Intramural interment was one of the most cherished practices of Christendom so long as the word “intramural” had a literal meaning. Hence the correctness of the imagery used of the Spiritual City:
“To work and watch, until we lie
At rest within thy wall.”
Probably each of the one hundred and twenty small parish churches of London in the medieval period stood in its small churchyard. In an exceptional time like the Black Death, these proved insufficient for the daily burials: three new cemeteries were enclosed and consecrated outside the walls—two of them in Smithfield and the other at Aldgate. These all soon passed into the hands of friars, and became the grounds of monasteries. The churches or churchyards of monasteries were in great request for burial, but not for common burials, or for burials in a time of epidemic. The ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman’ is clear enough that the friars took no large view of their duties; they affected the care of the dead, but only if they were well paid:
“For I said I nold | be buried at their house but at my parish church. | For I heard once how conscience it told | that where a man was christened by kynde [nature] he should be buried, | or where he were parishen, right there he should be graven. | And for I said this to friar, a fool they me held | and loved me the less for my lele speech | ... I have much marveil of you and so hath many another | why your convent coveteth to confess and to bury | rather than to baptise bairns that ben catechumens.”
The reason why the friars paid so much attention to burials was that these rites were the most profitable:
“And how that freris [friars] folowed folke that was riche | and folke that was pore at litel price they sette, | and no corps in their kirk-yerde ne in their kyrke was buried | but quick he bequeath them aught or should help quit their debts.”
The friars in the towns would appear, then, to have been as much in request for the disposal of the dead within their precincts as the monks were in the country, both alike taking a certain part of that duty out of the hands of the regular parish clergy. Hence we may assign a good many burials, perhaps mostly of the richer class, as in Stow’s long lists of conventual burials, to the various precincts of Whitefriars, Blackfriars, Greyfriars (within Newgate) or Friars Minor (Minories), Carthusians, or other settlements of the religious orders in the city and liberties of London. It is not unlikely that the narrow spaces for burial in and around the old churches in the streets and lanes of the city were already getting crowded, and that the friars naturally acquired a large share of the business of burial because their consecrated houses and enclosed grounds were situated where there was most room, namely in the skirt of the Liberties, or in waste spaces within the walls.
The parish churchyards within the walls became insufficient, not merely because of the generations of the dead, but because they were encroached upon. In 1465 the churchyard of St Mary le Bow in Cheapside was so encroached upon by building of houses that John Rotham or Rodham, citizen and tailor, by his will gave to the parson and churchwardens a certain garden in Hosier-lane to be a churchyard; which, says Stow, so continued near a hundred years, but now is built on and is a private man’s house[636]. In like manner there was a colony of Brabant weavers settled in the churchyard of St Mary Somerset, and the great house of the earl of Oxford stood in St Swithin’s churchyard, near London Stone. John Stow’s grandfather directed that his body should be buried “in the little green churchyard of the parish church of St Michael in Cornhill, between the cross and the church wall, as nigh the wall as may be.” For some years previous to 1582, as many as 23 of the city parishes were using St Paul’s churchyard for their dead, having parted with their own burial grounds. But in that year (letter of 3 April, 1582[637]) the number of parishes privileged to use St Paul’s churchyard was reduced to 13, the ten restrained parishes being provided for in the cemetery gifted to the city in 1569 by Sir Thomas Roe, outside Bishopsgate, “for the ease of such parishes in London as wanted ground convenient within the parishes.” The state of St Paul’s churchyard may be imagined from the words of a remonstrance made two years after, in 1584: “The burials are so many, and by reason of former burials so shallow, that scarcely any grave could be made without corpses being laid open[638].” Twenty years before, in 1564, or the year after the last great plague which we have dealt with, Medicus, one of the speakers in Bullein’s Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence brings in “the multitude of graves in every churchyard, and great heaps of rotten bones, whom we know not of what degree they were, rich or poor, in their lives.”
St Paul’s churchyard would appear to have received the dead of various parishes from an early date. There was a large charnel house for the bones of the dead on the north side, with a chapel over it, dedicated to the Virgin and endowed in 1282. Stow says that the chapel was pulled down in 1549, and that “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 cart-loads, and there laid on a moorish ground, in short space after raised, by soilage of the city upon them, to bear three windmills. The chapel and charnel were converted into dwelling-houses, warehouses, and sheds before them, for stationers, in place of the tombs.” Elsewhere he names Reyne Wolfe, stationer, as the person who paid for the carriage of the bones and “who told me of some thousands of carry-loads, and more to be conveyed.” From this we may infer that the graves were systematically emptied as each new corpse came to be buried, according to the principle of a “short tenancy of the soil” which is being re-advocated at the end of the 19th century by the Church of England Burial Reform Association.
The spaces reserved for burial around the newer parish churches in the liberties, such as St Sepulchre’s and St Giles’s, Cripplegate, were gradually pared down and let out for buildings by the parish. Stow, in his Survey of 1598, says that St Sepulchre’s church stands “in a fair churchyard, although not so large as of old time, for the same is letten out for buildings and a garden plot.” The records of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, show that rents were received by the parish for detached portions of the churchyard in 1648[639].