Who nevermore will trouble you, trouble you.”
Old Chelsea Church is noted for its monuments, many persons of distinction having been buried there, and in the churchyard is a great erection in memory of Sir Hans Sloane, but the ground is closed to the public, and the tombstones are sadly neglected. From a dramatic point of view the burial-ground attached to St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, is most interesting, as it contains the graves of a large number of actors.
So many works have been written about monuments and epitaphs that it is not my intention to refer to many, but some are interesting as giving a peep into the life of those they commemorate. There are several in London which describe the number of times the deceased person was “tapped for dropsy.” A tombstone at Stepney is in memory of one “Elizabeth Goodlad, who died in 1710, aged 99, and her twenty daughters.” They must have been exemplary daughters not to have worn out their mother sooner! The Rev. Matthew Mead was also buried here, a most prolific writer of sermons and treatises on religion, including one with this quaint title, “The almost Christian tried and cast.” Stepney Churchyard is very old; it is highly probable that there was a church there in Saxon times. The other churchyards in East London which can boast of considerable antiquity are Bromley, Bow, Whitechapel, and Hackney, although Sir Walter Besant, in his novel, “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” says that the churchyards in East London “are not even ancient.” No doubt if he re-wrote that novel now he would alter many of his remarks. It is hardly possible to think that the eastern districts of London ever formed a “marvellous, unknown country,” or that Rotherhithe needed any “discovery.”
By the close of the last century and at the beginning of this one, the want of additional burial space was much felt in several parishes. Some had “poor grounds,” and some, like St. James’s, Clerkenwell, had a “middle ground,” this particular one being now the playground of the Bowling Green Lane Board School, but the extra graveyards were all small and all crowded. The parishes of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, St. James’s, Piccadilly, St. Andrew’s, Holborn, St. James’s, Clerkenwell, St. Marylebone, and St. Mary’s, Islington, secured additional burial-grounds in which chapels of ease were erected. These are Christ Church, Victoria Street, St. James’s, Hampstead Road, Holy Trinity, Gray’s Inn Road, St. James’s, Pentonville Road, St. John’s Wood Chapel, and the Chapel of Ease in Holloway Road, the ground surrounding which is one of the best kept churchyard gardens in London. Many of the district churches, built at the commencement of this century, also had graveyards attached. In Bethnal Green, for instance, not only is there the burial-ground of St. Matthew’s, which was consecrated in 1746, and has vaults under the school as well as the church, but there are those of St. Peter’s, St. Bartholomew’s, and St. James’ the Less, the two first being laid out as gardens, and the last being a dreary, swampy waste, containing about ten sad-looking tombstones and a colony of cocks and hens.
It is impossible, in a chapter already too long, to touch upon all the churchyards outside the City, but I must refer briefly to the four principal parish churches which have disappeared. The present building of St. Mary le Strand only dates from 1717; the original one stood in a “fair cemetery,” much nearer the river, and was also called the Church of the Innocents. This ground was enlarged in 1355 by a plot 70 feet by 30 feet in size, but the church and churchyard disappeared about 1564 to make room for Somerset House. The church of St. John the Evangelist, Tybourn, was removed in 1400 by Bishop Braybrooke, and the first church of St. Marylebone was built to take its place. Provision was made for the preservation of the churchyard, but it also disappeared before long. It was near the site of the present Court House in Stratford Place, under which, and the older one, bones were dug up in 1727 and 1822.
THE SITE OF ST. KATHARINE’S DOCKS.
(From Rocque’s Plan, 1746.)
ST. MATTHEW’S, BETHNAL GREEN, 1818.
Tybourn Church was removed because it was in so lonely a situation, and yet so near the main road from Oxford to London, that robbers and thieves were always breaking into it to steal the bells, images, ornaments, &c. The Church of St. Margaret, Southwark, stood in the middle of the Borough High Street, with a much-used graveyard round it, which was enlarged in 1537. But it was in so inconvenient a place, and the ground was so much used for holding markets in, that it was removed about 1600, and the parish amalgamated with St. Saviour’s. The old town hall took the place of the church, and the Borough Market is still held on or near the site of the churchyard. When St. Katharine’s Docks were made, in 1827, St. Katharine’s Church, the ruins of the hospital (dating from 1148), two churchyards of considerable size, and the whole parish,—inns, streets, houses and all, were totally annihilated. The church was a beautiful one; it has been described by Sir Walter Besant and other chroniclers, and must have been amongst the finest specimens of ecclesiastical architecture in London. The whole establishment was, to a certain extent, rebuilt near Regent’s Park. It is said that a quantity of the human remains from the churchyard were used to fill up some old reservoirs, &c., in the neighbourhood; but, at any rate, it is a fact that they were distributed amongst the East-end churchyards, and several cartloads were taken to Bethnal Green and deposited in St. Matthew’s ground, where the slope up to the west door of the church is composed of these bodies from St. Katharine’s. There were originally steps leading to the entrance, but the steps are buried under this artificial hill, the ground having been raised several inches.