London Read online

  LONDON

  City of the Dead

  LONDON

  City of the Dead

  DAVID BRANDON & ALAN BROOKE

  Cover image courtesy of Simon Marsden

  First published 2008

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © David Brandon & Alan Brooke, 2008, 2013

  The right of David Brandon & Alan Brooke to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9617 7

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  Introduction

  1.‘A Good Send-Off’

  2.Resurrectionists and Bodysnatchers

  3.Controversies

  4.Bizarre Deaths

  5.Churchyards and Other Burial Places

  6.Death and the Afterlife in the Arts

  7.Irrational Aspects

  8.Death and Disaster

  9.Pestilence and Public Health

  10.Commemoration and Memory

  11.Curious Memorials and Monuments

  12.People and their Pains

  13.Chronicling Death

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  London has always been lethal. Death – anticipated or brutally sudden – has plucked the old, the young, the vulnerable, the innocent, the villainous, the foolhardy, the brave and the timorous from those around them and has done so with a callous and insouciant lack of discrimination.

  Through much of the period under review, mortality in London was markedly higher than in any other part of the country. London could be a dangerous place. Life was short and early death was common. Death was a part of life and Londoners found ways of coping with its pervasive presence just as they managed to handle the other demanding challenges that came their way.

  Has any city had more written about it than London? It seems that all the obvious and also every arcane or obscure aspect of its past have received the attention of writers over the centuries. Many of them have clearly been imbued with an absolute, uncritical love and awe of London. Others have been captivated, even spellbound, by the lure of the metropolis, but this attraction has sometimes been a mixed one, laced with concerns about London’s sheer enormity and the bewilderingly complex nature of its past. How can it be possible to comprehend even a small percentage of this? Yet others have found London at one and the same time fascinating and repulsive. For them it is like a great maelstrom: turbulent, confusing, threatening and on occasion destructive yet for all that, it is a constant source of attraction and excitement worthy of research and recording.

  Because death has been such a feature of London’s past, it has inevitably been written about extensively and from a wide variety of approaches and angles. Books and articles galore have dealt with the effect of major epidemic diseases; with London’s murders and accidental deaths; its calamities and disasters; its judicial executions; the demise of particular Londoners, especially where these deaths have been unusual; with the development of measures to tackle avoidable death; with its statues and memorials; its rituals of commemoration; its places of interment, its cemeteries and ghosts; the evolution of mourning, death and burial practices; perceptions of the afterlife and controversies concerning death.

  Why, then, another book dealing with death in London? This book is intended to be an informed, informative and hopefully entertaining general introduction to the subject of death in London. It is aimed at the general reader of history. It does not pretend to be all-inclusive; more specialised and detailed works on the subject are referred to in the bibliography and we have drawn on them extensively. The issue of death throws a fascinating light on so many aspects of the human condition and the development of culture and society. This book’s main thrust is to consider the ‘everydayness’ of death in the life of London’s citizens and how that has been reflected in the culture they have created. It is this approach that the authors believe offers something that has not been specifically done before. The book’s time frame runs from the medieval period to the end of the First World War.

  1

  ‘A Good Send-Off’

  Funerals, Feasts and Fashions

  The pressing need to find more places to bury the dead in London became increasingly apparent as the population expanded from the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the century the population of London was approximately 70,000 with the majority living in the City, although there were significant numbers in Westminster and Southwark. By the late seventeenth century, this trend was reversed with about three-quarters of the population living outside the City. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, London witnessed a significant transformation: it changed from being a compact settlement to a sprawling metropolis. Fields and meadows, waste and woodland, particularly to the west of the City, were consumed by this urban expansion. As London grew, it experienced rising rates of mortality and these prompted differing responses to the problem of how they should be tackled. The administrative means and the necessary scientific knowledge to do so effectively did not exist at this time.

  Although there was a continuity of some pre-sixteenth-century rituals in relation to death, there were also changes which, by the mid-nineteenth century, amounted to the emergence of a ‘mourning industry’. The Victorian period became associated with a highly visible culture of mourning although much of the groundwork for this had begun in the eighteenth century. The proliferation of popular publications such as newspapers, magazines and books of etiquette, provided an outlet as well as an influence for the growing industry of death. Commercialisation, of which advertising was an important part, allowed the purveyors of mourning – undertakers, businessmen, retailers, manufacturers of coffins and coffin furniture – to promote their goods and services.

