Necropolis: London & it's Dead (9 page)

The plague pits exerted a form of morbid fascination over Londoners, despite their toxic state. On 30 August, Pepys walked to the plague pit at Moorfields to see it for himself (‘God forgive my presumption.’) He was relieved to be spared the sight ‘of any corpse going to the grave’, although ‘everybody’s looks and discourse in the street is of death and nothing else’.
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Henry Foe, haunting the desolate streets of London in his inky cloak and broad-brimmed hat, provided the most powerful description of a plague pit–the great pit of Aldgate. Forty foot long, and about fifteen or sixteen foot broad, the pit was designed to serve Aldgate for a month or more. It was excavated to a depth of twenty feet in places, until the labourers could dig no deeper because of the water rising through the ground. The sheer scale of the pit made Henry suspect that the churchwardens were preparing to bury the entire parish. The pit was finished on 4 September; burials began on 6 September and, less than a fortnight later, it had consumed 1,114 bodies.
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Henry arrived at the pit late on the night of 10 September, and attempted to bluff his way in. The sexton warned him off. It was his job to risk his life, not Henry’s. But Henry’s curiosity got the better of him. He felt he could learn something from the sight, he told the sexton. It would be instructive. The sexton replied that the prospect before him was the best sermon he had ever heard in his life. And with that he threw open the door, and said: ‘Go, if you will.’

Shocked by his tone, Henry hesitated on the threshold. At that
instant, two links, or flaming funeral torches, emerged from the gloom, accompanied by the ominous clang of the plague bell, and a dead cart, laden with corpses, rumbled towards him through the empty streets. Following the cart, Henry could see nobody at first except the bearers, and the fellow who led the horse and cart. But as they approached the pit, he witnessed a man in an extreme state of distress, pacing up and down. Assuming him to be ill, or deranged, the bearers prepared to lead him away. Then they realized that he was in utter despair, having accompanied the bodies of his wife and children to the plague pit. He was distressed, but lucid, claiming he would only stay to see his family buried.

The man’s family were not the only bodies on the cart. Another sixteen or seventeen corpses were shot into the pit, some swathed in sheets or blankets, others naked. Beyond hurt, it mattered not to them whether they were buried with dignity or formality, huddled together in the common grave of mankind, where no distinction existed between rich and poor. But the bereft husband and father was horrified to see his family’s remains dumped in a ditch, without benefit of ceremony. He yelled out and collapsed, and the bearers ran to pick him up. As they ushered him past the mass grave, he stared into it again. Glowing lanterns had been placed all round the sides, but there was nothing to be seen. The mortal remains of his own family had already disappeared under a layer of soil. With a gentleness belying their normally brutal reputation, the bearers helped the widower to his local, the Pye Tavern in Houndsditch, and Henry, shocked and sickened by the scene, returned home.

Later, unable to sleep despite the fact it was one o’clock in the morning by then, he headed down to the Pye Tavern. The bereft father, a regular, was still there. The landlord had overlooked the curfew and done his best to comfort the man, despite the risk of infection. As Henry listened to his story, the man was targeted by a group of youths who had witnessed the entire incident from the pub window. Jeering, they wanted to know why he didn’t just go ahead and jump in the plague pit. A bookish type, not usually the sort to
start a fight in a pub, Henry reproved the youths sharply. So they turned on him, demanding to know what
he
was doing out of his grave!

Despite this outburst, Henry took to drinking at the Pye, trying to keep up the spirits of the bereaved family man, who survived the epidemic. About a week later, one of the youths who had taunted them was himself struck down. Within days, he and his mates had all been carried off to the great pit themselves.

Henry Foe, Samuel Pepys, and others who had bravely remained or were too poor to leave, occupied a sinister, desolate London, a city drained by death.

