St Magnus-the-Martyr Great Plague of 1665, the City authorities ordered fires to be kept burning night and day, in the hope that the air would be cleansed. Daniel Defoe's semi-fictictional, but highly realistic, work "A Journal of the Plague Year" records that one of these was "just by St Magnus Church". Despite its escape in 1633, the church was one of the first buildings to be destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. St Magnus stood less than 300 yards from the bakehouse of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane where the fire started. Farriner, a former churchwarden of St Magnus,
The Great Fire (children's novel) The Great Fire (children's novel) The Great Fire is a story for children and young adults, written by Jim Murphy about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which caused the destruction of most of the city of Chicago. "The Great Fire" was a Newbery medal honor book in 1996. The novel "The Great Fire" is about the great fire that happened in Chicago. The huge fire started in the O'Learys' barnyard and lasted for thirty hours. Daniel "Pegleg" Sullivan was the first to notice the fire and ran to save the cows in the barn and to tell the O'Learys