Necropolis: London & it's Dead (3 page)

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Unlike the other three, this sarcophagus had never been tampered with. Distracted, perhaps, by another find, or interrupted in their work, the grave robbers had left it intact. Perhaps they intended to return at a later date.

By the thirteenth century, the graves had been built over, which had preserved the sarcophagus for posterity. After scanning with a metal detector indicated that there was something precious inside, the lid was raised to show an elaborately decorated lead coffin, surrounded by mud. Inside was an intricate hair ornament made of jet, and a beautiful glass perfume bottle, suggesting that the inhabitant was a woman.

When the coffin was opened, it revealed the skeleton of a young woman, perfectly preserved, lying on a pillow of bay leaves and wrapped in an elaborate robe of Chinese silk, decorated with gold thread from Syria.

The Spitalfields Woman had been prosperous. She came from a wealthy family, the wife or daughter of a senior Government official. DNA testing revealed that she was probably of Spanish origin. Her sarcophagus was limestone, quarried in the East Midlands, possibly selected from a number of sarcophagi kept on hand for important burials by the precursors of the London undertaking trade. Tall for her day at five feet four inches, she showed little evidence of injury or disease; the cause of death was thought to have been an infection. And she had never given birth. DNA testing indicated that the child buried nearby was not related.

The Spitalfields Woman now resides in her coffin, at the Museum of London, for all to see. Reconstruction techniques, pioneered in the discipline of forensic science, have allowed experts to recreate her face. For all the Roman horror of the dead, there is nothing to fear here. We can look into her eyes, and consider the details of her short life, and gain some insight into what it was like to live and die in London, almost 2,000 years ago.

An earlier version of the bustling commercial melting pot that it has become today, London flourished under the Romans. However, as the Roman Empire declined, so did London. In
AD
410 the Emperor Honorius withdrew his army from Britannia, abandoning London to a wave of barbarians from Denmark, Germany and the Lower Rhine. These new arrivals, who displaced the Celts and Romans, became known as the Anglo-Saxons. Like the nomadic tribes which had roamed London before the Roman invasion, the Anglo-Saxons were pagans, their religious beliefs shaped by Nordic mythology. Although many Roman buildings fell into disrepair–like their predecessors, the Anglo-Saxons preferred to live in simple village settlements–the newcomers made good use of the existing cemeteries.

The most spectacular and elaborate of all Saxon burials was not in London at all, but at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, where, in the seventh century
AD
, an entire ship was dragged up from the river and equipped with priceless treasures for a king’s last voyage to Valhalla. This is echoed in the epic poem
Beowulf
, believed to have been composed in the eighth century
AD
Beowulf’s father, Scyld, was carried down to the shore and placed in ‘a ring-prowed ship, straining at anchor and sheeted with ice’, filled with battle armour, swords and gems. In keeping with tradition, Scyld’s ship was launched into the ‘unknown deep and trackless seas’
¹²
; but the ship at Sutton Hoo, the ultimate in grave goods, was buried, a fittingly glorious end to what must have been a glorious life.

The advent of Christianity brought such magnificent examples of paganism to a close. The Church imposed its own pattern on burial, but there was still plenty of opportunity for extravagant funerals and elaborate monuments. There would also be a new challenge to Londoners on how they coped with their dead
en masse
, in the form of the Black Death.

2: DANSE MACABRE

London and the Black Death

Mediaeval London was dominated by the Church. More than thirty monasteries, convents, priories and hospitals lined its narrow streets. At this stage in its development, England’s capital consisted of the City of London, roughly one square mile, surrounded by the mighty wall which had endured since the days of the Romans. The Tower of London, built by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, occupied the eastern boundary. To the north lay Cripple Gate and Bishop’s Gate; to the west stood New Gate and Blackfriars; while, along the south bank, the Thames formed a natural defence. Beyond the wall, Westminster, the seat of Government, lay to the west, ‘Hole Bourn’ and ‘Clerks Well’ to the north and, across the river, St Thomas’s Spital (ancestor of the great London teaching hospital) and St Mary Overey’s Priory.

