The London Burial Grounds / Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by Isabella M. Holmes

Every chronicler of London history who can lay claim to be called an antiquarian, from Fitzstephen, Stow, and Pennant, to the Rev. W. J. Loftie and Sir Walter Besant, has tried to gather up the fragmentary evidence which from time to time has come to light, and to form some picture of the condition of London in the earliest times. Many have gone in largely for invention, and have weaved what they supposed to be circumstantial stories from discoveries of the most trivial kind, but these fictions are not worthy of repetition. As it is only with the evidences of the places of interment in London that this chapter has to deal, it is not possible to go into the question of the Roman roads, walls, villas, gardens and camps, of which traces have been found, although these relics really form the most interesting of the ancient remains, or “remarkables” as Maitland calls them, belonging to the several parishes.

A few tumuli scattered over London are supposed to mark the sites of British burial-places, Stukeley imagined he had discovered one by Long Acre, but the evidence is not trustworthy. Certainly there are some artificial mounds in Greenwich Park, which were opened in 1804 by the Rev. James Douglas, and found to contain spear-heads, beads, pieces of cloth, hair, &c., and there is the well-known one in Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead, which the London County Council excavated in 1894. From the few broken pieces of human workmanship which were brought to light in this excavation, it was conjectured that the mound was an ancient British burial-place of the early bronze period, but no particular name can be associated with it. It is now railed round for its better protection, and planted with shrubs.

The Romans buried their dead outside their cities, often on each side of the highways immediately beyond the walls and gates, and they adopted this plan, to a certain extent, in Britain. But it must be remembered that Roman London, as first designed and built, was far smaller than that which is enclosed within the line of the city wall of which fragments still remain, and therefore some sepulchral monuments have been discovered inside this wall and its gates, as, for instance, near St. Martin’s, Ludgate, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, in Camomile Street and Lombard Street, and by the churches of St. Mary at Hill and St. Dunstan’s in the East. Near Dowgate some excavations made by Wren brought to light what were then thought to be British graves, but as there were Roman urns at a still lower level the matter was rather difficult of solution.

THE TUMULUS AT HAMPSTEAD.

The largest number of sepulchral remains have been found on the east side of the City, commencing at Bishopsgate and Moorfields, and extending to Wapping on the south, and Sun Tavern Fields, Shadwell, on the east; and it is not improbable that a cemetery of considerable size occupied all this district in Roman times. In 1756 many earthen urns, containing ashes, burnt human bones, and coins, were dug up in a field “called Lottesworth, now Spitalfield,” close to the present site of Christ Church, Spitalfields, together with some stone coffins and remnants of wooden ones which probably dated from British or Saxon times; and on many occasions during the last century, urns, lachrymatories, monumental stones, &c., were discovered in different spots in the district above mentioned. In many cases the monumental stones were erected to the memory of soldiers from various legions of the army, and on a few of them the inscriptions are still legible. Some of the Roman remains discovered in London are in the Guildhall Museum; the one represented in the accompanying picture, which was found near Ludgate, is with the Arundel marbles at Oxford. A few single graves have been identified among the traces of the gardens and villas which immediately surrounded the Roman Fort.

The following description of what Sir Christopher Wren found in St. Paul’s Churchyard, on the north side of the Cathedral, is interesting. “Upon digging the foundation of the present fabrick of St. Paul’s, he found under the graves of the latter ages, in a row below them, the Burial-places of the Saxon times—the Saxons, as it appeared, were accustomed to line their graves with chalk-stones, though some more eminent were entombed in coffins of whole stones. Below these were British graves, where were found ivory and wooden pins, of a hard wood, seemingly box, in abundance, of about six inches long; it seems the bodies were only wrapped up, and pinned in woollen shrouds, which being consumed, the pins remained entire. In the same row, and deeper, were Roman urns intermixed. This was eighteen feet deep or more, and belonged to the colony when Romans and Britons lived and died together.” (From Wren’s “Parentalia.”) The remains found in the north-east corner of the churchyard were the best preserved.

ROMAN MONUMENT.

Some evidences of a Roman cemetery have also been discovered on the south side of the Thames, in Snow’s Fields, Bermondsey, Union Street, Newington, and the burial-ground in Deverell Street. This district was probably the place of interment for those who lived in the small suburb which was growing up on the south side of the Bridge or Ferry. On Blackheath there have also been found traces of Roman burial, and in 1803 several urns were dug up in the Earl of Dartmouth’s garden, but they were supposed by some authorities to be the remains of the Danes who were encamped in that neighbourhood.