EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TOMBSTONE.
One of Mr. Loftie’s original ideas is to describe London as known by Stow, Norden, and Shakespeare, who lived and wrote at about the same time, i.e., 1600. I do not mean to say that he tells us what the burial-grounds were like in that day, for no historian of London ever seemed to think it worth while to do more than refer to one here and one there, or I should not have ventured to put forward this work at a time when we are satiated with histories of the metropolis; but I will, for a moment, adopt his plan. It is impossible to read Hamlet and the vivid description of the gravediggers who played at “loggats” with the skulls and bones, while they drank and sung, without coming to the conclusion that Shakespeare had witnessed the very same practices in the graveyards in his day as were exposed and stopped no less than two and a half centuries later, when “skittles” were played with bones and skulls at St. Ann’s, Soho, and other churchyards. But I cannot entirely give up the idea that Shakespeare walked in some churchyards which awoke peaceful and reverent thoughts in his contemplative mind.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY TOMBSTONE.
Stow scarcely mentions the churchyards at all. He and his later editors give up many pages of his survey to inscriptions copied from monuments, some being from tombstones in the churchyards, but most being from the tablets in the churches, and he occasionally refers to the gift by citizens of pieces of ground for graveyards, these being mainly in the City itself. Perhaps, however, it may not be out of place to quote from one or two passages which give us an idea of the condition of the open land immediately adjoining the City, and which point to the fact that such parish churches as lay beyond this land must indeed have been rural and remote.
We read in the edition of 1633 that “filthie cottages” and alleys extended for “almost halfe a mile beyond” Whitechapel Church, “into the common field.” He also refers to the fine houses, with large gardens, which were being built round the City, where former generations, more benevolently inclined, had erected hospitals and almshouses. He mentions the “wrestlings” that took place at Bartholomewtide by “Skinners Well, neere unto Clarkes Well.” This Clarkes Well, or Clerkenwell, “is curbed about square with hard stone: not farre from the west end of Clarkenwell Church, but close without the wall that encloseth it.” ... “Somewhat north from Holywell (Shoreditch) is one other well, curbed square with stone, and is called Dame Annis the cleere; and not far from it, but somewhat west, is also another cleere water, called Perilous Pond, because divers youths (by swimming therein) have been drowned.” Stow most carefully enumerates the wells and conduits of the City and its surroundings, several being “neere to the Church.” And it is a fact that many wells, conduits, and pumps in and around London were—and some still are—not only in close proximity to the churchyards, but actually in them. The water from St. Clement’s Well and St. Giles’ Well came through the burial-grounds. The site of the Bride’s Well, which gave the name to the precinct and the hospital, is still marked by the pump in an alcove of the wall of St. Bride’s Churchyard, Fleet Street. There was a pump by St. Michael le Querne and one in the churchyard of St. Mary le Bow, against the west wall of the church. There was a well in the crypt of St. Peter’s, Walworth, a pump in Stepney Churchyard, and another in St. George’s in the East, to which his parishioners used to resort for drinking water until the Rev. Harry Jones, during a cholera scare, hung a large placard on it, “Dead Men’s Broth!” and Dickens used to picture the departed, when he heard the churchyard pumps at work, urging their protest, “Let us lie here in peace; don’t suck us up and drink us!”
THE VILLAGE OF SHOREDITCH.
(From Aggas’ Plan, 1560.)
ST. PANCRAS VILLAGE.
(From Rocque’s Plan, 1746.)