Such are the very scanty traces that have hitherto been brought to light relating to the burial-places of those who were amongst the worthiest pioneers in the making of London, and who occupied it before the time of the Christians who founded the earlier priories and churches. For as soon as these Christian institutions were established, it became the practice to bury the dead inside them or around them, and the cloisters and burial-grounds of the priories, and the churchyards and vaults of the churches, took the place of the more distant cemeteries and the more scattered graves.

Roman London is buried with British, Saxon, and Danish London, far below the surface of nineteenth-century London, and Longfellow might have been writing its epitaph when he described the ruins under the sea—

“Hidden from all mortal eyes

Deep the sunken city lies;

Even cities have their graves!”

The dedications of the London churches mark historical periods, and there are a few names, such as St. Olave and St. Magnus, which are of Danish derivation, but of the Danish interments in London very few traces remain. Beyond the remnants found at Blackheath, and the belief held by some chroniclers that the church of St. Clement Danes was so named because it stood in a plot of ground where the Danes were buried, only one discovery of any importance has been made. On the south side of St. Paul’s Churchyard, in digging the foundation for a new warehouse a few years ago, a relic was found with the following Runic inscription on it, which Mr. Loftie thinks must have belonged to an early stage of the Danish conquest, “Kina caused this stone to be laid over Tuki.” A tradition used to prevail in Fulham that human remains, which have been discovered at different times in the neighbourhood of the river, were survivals of the Danish invasion, although the actual skeletons found there in 1809 (on the property of the Earl of Cholmondeley) seemed, from coins, daggers, &c., which were with them, to belong to the time of Charles I.

CHAPTER II
THE GRAVEYARDS OF PRIORIES AND CONVENTS.

“Gone are all the barons bold,

Gone are all the knights and squires,