “lost” in one go. (Wednesday 2 September was immediately followed by Thursday 14 September — a very short week!)
It’s possible that Baker was trying to “correct” the date of the anniversary to match the changeover to the Gregorian calendar, and miscounted?
The two calendars differ only in when the leap years are placed.
In the Julian calendar, every year divisible by 4 is a leap year, which makes it slightly too long.
In the Gregorian calendar, leap years are also every 4 years, but century years (like 1700, 1800, 1900) are only leap years if divisible by 400, which keeps it more accurate to the solar year.
Jack Preston 