So the churchyards remained, useless, closed and dreary, no one went into them, the children gazed through the palings and their parents deposited wastepaper, dead cats, rotten food, old clothes, &c., in them, and it was twenty years after they had been shut up before any of the disused graveyards were converted into public gardens. It must, of course, be borne in mind that, when first closed, these grounds were very unwholesome, but twenty years did, at any rate, a good deal towards ameliorating their condition, and now that another twenty years have passed we may safely say that no evil effects can accrue from letting people walk about in them, people, that is, who already live with these grounds in their midst. And there is no more sure way of hastening their improvement than by importing fresh soil and planting trees, shrubs and flowers.
ST. JAMES’S, PENTONVILLE, IN JANUARY, 1896.
The closing of the burial-grounds included the closing of the vaults. There is hardly a church in London, and but few chapels, with a graveyard attached, which had not also vaults used for interments under the building, and there are many churches and chapels which had vaults but not graveyards.
The earliest burials took place in the churchyards, the south side being always the favourite. It seems originally to have been customary to bury only stillborn infants, felons and suicides on the north side of the building. It became a fashion of later times to bury in or under the church, and the first place used was the porch. But when once the custom was established the inside of the church became the privileged place, and the most honoured dead were laid nearest the altar. The ancient crypts, such as those at St. Bartholomew’s and Clerkenwell, were not, I imagine, originally intended for burying in, although coffins were put in them later on. But the vaults, such as those under the City churches and the parish churches outside the City, were expressly made for the purpose, a few having been used for beer or wine instead of bodies.
Many vaults were private, such as “Lady Jersey’s Vault” and “Holden’s Vault,” both in St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and in this same church there is a “Doctor’s vault.” St. Clement Danes and other churches have a “Rector’s vault,” and St. Saviour’s, Southwark, can boast of a “Bishop’s vault.” The bodies from under some of the City churches which have been pulled down were moved to others; the coffins from St. Michael, Crooked Lane, were divided between St. Edmund King and Martyr and St. Mary Woolnoth, and those that went to the latter place have had a second removal, the vaults having to be cleared out a few years ago. In many places there were vaults under the vestries, the adjoining schools, almshouses, the sextons’ houses, &c., and at Lambeth, among the places of interment closed by order in Council, was a “vault under the station-house.” A list of the London churches and chapels which were provided with burial-vaults, but not with graveyards, will be found in [Appendix C]. It is not unlikely that many of these will have, in time, to be cleared out. In some cases the coffins or remains have already been collected and reinterred in cemeteries, the one at Woking having been especially favoured. They are very liable to become a nuisance, and are far more dangerous to the living than the human remains under the plots of ground open to the air.
CHAPTER XII
GRAVEYARDS AS PUBLIC GARDENS.
“Some young children sported among the tombs, and hid from each other, with laughing faces. They had an infant with them, and had laid it down asleep upon a child’s grave, in a little bed of leaves.... Nell drew near and asked them whose grave it was. The child answered that that was not its name; it was a garden—his brother’s. It was greener, he said, than all the other gardens, and the birds loved it better because he had been used to feed them.”—From the “Old Curiosity Shop,” Dickens.
The late Sir Edwin Chadwick, in the Report which he drew up in 1843 (ten years before the burial-grounds were closed), wrote the following significant words:—“The only observation I at present submit upon the space of ground now occupied (as burial-grounds) is that it would serve hereafter advantageously to be kept open as public ground.” Happily he lived long enough to see some of these very graveyards upon which he had reported converted into open gardens. Their conversion and their preservation have gone hand in hand. Partly to facilitate their being acquired as open spaces an Act was framed, by the passing of which it became illegal to build on any ground that had been set aside for interments. And there could be no better way of securing the preservation of a burial-ground from encroachment or misuse, than by laying it out and handing it over to a public body to be maintained for the benefit of the public under the Open Spaces Act. Once given to the people, the people are not likely to give up an inch of it again without a struggle.