3. The third place mentioned by Defoe was at “the Upper end of Hand Alley in Bishopsgate Street, which was then a green field, and was taken in particularly for Bishopsgate Parish, tho’ many of the Carts out of the City brought their dead thither also, particularly out of the Parish of Allhallows on the Wall.”
He then goes on to describe how this place was very soon built upon, though the bodies were, in many cases, still undecomposed, and he states that the remains of 2,000 persons were put into a pit and railed round in an adjoining passage. New Street, Bishopsgate Street, now occupies the site of Hand Alley.
STEPNEY CHURCHYARD.
4. “Besides this there was a piece of ground in Moorfields,” &c. Here he refers to the Bethlem burial-ground, which was not made at that time, but enlarged. Defoe finally mentions the extra grounds which had to be supplied in Stepney, then a very largely extended parish. They included a piece of ground adjoining the churchyard, which was afterwards added to it; and in 1886, in laying out this churchyard as a public garden, some human remains, without coffins, and very close to the surface, were accidentally disturbed at the south-western side of the ground. Another of the Stepney pest-grounds was in Spitalfields, “where since a chapel or Tabernacle has been built for ease to this great parish.” I believe it to be St. Mary, Spital Square. Another was in Petticoat Lane. “There were no less than five other grounds made use of for the Parish of Stepney at that time, one where now stands the Parish Church of St. Paul’s, Shadwell, and the other where now stands the Parish Church of St. John at Wapping.” The churchyards of these two churches, the former of which is a public garden, and the latter of which is still closed, are therefore survivals of pest-fields. But there are three other places to account for which Defoe does not localise. One was possibly in Gower’s Walk, Whitechapel, where human remains, without coffins, were come upon recently in digging the foundation for Messrs. Kinloch’s new buildings. The remains were moved in boxes to a railway arch in Battersea in the winter of 1893-4. I saw this excavation myself, the layer of black earth, intermingled with bones, being between two layers of excellent gravel soil. One additional ground bought at the time of the Plague was on the north side of Mile End Road. By about 1745 it was used as a market-garden, and now the site is occupied by houses south of the junction of Lisbon and Collingwood Streets, Cambridge Road. Besides these it is certain that a large tract of land south of the London Hospital was also used for interments, and the Brewer’s Garden and the site of St. Philip’s Church were probably parts of this ground, which was known as Stepney Mount. On the north side of Corporation Row, Clerkenwell, in digging foundations for artisan’s dwellings, a number of human remains were recently found. This site may have been a plague-pit, or it may have been a burial-ground for an old Bridewell close by, or an overflow from the graveyard in Bowling Green Lane.
The chief place of interment for those who died of the plague in Southwark was the burial-ground in Deadman’s Place (now called Park Street). Here vast numbers of bodies were buried. The graveyard was afterwards attached to an Independent Chapel, and many eminent Dissenters were buried there, for it soon became a sort of Bunhill Fields For South London. Now the carts, the trucks, and the barrels in Messrs. Barclay and Perkins’ Brewery roll on rails over the remains of the victims of the plague and the Dissenting ministers with their flocks.
THE SITE OF THE BREWER’S GARDEN ABOUT 1830.
DISSENTERS’ BURIAL-GROUND IN DEADMAN’S PLACE.
(From Rocque’s Plan, 1746.)