Up in Smoke

30/03/1886

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The City and Volunteer fire brigades attended a huge fire at English’s timber yards. They could do little to stop a blaze that destroyed three saw mills, the engine and boiler house, three timber sheds; four cranes; eleven railway trucks and a multitude of other machinery and stock pieces across the near 2-acre site. The cost of the damage was estimated to be around £20,000 - a significant sum in 1886. (Mellows, W.T., ‘Peterborough Municipal Jubilee’, Peterborough Standard, 1924)

Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.

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Chronicle Writers (and a Wild Hunt)

1127

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Much of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our key source for early medieval English history, was written at Peterborough Abbey in this period – today preserved in the Peterborough D and E Manuscripts. Another chronicle was written here by a monk called Hugh Candidus, telling the story of the abbey. One tale he told was of a corrupt abbot, Henry d'Angély, who was a rather godless and worldly man who planned to loot Peterborough of its wealth. As a result a dread portent followed in the form of a spectral 'wild hunt' sent to terrorise the area. 'In the very year in which he came to the abbey, marvellous portents were seen and heard at night during the whole of lent, throughout the woodland and plains, from the monastery as far as Stamford. For there appeared, as it were, hunters with horns and hounds, all being jet black, their horses and hounds as well, and some rode as it were on goats and had great eyes and there were twenty or thirty together. Many men of faithful report both saw them and heard the horns...'

Anglo Saxon Chronicle , Hugh Candidus , Henry d'Angely

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Up in Smoke

30/03/1886

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Chronicle Writers (and a Wild Hunt)

1127

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