Arson,

The spread of `lucifer’ matches was another common cause of fire. Twelve-year-old Thomas Tollieday set fire to Richard Knight’s hovel at Long Sutton on 14th August 1865 when he experimented with what a match could do. His mother told him to blame `Thickpenny’s girl’ but he was found not guilty of criminal intent in any case.

Bad feeling between a farmer and labourer led to a fire at Pinchbeck in February 1868. John Welsch had been drinking at the Pole Hole, where he nursed bitter feelings about farmer William Robertson who had refused to employ him. Then he went on to the Wheat Sheaf, only two hundred yards from Robertson’s wheat stack which mysteriously caught fire later that evening, half an hour after Welsch had left the pub. He was given 18 months’ hard labour. This sentence remained fairly standard for the offence for the rest of the century.