Great Fire of London both recorded the events and their own reactions day by day, and made great efforts to keep themselves informed of what was happening all over the City and beyond. After two rainy summers in 1664 and 1665, London had lain under an exceptional drought since November 1665, and the wooden buildings were tinder-dry after the long hot summer of 1666. A fire broke out at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane a little after midnight on Sunday 2 September. The family was trapped upstairs but managed to climb from an upstairs window to the house next door, except for a
Robert Hubert severe inquisition [...] Catholics were also chief suspects, and accusations were so formal as to be added to the Monument in 1668, which stayed (with brief interruptions) until 1830: [...] the most dreadful Burning of this City; begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction. Hubert had convenient attributes. He was convicted and sentenced to death at the Old Bailey. Despite the contradictoriness of both Hubert's account and of public opinion, the Farriner family, in whose bakery the fire had started, was naturally under pressure — they needed to show that their ovens had been