  Medieval burials generally followed a standard Christian procedure but would vary according to social rank. Burials in this period included interment without a shroud; with a shroud (which was more common); in a shallow grave, wooden coffin, lead-lined coffin or stone sarcophagus; mausoleum burials; laying in an east–west alignment and embalming. For the majority however the standard practice was burial in a shroud without a coffin. The distinction between a ‘good death’ (a natural death, one which had been prepared for) as opposed to a ‘bad death’ (unnatural such as suicide, accident or murder), was of absolute importance. Hence, the expectation was that one should be ready for death and be able to fulfil all the appropriate religious rituals and practices.

  The deathbed epitomised a good death. As death became imminent, doors and windows would be opened in order that the soul could be released. A priest would usually arrive to administer the last rites and the dying person would be asked to declare his or her faith and to make confession. Having been absolved, anointed and commended in prayer, and once death had taken place, the body was washed, the eyelids closed (as this is the first part of the body where rigor mortis sets in), orifices plugged, body straightened then wound in a clean linen cloth or garment. In the period between death and burial, the body w
ould be ‘watched over’, a ritual that dates back to at least the fourteenth century. Elements of this practice – the wake and the viewing of the body – have continued down to the present. After Mass the body was taken to the grave and sanctified by a priest. Family and friends would normally accompany the funeral procession bearing candles or torches. Those who were wealthy or held a prominent position were generally interred inside the church with a memorial. Most people would be buried outside the church in the graveyard or a burial site and could expect little more than a shallow mound marked with a wooden cross. In times of mass death such as during plague epidemics, disposal became more urgent and corpses were buried in large pits such as the Black Death cemetery in East Smithfield.

  The elite classes predictably had more elaborate burials. For such dignitaries, until the late thirteenth century, the body might be embalmed ready for their funeral display. The process of embalming had been known since ancient times. During the medieval period, embalming involved cutting the body open from the throat to the groin, evisceration (removing organs and intestines), immersing the body in alcohol and inserting spices, preservative herbs and salt. The body would then be wrapped in tarred or waxed sheets. This process was used on a number of kings such as Canute, William the Conqueror and Edward I.

  The people of medieval London were reasonably free to choose their place of burial. However, after the sixteenth century increasing pressure on space meant that previous burial sites were removed to make way for new ones. Another method was the formation of vaults or repositories for the bones or bodies of the dead. These charnel houses were often found in church crypts. In addition to the 107 pre-Reformation parish churches in London, there were also religious houses that accommodated burials such as the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces near the Tower and the Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary Spital on the north side of Folgate Street.

  The Museum of London Archaeological Service has cast much light on the history of burials in London. Excavations at St Mary Graces near the Tower between 1986 and 1988 found large parts of a medieval burial ground with some 420 burials from the fourteenth century. In the parish cemetery of London Blackfriars in Carter Lane, burials from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century revealed wooden coffins, one lead coffin and grave linings.

  At the monastic Cemetery of Bermondsey Abbey burial sites have been found dating from 1099 until the dissolution in 1538. Excavations of the site of the medieval graveyard of St Lawrence Jewry near the Guildhall, which dates from the eleventh century, showed that copper alloy bells were found in a number of graves. At the Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton 738 burials were found, some of which consisted of stone-lined graves and also monolithic stone coffins with a lining of grey ash and charcoal. Some of the graves contained artefacts such as chalices, copper buckles, leather straps, and in one case, a pendant lamp. Burials at St Benet Sherehog (lost in the Great Fire) in Sise Lane (now off Queen Victoria Street), were consistent with other graves revealing skeletons lying with their heads to the west end of the graves.

  Post-Reformation burials, such as those at Chelsea Old Church (destroyed in the Second World War), and St Brides Cemetery on Farringdon Street, show that the dead were interred mainly in wooden coffins, some with lead lining and coffin plates. An excavation at the Cross Bones Cemetery in Southwark, which served a poor parish and eventually became a pauper’s graveyard in 1769, found remains of clothes and shrouds.

  Another pauper site used up until the seventeenth century was found at St Thomas’ Hospital in Southwark where more than 200 interments were found. These bodies had been buried without coffins and large numbers of shroud pins were present.

  By the early sixteenth century a widely accepted set of rites and practices had become associated with burial. The Church, which had largely taken responsibility for burying the dead, specified what was essential regarding the service and ceremonial. Burial orders issued in the 1550s made the length of the burial service much shorter. In addition to the provisions made by the church, a number of secular rituals continued and, as we will see later, expanded. These included the conduct around the deathbed; the watching of the corpse; the procession to church; bell-ringing and the distribution of alms. Eating and drinking after the burial varied in scale depending on the status of the deceased person.

