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John Evelyn's 'Fumifugium'

February 2, 2026·40 min·3 clips

Evelyn described London's coal smoke as a 'suburb of hell' that killed bees, ruined clothes, and caused tuberculosis.

Coal was already a problem in 1306. The excerpt opens with a ban on burning sea coal, then cuts against the tidy version of that law: people kept burning it anyway. Then the plague changes the whole fuel picture. Coal use dropped in the later fourteenth century, not because anyone had become wiser about public health, but because the Black Death left fewer people needing heat. Forests started to come back. That part lands strangely, since the cleaner air was more a grim accident of population collapse than a reform anyone planned. Then demand climbed again. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, population growth and fuel needs were pushing England back toward coal. The weather helped make that happen. The Little Ice Age made life colder and wetter, so people needed more fuel just to stay warm. Wood was harder to move, too. Roads from forests into cities such as London were poor, which made urban wood supplies more difficult and expensive. Coal was the practical answer, even when it made towns dirtier. The host ties that shift to thicker pollution and repeated attempts by Parliament and monarchs to control burning. Public health was not really the center of it. The rules mostly protected the monarch, the royal family, and the air they personally found unpleasant. Elizabeth's rule makes that plain. In 1578, coal burning was banned in London only while Parliament was in session, which sounds less like clean-air policy and more like a temporary comfort measure. James changed the politics around coal. After James the sixth of Scotland became James the first of England and Ireland in 1603, wider Scottish coal use and royal household use helped coal seem more acceptable in England. Industry grew alongside that acceptance. Brewers still drew complaints because their coal smoke visibly dirtied the air, but the bigger pattern was hard to stop. Laws came and went around court preference, while ordinary fuel needs kept pulling London back into smoke.

As heard by us

A clear, grounded look at how coal smoke became a London problem before clean air was a modern cause.

John Evelyn's "Fumifugium" uses coal smoke to get at a dirtier, more practical history of London: one shaped by fuel, weather, roads, industry, and royal preference.

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