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“Such strange churchyards hide in the City of London.”

Dickens.

I have already referred, in Chapter I., to the different areas occupied by the City of London at different periods. But the City, as we know it now, averages, roughly speaking, a mile and a half from east to west and three-quarters of a mile from north to south. It includes a considerable space outside the old wall, and the boundary line is very irregular, except on the southern side, where is the “silent highway.” It is governed by the Corporation, and its ancient wards are represented by Aldermen, while the Lord Mayor commences his year of office by a public procession through the streets on November 9th, supported by his dignified companions, the Sheriffs.

The City of London is the Office of the World. Its highways represent untold wealth, and its byways reek with poverty and dirt; it contains the most bustling thoroughfares and the most retired corners; it is full of business and affairs up to date, and yet teeming with antiquarian interest, and relics of ancient history. As on one side of a busy road we have Cannon Street Station and on the other side the venerable “London Stone,” so the City churches, with their old-world churchyards, are wedged in between huge modern warehouses, offices, and public buildings; “churchyards sometimes so entirely detached from churches, always so pressed upon by houses; so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten—except for the few people who ever look down into them from their smoky windows. As I stand peeping in through the iron gates and rails I can peel the rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The illegible tombstones are all lopsided, the grave-mounds lost their shape in the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar or Plane-tree that was once a drysalter’s daughter and several common-councilmen, has withered like those worthies, and its departed leaves are dust beneath it.... Sometimes, the queer hall of some queer Company gives upon a churchyard such as this, and, when the Livery dine, you may hear them (if you are looking in through the iron rails, which you never are when I am) toasting their own Worshipful prosperity.... Sometimes, the commanding windows are all blank, and show no more sign of life than the graves below—not so much, for they tell of what once upon a time was life undoubtedly.”

Poor little churchyards, they are so insignificant, and many of them are even more shrunken than when Charles Dickens visited them. Thus we hear of an injunction being sought for to restrain the would-be reformer from cutting off a two-foot-wide strip of St. Martin Orgar’s ground to make a dry area behind the houses in Crooked Lane; and the Commissioners of Sewers possess the right, and sometimes use it, of curtailing a churchyard in order to widen a road. In 1884, for instance, they gave £750 for a piece at the eastern end of Allhallows’ Churchyard, London Wall. The remainder of that little ground is now a public garden, laid out in 1894 by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, and is a quiet resting-place in the busy thoroughfare, with a piece of the ancient City wall still existing in it. Most of the churchyards “entirely detached from churches” are the sites of the burned buildings, which were used as burial-grounds for the amalgamated parishes—for the mournful calamity of 1666 visited the churches of London with “peculiar severity,” 89 of them being destroyed, 51 of which were rebuilt by Wren and his followers, and 35 of which were not replaced. All the City churchyards are now protected from being built upon by the Disused Burial-grounds Act of 1888, but that Act has not yet been read to include the sites of the churches themselves which are from time to time removed, and which have all had interments in the vaults underneath them. The site of Allhallows’ the Great, Upper Thames Street, was recently sold to a brewery company, but has not yet been built upon, because it is thought that an injunction will be served upon the builder and that it will be made a test case.

Of the burial-grounds attached to the Cathedral, the Temple, and the churches which are the survivals of the priories, I have already written; apart from these one of the oldest of the churches founded in the City is sometimes supposed to be that of St. Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street. The present building, which is threatened by a railway company, is by Hawksmoor, but a church existed on the site in very early days. In St. Peter’s, Cornhill, is a tablet, the authenticity of which is certainly open to grave doubt, recording the fact that a church was erected on this spot by Lucius in A.D. 179, but the genuine history of the foundation can only be traced as far back as 1230. The burial-ground of St. Benet Sherehog, in Pancras Lane, marks the site of a church dating from Saxon times, dedicated to St. Osyth,—Size Lane, which is close by, being a survival of the name. The City churches still standing, of which the whole or a part date from before the Great Fire, are St. Bartholomew’s the Great; Allhallows’, Barking; the Temple; St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate Street; and St. Catherine Cree, Leadenhall Street, all connected with priories; and St. Bartholomew’s the Less; St. Giles’, Cripplegate; St. Olave’s, Hart Street; St. Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate Street; St. Andrew’s Undershaft, Leadenhall Street; and Allhallows’, Staining, Star Alley.