Space was at a premium, and enterprising Londoners constructed houses, shops and even a church on London Bridge. Trade flourished here, in the largest and wealthiest city in England. Entire streets were devoted to one trade and their names survive today: Apothecary Street; Shoe Lane; Stonecutter Street; Pudding Lane.
London was one vast factory, drawing workers from all over the country.

In administrative terms, London was divided into parishes, like a series of overlapping villages, which took responsibility for all who dwelled in them, the living and the dead. Named after the churches which governed them, parishes were controlled by churchwardens and overseen by ‘vestries’, the precursors of modern district councils or boroughs.

The religious Orders played a vital role in the community, carrying out the majority of charity work, tending the sick, burying the dead and praying for the dead and the living. The monks’ behaviour, however, was sometimes less than perfect. Despite the Christian injunction to fasting and abstinence, monks ate better than the laity. Recent excavations at Bermondsey Abbey yielded skeletons with the symptoms of arthritis and obesity. Living on a diet heavy in saturated fats and wine, London’s monks were condemned by Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, for ‘wearing furs and eating fat’.
¹

The cloisters of St Bartholomew’s Priory, West Smithfield, were notorious for lowlife: ‘lords and ladies, aldermen and their wives, squires and fiddlers, citizens and rope-dancers, jack-puddings [clowns] and lawyers, mistresses and maids, masters and ’prentices’ meeting up for ‘plays, lotteries, farces and all the temptations to destruction’.
²
Occasionally, scholars from St Paul’s and other grammar schools would meet in St Bartholomew’s churchyard for learned debates, but these events inevitably degenerated into street fights and had to be discontinued.
³

Influential convents and monasteries included the Greyfriars or Franciscans, later Christ’s Hospital, which took in underprivileged children; the Blackfriars or Dominicans; and the Crossed or Crouched Friars by Fenchurch Street. Outside the City walls were the Whitefriars or Carmelites, south of Fleet Street; the Abbey and Convent at Westminster; St Mary Spital, outside Bishopsgate; and Bermondsey Abbey. Some Orders were mendicants (beggars), who
had no burial place of their own, but most establishments had a large cemetery or ‘cloister garth’ for monks and nuns. At the Church of the Crutched Friars, by Fenchurch Street, rules for burial stated that:

When any Brother of Suster of the same Bretherhede is dede, he or she shall have 4 Torchys of Wex of the Bretherhede, to bring the Body in Erthe: And every Brother or Suster shall come to his Masse of Requiem, and offer I
^d
and abide still to the Tyme the Body be buryed, uppon Pain of a l. Wex, yf he or she be within the Cite.
⁴

Despite the reference to torches and tapers, burials did not always take place in the evenings. They were conducted after Mass, before dinner, and with as little delay as possible. These were solemn proceedings, particularly if the deceased had been a Prior, or a Canon, with an impressive procession of monks bearing lighted tapers, chanting Psalms, sprinkling holy water, and the celebration of Requiem Mass. At Christ’s Hospital, this practice persisted into the eighteenth century, with the Christ’s Hospital scholar or ‘blue’ carried in a torchlight procession and buried within the school grounds as his fellow students sang the thirty-ninth Psalm. The boys also participated in London’s ceremonial funerals. Whenever a worthy died, one boy for each year of the man’s life marched in his cortège.

Builders demolishing the remains of the Blackfriars monastery after the Great Fire of London discovered four heads, in pewter pots, in a wall. The heads, which were embalmed, had tonsured hair. The historian Strype speculated that these were the heads of ‘some zealous priests or friars executed for treason, or for denying the King’s Supremacy; and here privately deposited by these Black Friars’.
⁵

The monastic Orders were responsible for a number of hospitals, which had their own burial grounds. These included St Bartholomew’s in the City and St Thomas’s in Southwark, devoted
to the care of the ‘wounded, maimed, sick and diseased’. Greyfriars or Bridewell, a house ‘for the correction of vagabonds’, near the Embankment, also had its own burial ground, which continued to be used into the nineteenth century.

