Necropolis: London & it's Dead (10 page)

By the following spring, grass, weeds and wildflowers will have covered this burial mound, as Nature reclaims the scarred earth. And, within a year, London will be engulfed by another tragedy, which will erase almost all traces of the plague: the Great Fire of 1666.

5:
ET IN ARCADIA EGO

A Vision of Elysian Fields

A year after the Great Plague, London was destroyed by fire. Seventy per cent of its houses vanished into the flames. St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, Christ’s Hospital and the north end of London Bridge were engulfed. Thirteen thousand buildings, including eighty-nine churches, disappeared for ever. Fifty-one churches were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren and his followers, including Nicholas Hawksmoor, but thirty-three were never replaced.

In addition to the churches, Wren was commissioned to design and build a new St Paul’s. Faced with this opportunity to forge another London from the wreck of the old, Wren did not neglect the dead in his plans and proposed suburban cemeteries on the outskirts of town. As an architect, Wren deplored the concept of intra-mural interment, since he understood that the practice contributed to rot, damp and subsidence. He may also have been motivated by the appalling scenes that ensued during demolition work of the old St Paul’s, when mummified corpses, their tombs smashed by falling debris, were salvaged and propped up in the Convocation House yard for the amusement of sightseers. The
remains of John Colet, founder of St Paul’s School, became the focus of a grisly scientific experiment:

After the Conflagration, his monument being broken, his coffin, which was lead, was full of a liquor which conserved the body. Mr Wyld and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and ’twas of a kind of insipid taste, something of an ironish taste. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chink, like brawne. The coffin was of lead and layd in the wall about 2 foot ½ above the surface of the floor.
¹

Wren was not alone in his distaste for intra-mural burial. His contemporary, the diarist John Evelyn, also deplored the state of London’s churchyards: ‘I observed that most of the churchyards (though some were large enough) were filled up with earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodies one above the other, to the very top of the walls, and some above the walls, so that the churches seemed to be built in pits.’
²

The Great Fire should have provided the perfect opportunity to obliterate the plague pits, and do away with London’s overcrowded churchyards. According to the writer and historian, Mrs Isabella Holmes, Wren:

wished to see suburban cemeteries established, and burials in churches and churchyards discontinued, partly because he considered the constant raising of the level of a churchyard rendered the church damp and more liable to premature decay. But Wren’s plans for rebuilding the city were not carried out; they were approved by the King and Parliament, but disapproved of by the Corporation [the municipal governing body of the City of London].
³

The churches were rebuilt on the old sites, the churchyards were used again, and the sites of those churches which were not rebuilt
became additional parish burial-grounds. Despite Wren’s reservations, the great and good continued to be interred at the new St Paul’s, including the great architect himself, in 1723.

Although burial of the dead was the responsibility of the Church of England, another trend was emerging. Following the Reformation, many Londoners had turned away from the established Church to join sects such as the Baptists, Methodists and Quakers, and they wished to be buried somewhere other than the city’s churchyards. While many historians conclude that the first purpose-built cemetery in Britain was the Rosary Cemetery, opened in Norwich in 1819, Bunhill Fields, established 1665, may lay claim to this title. This land, north of the City and adjacent to Finsbury Fields, the Artillery Ground and Windmill Hill, was known as Bone-hill or Bon-hill.

In the year 1549, when the Charnel Chapel in St Paul’s Churchyard was pulled down:

the bones of the dead, couched up in a charnel under the chapel, were conveyed from thence into Finsbury Field, by report of him who paid for the carriage, amounting to more than one thousand cartloads, and there laid on a moorish ground, which, in a short time after, being raised by the soilage of the City, was able to bear three windmills.
⁴

The number of windmills was later on increased to five, and these appear on many old maps of London.

