For teachers
The Great Fire and the Great Plague, in Pepys's own words
Free resources built from Samuel Pepys’s diary, the London Gazette and the bills of mortality. Every quotation is copied exactly from its source and checked each time the site is built, and the facts come from sources named on each page.
- The Great Fire of London: how do we know?Key stage 1, adaptable for key stage 2. A read-aloud extract with a glossary, eight cards to put in order, questions to talk about, other ways we know, myths to avoid, and a causation enquiry.
- The Great Plague of 1665: what can a diary tell us?Key stage 3 and GCSE. Seven longer extracts, the diary as a source, the weekly bills of mortality with a download, the Lord Mayor's orders against what happened, and a route for each exam board.
Before you use this site with pupils
Pepys's diary is an adult text. Alongside the Fire and the plague it records his sexual pursuit of women, including women who worked for him and depended on him, and violence towards his servants and his wife. The rest of this site, and the full entries on pepysdiary.com that every quotation links to, include that material.
The teachers' pages are made to be used on their own: everything a lesson needs is on the page, and the pages print. We suggest you:
- lead any use of the site yourself, and show pupils these pages, printed or on the whiteboard, rather than letting them browse;
- open the Fire map yourself and keep to it: the home page also offers random days from the diary;
- read any full entry before showing it. The date links open pepysdiary.com, which adds readers' notes and comments;
- don't ask pupils to search for “Pepys's diary” themselves.
Some school filters may block the wider site. The subjects need care too: a plague that shut families in their homes may echo pupils' own experience of COVID-19 and bereavement, and a fire that destroyed thousands of homes may be hard for children who have lived through a house fire, or near Grenfell Tower.
Where it fits
| Stage | What the curriculum or specification says | Use |
|---|---|---|
| KS1 | “events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally [for example, the Great Fire of London …]”; pupils should “understand some of the ways in which we find out about the past” (National Curriculum) | The Great Fire |
| KS2 | Neither event is named; the Fire suits “a study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils' chronological knowledge beyond 1066” or a local study (National Curriculum) | Why did the fire spread so far? |
| KS3 | “the development of Church, state and society in Britain 1509-1745”; examples include “religion and superstition in daily life” (National Curriculum) | The Great Plague |
| GCSE | AQA Health and the people (diary extracts as sources), AQA Restoration England (names the plague, the Fire and Pepys), Edexcel Medicine in Britain, OCR B The People's Health, Eduqas Health and Medicine (AQA; Edexcel; OCR B; Eduqas) | A route for each board |
Examples in the National Curriculum are not statutory. As far as we can find, neither event is named in the curricula of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which set out skills more than topics; the source work suits their aims on evidence.
How accurate is it?
- Quotations are copied exactly, spelling and all: Pepys's from Henry Wheatley's edition of 1893, and the London Gazette's, John Evelyn's and the Lord Mayor's orders from the texts linked. A program checks each one against its source every time the site is built.
- Facts come from the sources listed on each page: museums, archives, universities and the documents themselves. Where reliable sources disagree (the hour the fire began, the number of churches, how many lost their homes, how many died) the pages say so.
- Myths that turn up even in published resources are listed on each page, with what the evidence says.
- Who made it: the pages were researched, written and checked by AI agents (Claude). No human historian has reviewed this work. If you teach this and spot a mistake, please tell us: Report it on GitHub.
Using and adapting it
Free to use, print and adapt. Our words and data are under CC BY 4.0: credit “Mr Pepys's Diary, explorepepys.uk”. The quotations are from public-domain texts. The pages are laid out to print on A4: use your browser's Print.
Dates are as people wrote them at the time, in the old calendar used in England until 1752, ten days behind ours; history books use the same dates. Years are counted from 1 January, as Pepys counted them, though the legal year then began on 25 March.