As the distinguished historian Dr Vanessa Harding has observed, the dead were everywhere in mediaeval London, ‘neither out of sight, nor out of mind’.
⁶
The Romans had feared their dead, and banished them to distant cemeteries; by the Middle Ages, Christians buried their dead close to home. Londoners were born, baptized, married and buried in the Church. Literally, in many instances, as burial within the walls and vaults was considered the most distinguished form of interment.

Although St John Chrysostom had directed Christians to continue the Roman practice in the fourth century
AD
, warning them that burial in the church was analogous to placing a rotting cadaver near the limbs of Christ, his caution was ignored.
⁷
The custom of burying within the church derived from the concept of martyrdom. Christians revered those who had died for their faith, turning their tombs into shrines. The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions.

The tradition of martyrdom informed a different attitude towards human remains. Corpses
per se
were not regarded as objects of fear. Nowhere was this more evident than in the charnel house of St Paul’s. Built over a shrine to St Erkenwald, an Anglo-Saxon bishop of London, following a great fire, beneath its soil lay the graves of Britons, Saxons and Romans. St Paul’s was London’s principal church after Westminster Abbey. Weddings were
celebrated here, sermons preached, plays enacted and burials conducted.

The institution of the charnel house was a particularly gruesome aspect of mediaeval burial. Christians then had little concept of one man, one grave, and many, of course, could not afford an elaborate burial. Fees consisted of payments to the gravedigger for breaking the ground, to the priest and to the parish church, and to the sexton, who tolled the passing bell. Those who could not pay were buried ‘on the parish’, in pits, wrapped in shrouds. When one pit was full, it was covered in earth, and a previous one reopened. The bones were dug up, and taken to the charnel house for safekeeping. The term derives from the French
charnier:
flesh. In France and Italy, skeletal remains were used to create artistic displays, including chandeliers, which were exhibited in the ossuary–a gallery above a charnel house.

Eventually, even the bodies of the wealthy, buried under the stone flags of the church, submitted to this fate. But it was not regarded as violation. The French historian Philippe Ariès has observed that the significant thing was to be buried in or near the church. What actually happened to your body after that was immaterial. Tombs and headstones were reserved for the nobility. Although the faithful visited the shrines of saints, the concept of returning to the grave of a loved one, and communing with their memory, was unknown.

The dead were also at the heart of the city. Saturated with Christian theology, the attitude of the average Londoner was, in the words of Ariès,
‘et moriemur–
and we shall all die’. With land at a premium, churchyards were communal spaces at the core of parish life, more like streetmarkets than parks. Laundry fluttered above the graves; chickens and pigs jostled for scraps. Bands of travelling players enacted dramas, and desecration was inevitable, with ‘boisterous churls’ playing football, dancing, drinking and fighting on the hallowed ground. Just how rough these activities got is indicated by entries in parish registers of
deaths resulting from participation in such pastimes. Church services were frequently disturbed, and the erection of booths for the sale of food and drink caused serious damage to the graves. Before condemning such irreverence, we should remember that the bond between the living and the dead was very different from today. It was an extension of the mediaeval belief that the dead were, in some sense, still close by, and probably grateful to hear the merrymaking.

Under normal conditions, London possessed enough burial space to satisfy demand, but the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 placed existing resources under enormous strain, leading to the creation of London’s first cemeteries since Roman times.

The epidemic of 1348 was the most severe, but it was not the first. For centuries, the plague had been, according to Victorian historian Mrs Isabella Holmes, a ‘constant and dreaded visitor to Britain’. London was first ravaged by the plague in 664, and it returned again and again, constantly driving kings, courtiers and wealthier citizens to flee to the country for safety. However, the strain which struck England in 1348 was so virulent that previous outbreaks paled into insignificance. Although historians such as John Stow wrote that ‘scarce the tenth person of all sorts was left alive’, it is now believed that the Black Death wiped out a third to half the population of London, and up to 50 per cent of the population of Europe.