<P> Only a few deaths from the fire are officially recorded, and deaths are traditionally believed to have been few . Porter gives the figure as eight and Tinniswood as "in single figures", although he adds that some deaths must have gone unrecorded and that, besides direct deaths from burning and smoke inhalation, refugees also perished in the impromptu camps . </P> <P> Hanson takes issue with the idea that there were only a few deaths, enumerating known deaths from hunger and exposure among survivors of the fire, "huddled in shacks or living among the ruins that had once been their homes" in the cold winter that followed, including, for instance, dramatist James Shirley and his wife . Hanson also maintains that "it stretches credulity to believe that the only papists or foreigners being beaten to death or lynched were the ones rescued by the Duke of York", that official figures say very little about the fate of the undocumented poor, and that the heat at the heart of the firestorms was far greater than an ordinary house fire, and was enough to consume bodies fully or leave only a few skeletal fragments . </P> <P> The fire was fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, Hanson points out, but also by the oil, pitch, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine, and gunpowder stored in the riverside district . It melted the imported steel lying along the wharves (melting point between 1,250 and 1,480 ° C (2,300 and 2,700 ° F)) and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates (melting point between 1,100 and 1,650 ° C (2,000 and 3000 ° F)). Nor would anonymous bone fragments have been of much interest to the hungry people sifting through the tens of thousands of tons of rubble and debris after the fire, looking for valuables, or to the workmen clearing away the rubble later during the rebuilding . </P> <P> Hanson appeals to common sense and "the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries", emphasising that the fire attacked the rotting tenements of the poor with furious speed, surely trapping at the very least "the old, the very young, the halt and the lame" and burying the dust and ashes of their bones under the rubble of cellars, producing a death toll not of four or eight, but of "several hundred and quite possibly several thousand ." </P>

Where did the great fire of london start and finish