Regarded as a profitless wasteland, the bowmen and archers of the City of London used the area nearby for target practice, and it eventually became the training ground for the Honorary Artillery Company. This area had been something of an informal graveyard since Saxon times: heretics were buried at Moorfields. According to the historian Maitland, writing in 1756, the Mayor and Citizens of London set apart and consecrated Bonhill in 1665, ‘as a common Cemetery, for the interment of such corps as could not have room in
their parochial burial-grounds in that dreadful year of pestilence.’
⁵
However, it appears the land was not actually used for plague victims on that occasion, and instead was leased by one John Tyndall or Tindal, who ‘converted it into a Burial-ground for the use of Dissenters’. A large plot to the north was added, and eventually the whole cemetery measured about five acres. From 1665 to 1852, when the ground was closed, 123,000 people were buried there, including vast numbers of Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Independent ministers.

St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, rebuilt by Wren in 1675, represents a microcosm of London burial practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A series of excavations has found evidence of burial here since Roman times. No less than seven churches have been built on the site of St Bride’s over the past 2,000 years: earlier still, the land was occupied by a Roman temple. Samuel Pepys, baptised in St Bride’s in 1633, visited the church in March, 1664, to:

chose a place for my brother to lie in, just under my mother’s pew. But to see how a man’s tomb are at the mercy of such a fellow, that for 6d he would–in his own words–‘jostle them together but I will make room for him’–speaking of the fullness of the middle aisle, where he was to lie, and that he would for my father’s sake do my brother that he is dead, all the civility he can; which was to disturb others’ corps that are not quite rotten, to make room for him.
⁶

Pepys’s experience typifies the overcrowded intra-mural burials which Wren so deplored. But Pepys possessed the seventeenth-century’s robust attitude to death. In February 1669, he took a group to Westminster Abbey:

and there did show them all the tombs…there being other company this day to see the tombs, it being Shrove Tuesday; and here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen
Katherine of Valois; and I had the upper part of her body in my hands and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen and that it was my birthday, thirty-six years old, that I first kissed a Queen.
⁷

The body of Katherine de Valois, buried 1483, had been a grisly exhibit since she was dug up in 1502, when the chapel was demolished on the orders of Henry VII. Katherine’s body was placed in a wooden box near her husband’s tomb and Henry fully intended to have her reburied. But as he died the next day, this was never carried out and Katherine became one of the sights of Westminster Abbey. In 1631, John Weever wrote that: ‘Katherine, Queen of England, lieth here, in a chest or coffin with a loose cover, to be seen and handled of any who will much desire it.’ By the eighteenth century, the body was still on show, ‘the bones being firmly united, and thinly clothed with flesh, like scrapings of tanned leather’, according to Richard Gough, the eighteenth-century historian and genealogist.

Of late years the Westminster scholars amused themselves with tearing it to pieces; and one in particular, who bore a principal character in the police in India, lies under the imputation of having contributed in a special manner to that havoc. I can just remember seeing some shapeless mass of mummy of a whitish colour. It is now under lock and key near her husband’s tomb, waiting for the next opening of the royal vault for her last repose.

This awful spectacle of frail immortality was at length removed from the public gaze into St Nicholas’s Chapel and buried under the monument to George Villiers, when a vault was made for the remains of Elizabeth Percy, Duchess of Northumberland. Then the unfortunate creature was disinterred by the Dean of St Paul’s in 1877, before eventually being reinterred near her husband in the Chantry Chapel in 1878.
⁸
St Bride’s was re-opened in 1675,
although the steeple, Wren’s highest at 226 feet, was not completed until 1701.

Despite Wren’s opinions on the subject, burial continued both outside and inside St Bride’s. The majority of burials took place at the Upper Ground and Lower Ground cemeteries nearby. In the 1950s, a joint excavation by the Museum of London, the Natural History Museum and the University of Cambridge found a large quantity of human remains, including a mediaeval charnel house and 300 burials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Burial records indicate that the crypt was reserved for local worthies, interred in lead coffins. These included Samuel Holden(1740), a Governor of the Bank of England; John Pridden (1807), a bookseller and churchwarden at St Bride’s; John Jolliffe (1771), MP for Petersfield; and Henry Dolamore (1838), licensee of the Cheshire Cheese, the most famous pub in Fleet Street. Best known of all was Samuel Richardson (1761), novelist and printer. William Rich the pastrycook, who modelled his famous many-tiered wedding cakes on the steeple of St Bride’s, was laid in the crypt in 1811. The occupations given for these burials–jeweller, Venetian blind maker, Lord Mayor (Robert Waithman, 1823)–place them fairly and squarely in London’s emerging bourgeoisie. These were the new class of burials, and their funerals were to be every bit as elaborate as the lives they had departed.