Ladyes who wore black patches out of pride

Now weare them their plague sores to hide

Into the vallies are the bodyes throwne

Valley no more but now dead mountains grown

Thick grass and moss begins to growe

Out of the Putrified corps and now

The Cattell did the men devoure

As greedily as men did them before.
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There were no boats upon the river, and grass grew down Whitehall. Front doors stood open, casement windows swung in the breeze, with no one to close them. Death was a midwife, with infants passing straight from the womb to the grave. Marriage beds were sepulchres, unhappy couples meeting with death during their first embrace. One woman ‘deliberately drew her husband into her embraces, which ended his life with hers’; and the dead carts circulated endlessly, operating throughout the city, not confined to particular parishes any more, but carrying all to the pit, in a desperate attempt to contain the epidemic. ‘
Quis tali fundo temperet a lachymie
,’ mused Dr Nathaniel Hodges. ‘Who could look upon this place and not weep?’
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Soon smog was added to the other hazards. On 6 September, the
Lord Mayor ordered fires to be lit in the street throughout the city in an attempt at fumigation. This measure simply exacerbated matters. People choked to death on the suffocating fumes. The watchmen, eyes watering from the smoke, looked as if they were weeping for their fatal mistake. The ‘wet constitution’ of the air created by fumigation caused the most fatal night of the entire epidemic, when more than 4,000 people expired.

On 14 September, Pepys met a ‘dead corpse of the plague, carried to be buried close to me at noonday through the city’. One of his own watermen was dead and another had buried a child and was dead himself. ‘In great apprehension of melancholy, and with good reason’ Pepys returned home to a stiff drink, ‘which I am fain to allow myself during this plague time, by advice of all, my physician being dead and surgeon out of the way, whose advice I am obliged to take.’

Just as the plague reached crisis point, and it seemed as if nobody would emerge unscathed, the epidemic began to recede. Henry’s friend, Dr Heath, observed that the Bills of Mortality for the past week indicated 8,000 dead, and not the 20,000 that he had predicted. Even more encouraging, the duration of the disease had grown from two days to five, and one in five people actually recovered.

In October, the mortality rate continued to fall. But, lulled by a false sense of security, citizens became careless. Returning from the country, they were desperate to socialize. ‘The People were so tir’d with being so long from
London
, and so eager to come back, that they flock’d to Town without Fear or Forecast, and began to shew themselves in the Streets, as if all the Danger was over.’
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This rash conduct cost many their lives. There was a brief resurgence of the pestilence, with the bills increasing again by 400 in the first week of November. But the plague was on its way out: ‘The Distemper was spent, the Contagion was exhausted, and also the Winter Weather came on apace, and the Air was clear and cold, with some sharp Frosts;…most of those that had fallen sick recover’d, and the Health of the City began to return.’
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As London began to recover from the pestilence, one of the first tasks was to seal the plague pits and churchyards to prevent reinfection. Fearing that disturbance of the plague-laden earth would scatter infection, the Privy Council prohibited further burials in City churches and churchyards. Most of these had already ceased, because the ground was choked with plague victims. All churchyards were to be covered with twelve inches of lime, a caustic alkaline substance which dissolves flesh. However, lime was not obtainable in such vast quantities, so it had to be mixed with fresh earth. And despite the best efforts of the authorities, not all plague pits were undisturbed. Some were converted for other uses, or even built on. A piece of ground beyond Goswell Street, along the old lines of the City fortifications, where hundreds of victims from Clerkenwell and Aldersgate were buried, subsequently became a physic garden, one of the first examples of a London burial ground being turned into a park. Another piece of land at the end of Holloway Lane, in Shoreditch, became a yard for keeping hogs.