  The Church took the responsibility for burying the dead through the work of joiners, gravediggers and clergy. In pre-Reformation England, the Knights Hospitallers buried executed felons while officers of the College of Arms (founded 1484) controlled the management of funeral ceremonies for the elite classes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the College of Arms lost this trade with the emergence of undertakers at the end of the seventeenth century. One of the earliest known of London undertakers was William Boyce in 1675 whose trade card advertised him as a ‘coffinsmaker at the White Hart and Coffin … Ould Bayley near Newgate.’ Sir Anthony Wagner (1908–1995), who was one of the leading authors on heraldry and genealogy as well as an officer of arms at the College of Arms, claims that the first modern undertaker was William Russell, a member of the Painter Stainer’s Company and a painter of hatchments for heraldic funerals who took up coffin-making later. His trade card was illustrated with a skull and crossbones. Although modern funeral undertaking arose in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, it began to flourish in the eighteenth century. Read’s Weekly Journal in June 1739 reported that Azariah Reynolds was ‘the oldest undertaker for funerals in town’ when he died at his house in Hackney at the age of ninety.

  With the growth of the undertaking business came advertisements, trade cards and a whole culture of mourning. During the eighteenth century when the undertaker became well established, he continued a centuries-old tradition of supplying all the requirements of a burial – equipment, clothes, carriages, food, drink, flowers and invitations. In 1747 the London Tradesman wrote:

  An undertaker’s business is to furnish the funeral solemnly with as much pomp and feigned sorrow as the heirs and successors of the deceased choose to purchase.

  With this growth in the number of undertakers and the commercial enterprise that accompanied the trade, accusations of greed were inevitable. Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), secretary to the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, made harsh criticism of undertakers who dealt with funerals of the working and middle classes. Commenting on the large number of undertakers in London in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843), he argued that a small number of masters actually monopolised the trade thus giving rise to a corrupt system of exorbitant costs. He noted that the ‘greatest severity on the poorest classes, acts as a most severe infliction on the middle classes of society … and involves so many other evils’.

  What pushed up the expense of funerals was all the accompanying pomp of horses with plumes, silks, hearse and the coachmen and mourners. The latter rightly invited much scorn. Professional mourners included staff-bearers and ‘mutes’. Mutes wearing white or black sashes, top hats, gloves and carrying staffs draped in cloth, were a common sight in the capital. Looking suitably solemn on the day of a funeral they positioned themselves near the church door or the home of the deceased. Charles Dickens portrayed the image of the mutes and the accompanying funeral pomp in Martin Chuzzelwit (1844):

  [on] the day of the funeral … two mutes were at the house and door, looking as mournful as could be expected of men with such a thriving job; the whole of Mr Mould’s establishment were on duty … feathers waved, horses snorted, silk and velvets fluttered; in a word, as Mr Mould emphatically said, ‘everything that money could do was done.’

  The mutes would then accompany the funeral procession and, as Chadwick recorded in his Report, they would often stop ‘in parties in public houses on their return from burials’ thereby making a ‘mockery of solemnity’.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, there
were 750 undertakers in London. William Tayler, a footman who worked in the employ of a wealthy widow at No. 6 Great Cumberland Street (now Great Cumberland Place) opposite Marble Arch, started to keep a diary in 1837. In February he recorded an outbreak of influenza in London. It was so great, Tayler noted, that ‘every day the streets are regularly crowded with funerals and mourning coaches … all the undertakers are making their fortunes.’

  Despite the extravagance of some high-profile funerals such as Nelson’s and Wellington’s in the nineteenth century and the perception of the Victorian age as one associated with the outpouring of mourning and all its trappings, there were many among the middle and upper classes who requested low-key funerals. Chadwick identified a strong case for the reform of funeral ceremonies when he acknowledged the claim by undertakers that the well-to-do classes were requesting in their wills to have a plain and simple funeral. Two notable London funerals within the space of two weeks in 1845 proved to be relatively private: The Marquis of Westminster expressed his opposition to a public funeral in his will, and the following week the Earl of Mornington requested a private funeral with only close family in attendance.

  No matter how private or plain these funerals were, neither compared with the stark poverty and the stigma of a parish funeral. An example of this is given in a letter of October 26 1849 in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, 1849–50 in which a poor woman conveyed her experience:

  A friend gave me half a sovereign to bury my child. The parish provided me with a coffin, and it cost me about 3s … I would give the undertaker three shillings to let a man come with a pall to throw over the coffin, so that it should not be seen exactly that it was a parish funeral. Even the people in the house don’t know … I had to give 1s 6d for a pair of shoes before I could follow my child to the grave … I think there’s some people at the docks a great deal worse off than us.