HOW DID MEDIEVAL PEOPLE DEAL WITH GREAT FIRES?

Lessons from earlier ‘interesting times’

The Great Fire(s) of Los Angeles, which are currently raging, have consumed tens of thousands of acres and destroyed thousands of homes, and are by no means over, give one the sickening feeling that often accompanies seeing history unfold.

Studying history is fun. Living through it, less so.

The fires are also a reminder that for all the sophisticated tools that are available to us in the twenty-first century, humans are still highly vulnerable to some timeless elemental threats.

In the fourteenth century the gloomy poet John Gower wrote:

There are three things of such a sort that they produce merciless destruction when they get the upper hand. One is a flood of water, another is a raging fire and the third is the lesser people, the common multitude; for they will not be stopped by either reason or discipline.

Fire, floods and populists. Although Gower was writing seven centuries ago, he could have been drawing up a checklist of modern terrors.