Originally a green field, there was a massive plague pit for the dead of Bishopsgate at the upper end of Hand Alley. Two or three years after the plague was ended, it came into the possession of Sir Robert Clayton, who built a large, handsome house on the land. However, laying the foundations meant digging up the bodies. When the ground was opened, some of the corpses were so well-preserved that it was possible to distinguish the women from the men by the length of their hair, and the flesh that remained. After a public outcry, and the fear that disinterring the corpses might reactivate the plague, the remains were carted off to another part of the site and thrown into a deep pit, which was not built on, but became a passage known as Rose Alley. Cordoned off, this site held the remains of over 2,000 plague victims. Plague pits were never memorialized. There were no gravestones. They were dug in fields, and filled in as soon as full. At the height of the epidemic, one pit might only be used for a couple of days before being filled in and a new one dug alongside. Not all owners were paid for the land,
requisitioned by the authorities, so it reverted to them once the plague was past, and to former use.

As time passed, London has constructed houses, churches, streets, entire railway stations, over these mass graves, and it is only by chance that they come to light due to building excavations. During the nineteenth century, skeletal remains were reinterred elsewhere, destroying vital archaeological evidence and leaving nothing but anecdote. The pest fields of Tothill, Westminster, disappeared beneath St Vincent’s Square, according to Mrs Holmes, and became the playground of St Paul’s School. In Gower’s Walk, Whitechapel, human remains were discovered during building excavations in 1893. The pit consisted of one layer of black earth, intermingled with bones, without coffins, sandwiched between two layers of gravel, strongly suggesting a mass grave.

Liverpool Street Station now stands on the site of a forgotten plague pit. In an excavation of nearby Broad Street in 1863, the dig yielded between three and four hundred skeletons, the soil being full of them below surface level to a depth of eight or ten feet. The bones lay in disorder. Only a few of the first committals were in coffins, these being found in one corner. The corpses had been thrown indiscriminately into pits. So many leather shoes were dug up as to suggest that they died with their boots on.

Cartloads of human remains were discovered at Beak Street, Golden Square and Poland Street, Soho, during the nineteenth century. Quantities of bones were found when the old Marylebone courthouse was built in 1727 and the new one in 1822, suggesting this was close to the Marylebone pest house which had caused such uproar among the locals. When a bookshop in Oxford Street was rebuilt in the early 1920s, numbers of human bones were found eight feet down, not in rows, but buried indiscriminately, as if the bodies had been flung in.

At the spot where Brompton Road and Knightsbridge now meet, excavations for the Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington Underground stations unearthed a pit so
dense with human remains that it could not be tunnelled through. This is said to account for the curving nature of the track between the two stations.

Plague pits figure in the mythology of haunted London. During the nineteenth century, 50 Berkeley Square, the home of the eccentric and reclusive Mr Myers, attracted considerable press coverage. A widower, Myers kept to himself, and the room he favoured was described as having a terrifying, chilling atmosphere. A maid went insane with fear. A man who stayed the night for a wager was found dead in bed. Other researchers referred to a ‘shapeless, slithering, horrible mass’, and suggested that this manifestation resembles the sheeted corpses of pestilence victims. Like so many houses in London, it is entirely possible that 50 Berkeley Square
is
built on a plague pit. The ghouls are a matter for speculation.
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Unlike the victims of the Great Fire, who are commemorated by Wren’s Monument on Cannon Street, there is no official memorial to those who perished in the London plague. Dr Nathaniel Hodges’ tablet in St Stephen’s, Walbrook, said merely that he had survived it. In Surrey, a stone in a churchyard refers simply to two children, ‘dying young in the great sickness, AD 1665’.
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Early in January 1666, Pepys visited the Church of St Olave’s, Hart Street, for the first time in a year. He and his family survived the plague; despite everything, he had enjoyed one of the most successful years of his life. Nevertheless, he felt lucky to be alive. Evensong, and twilight had already set in:

This is the first time I have been in this church since the plague, and it frightened me indeed to go through the church more than I thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of the plague.
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With a shiver, Pepys glanced at the raised ground and went on his way. Meanwhile, Henry Foe stepped out into the cold night air. His
business revived, his household secure, he headed for the Pye Tavern, and the widower who had become a cherished friend. The shape of the Aldgate Pit reared in the darkness, like one great grave covered in brown earth. Then snowflakes began to fall, whirling faster and faster in the gloom, spinning a pall of white.