But pest-fields were needed in the west of London, as well as in the north, south, and east, and in addition to Tothill Fields there was a large tract of land set aside near Poland Street, upon the site of which the St. James’s Workhouse was subsequently built, a piece of the ground surviving still in the workhouse garden. Carnaby Market and Marshall Street were also built on the site about the year 1723, when three acres, known as Upton Farm, were given in exchange in the fields of Baynard’s Watering Place (Bayswater), upon which Craven Hill Gardens now stands. There was a plague-pit near Golden Square, this district being all a part of the pest-field at one time.
The orchard of Normand House, by Lillie Road, Fulham, is said, by Mrs. S. C. Hall, to have been filled with bodies in the year of the Great Plague. The site of this orchard has almost gone; Lintaine Grove, and the houses on the north side of Lillie Road were built upon it. There is still a piece vacant, and for sale, at the corner of Tilton Street, about three-quarters of an acre in extent. Knightsbridge Green (opposite Tattersalls) was also used for the victims of the Plague, and those who died in the Lazar Hospital. Such are all the records of plague-pits and pest-fields which I think sufficiently authentic to record.
There used to be an additional burial-ground for Aldgate parish in Cartwright Street, E., consecrated in 1615. This, at the beginning of the present century, was covered with small houses, and on a part of the site the Weigh House School was built in 1846. The rookery was cleared by the Metropolitan Board of Works nearly forty years later, when Darby Street was made, and the vacant land was offered as a site for artisans’ dwellings. I brought the case to the notice of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, and the Board was communicated with. At first it was denied that any part of the site had been a burial-ground, but excavations were made and human remains were found. Nor was this really necessary, for the workmen who had pulled down the houses, and the authorities at the school, were well aware of the fact, and knew of actual tombstones being unearthed, upon which a date as late as 1806 had been found. The Board of Works caused the plans for the surrounding new buildings to be altered, and what is left of the site of the burial-ground is now an asphalted playground adjoining the southern block. A certain gentleman afterwards wrote and circulated a pamphlet, in which he stated that the Metropolitan Board of Works had discovered one of the “seites” set apart in Whitechapel for a pest-ground in 1349, whereas the fact was that the Board had been driven, somewhat against its will, to preserve as an open space the site of a consecrated burial-ground belonging to the parish of St. Botolph, Aldgate. That it may once have been a part of a pest-field is likely enough, for they abounded in the district, but the age of the Aldgate ground was, I consider, sufficient to account for the driest of the dry bones found there.
Although the Plague has not re-appeared, there have been periods of great mortality from other diseases. Special provisions for burial had to be made at the time of the cholera visitations. In the outbreak of 1832, 196 bodies were interred in a plot of ground adjoining the additional burial-ground for Whitechapel (now the playground of the Davenant Schools). A large piece of ground by the churchyard of All Saints, Poplar, on the north side of the Rectory, was also used for the purpose, and the circumstance is recorded on the monument which stands in the middle of it.
The fact that the bodies in the pest-fields and plague-pits were usually buried without coffins, and were only wrapped in rugs, sheets, &C., has accelerated their decay, and it can no longer be thought dangerous when such pits are opened. Not that I wish in any way to defend the disturbance of human remains, for I hold that no ground in which interments have taken place should be used for any other purpose than that of an open space, and, apart from the legal and sentimental aspects of the question, human remains, in whatever state of decay they may be, are not fit foundations for buildings, nor is it seemly or proper to gather them up and burn them in a hole, or to cram them promiscuously into chests or “black boxes,” to be padlocked and deposited in other grounds or convenient vaults. But the old plague-pits, the very crowded churchyards, and the private grounds where the soil was saturated with quicklime, the coffins smashed at once, and decay in every way hurried, are likely now to be less insalubrious than those grounds where lead and oaken coffins—specially intended to last for generations—are still in good preservation, and only occasionally give way and let out the putrifactive emanations.
CHAPTER VII
THE DISSENTERS’ BURIAL-GROUNDS.
“Methodism was only to be detected as you detect curious larvæ, by diligent search in dirty corners.”—George Eliot.
Foremost amongst the burial-grounds devoted especially to Dissenters is Bunhill Fields,—not the New Bunhill Fields in Newington, nor Little Bunhill Fields in Islington, nor the City Bunhill Ground in Golden Lane, not the Quakers’ ground in Bunhill Row—but the real, genuine, original Bunhill Fields, City Road.
The land on the north side of the City and south of Old Street was variously called the Moorfields, Finsbury Fields, the Artillery Ground, Windmill Hill, and Bone-hill or Bon-hill. In the year 1549, when the Charnel Chapel in St. Paul’s Churchyard was pulled down, “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 cartloads, and there laid on a moorish ground, which, in a short time after, being raised by the soilage of the City, was able to bear three windmills.” The number of windmills was, later on, increased to five, and they may be seen on many old maps of London. Heretics used to be interred in Moorfields, and bones from St. Matthew’s, Friday Street, were moved to Haggerston, in fact several acres in this district were in use for the purpose of burying in.