ABSTRACT
The Weavers, gazing a t the smouldering ruins of their Hall, must have felt almost overwhelmed by the tremendous physical and financial problems confronting them. They had to pull down the ruined shell and clear from the site mountains of masonry and charred timbers when everybody else all over the City, immersed in similar work, would be competing for labour and transport. Then they had to find men, materials and money to build anew. They could look for no help from insurance, for fire insurance was not 'invented' and developed in London until more than a decade after the Great Fire; so how could they raise the money, and how much would they need? No grants from public funds were to be had. All donations coming in from other parts of the country were, quite properly, designated for the relief of London's poor, whose plight in the long, hard winter of 1666-7 was pitiful in the extreme.l Apart from these funds, self-help was the order of the day. All in all, it was a situation in which initial hesitation is excusable and some delay not surprising, especially after the awful ravages of the plague only a year before. Even the rents from the house in Bread Street and the tenement adjoining Weavers' Hall would cease, for these premises, too, had been gutted.
