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,
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