In previous centuries, rich and poor lived together and died together. The greatest social distinction consisted of whether one was buried within the church or the churchyard. During the seventeenth century, the majority of Londoners continued to be buried close to home, in parish churchyards, with a series of religious and secular rituals that had changed little over the centuries. The historian Julian Litten refers to this rite of passage as ‘the Common Funeral’, the opposite of the heraldic or state funeral, a composite ritual performed by the community.

Many superstitions, centuries old, operated alongside the orthodox teaching of the Church. Death was often preceded by omens: a
raven or other dark-hued bird settling on a roof; white wax forming a shroud down one side of a candle; a broken mirror. Once death had occurred, a window must be opened so that the spirit could depart. The custom of placing money upon the eyes, derived from the Classical conceit of paying Charon the ferryman, was still current, centuries after the Romans had gone. Quantities of silver and copper coins have been unearthed in churchyards over the years, giving archaeologists valuable evidence as to the time of interment. Coins were a form of grave goods: cash, so vital in this world, cannot entirely be dispensed with in the next.

Another practice which also persisted for centuries was that of ‘telling the bees’ when a death had occurred in the family. If this was neglected, it was feared they would abandon their hives, never to return. Death established, it was traditional to ring a passing bell; this signified that a soul had passed on, and frightened off any evil spirits making a concerted effort to obtain that soul at the time of death. In a parish, the tolling of the bell indicated the loss of a resident. This communal attitude to death was reflected in Donne’s famous observation: ‘No man is an
Island
, entire of it self. Any man’s
death
diminishes
me,
because I am involved in
Mankind
; And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell
tolls; It tolls for
thee
.’
⁹

Caring for the dead was a dual role, for clergy and laity, with the majority of the work done by the laity. They it was who performed the secular rituals, preparing the corpse for burial, watching, providing refreshment for the mourners and transporting the body to the grave. The corpse was washed and anointed in accordance with traditional Christian teaching. The custom had a similar symbolic function to that of washing a newborn, and was carried out by the same people. The midwives who ushered new life into the world also prepared dead bodies for the next one. Once the corpse had been washed, and the orifices plugged to prevent leakage, it was wrapped in a shroud.

In 1666, an Act designed to promote the wool industry came into force, insisting that everyone should be buried in a woollen shroud.
Other fibres, such as silk or linen, were banned. A certificate had to be signed by a relative of the deceased, declaring that a woollen shroud had been used at the burial, and this was sworn as an affidavit before the local Justice of the Peace. The only exception was plague victims.

Many people resisted the idea of burial in wool, as linen was associated with the interment of Christ in the sepulchre following His crucifixion, but failure to comply incurred a fine of five pounds. This law, not repealed until 1814, protected the paper trade. As a result, no less than 200,000 pounds of rag were saved from the grave, and contributed to the rise of the printing industry. (Newspapers were originally made from recycled cloth, hence the word ‘rag’ as a term of derision.)

Grave clothes were part of a young woman’s trousseau. These grim garments were sewn in the knowledge that they might be needed. For the same reason, a potential bride habitually prepared at least one set of burial clothes for any child she might bear. Babies dying within a month of baptism were buried in their baptismal robes and swaddling bands. Children were often elaborately dressed. In 1672, John Dwight produced a stoneware portrait of his six-year-old daughter, Lydia, on her deathbed, clutching a bunch of flowers, and wearing grave clothes, complete with a hood and broderie-anglaise pillow. A year later, he carved the stunning image of Lydia resurrected, on Judgement Day, a skull at her feet.