The church of St. Bartholomew the Less, of which but a very small portion of the tower is ancient, is within the Hospital enclosure, and the churchyard is smaller than it was, some of it having been thrown into the paved courtyard. St. Ethelburga’s churchyard is a quaint little courtyard with a few tombstones in it, only approached through the church and vestry. In St Andrew’s Undershaft (or “under the maypole,” which used to be suspended on the houses in St. Mary Axe) the monument of John Stow is to be found—poor Stow, whose survey of London is the foundation for all modern histories. The adjoining churchyard is very small. That of Allhallows’, Barking, has lately been entirely covered with building materials, owing to the restoration of the church. It was, according to Stow, “sometime far larger.”

The churchyard of St. Olave’s, Hart Street (Dickens’ St. Ghastly Grim), is an interesting one. The church itself is one of the most beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture in London—a small Gothic building, admirable in its proportion. The old gate of the churchyard has skulls and cross bones on it, and in this ground were interred a vast number of the victims of the plague of 1665, which is said to have taken its origin in this parish in the Drapers’ Almshouses.

ALLHALLOWS’, STAINING, 1838.

Of the church of Allhallows’, Staining, only the tower remains, in the centre of a neatly-kept little burial-ground. This was the model for the churchtower in “Old London” at the exhibition at South Kensington in 1886.^[1] The churchyard of St. Giles’, Cripplegate, the church which contains the monument to Milton, has a long and varied history. It is well known to antiquarians, as the valuable relic, the postern of the City wall, is situated in it. The story of this ground is one of additions and encroachments, and it has found a careful chronicler in Mr. Baddeley, a former churchwarden. The addition running south was called the “Green Churchyard,” a name which we find repeated in other parishes—for instance, it was given to the higher portion of the churchyard of St. James’, Piccadilly, and to the little piece by St. Bartholomew the Great, approached through the present south transept. The gravestones at St. Giles’ have been laid flat, and the ground is neatly kept and generally open, but not provided with seats for the public. Until Michaelmas, 1640, “the military” used to be trained in this churchyard.^[2]

1.In 1873 a crypt was made under the tower, in which were deposited the remains from Lambe’s Chapel, St. James’s in the Wall, Monkswell Street.

2.Malcolm’s “Londinium Redivivum.”

CRIPPLEGATE CHURCHYARD ABOUT 1830.

There were four churches in the City dedicated to St. Botolph, a pious Saxon who built a monastery, in 654, in Lincolnshire. It is a little curious that all the four churchyards are now public gardens—St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate; St. Botolph’s, Aldgate; St. Botolph’s, Aldersgate; and St. Botolph’s, Billingsgate, The last-named church was not rebuilt after the Fire, and the site of one of its churchyards, the “lower ground,” is now occupied by a new warehouse with red heads on the frontage, on the south side of Lower Thames Street. What remains of the “upper ground” is a small, three-cornered, asphalted court, open to the public, with seats, a drinking fountain, and a coffee stall. The charming little garden in Aldersgate Street includes three churchyards, that of St. Botolph, an additional one for St. Leonard’s, Foster Lane, and an additional one for Christ Church, Newgate Street, which is at the western end, and was given to the parish in 1825 by the Governors of Christ’s Hospital when the Great Hall was built and a small burial-ground at the north-west corner of the buildings could no longer be used. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association laid out Aldgate churchyard in 1892; it is much appreciated, and is maintained by an annual grant from the charity funds of the parish. A melancholy incident took place here in September, 1838, when two men, a gravedigger and a fish-dealer, lost their lives in a grave by being poisoned with the foul air. The grave was a “common one,” such as was often kept open for two months until filled with seventeen or eighteen bodies. It may safely be said that all the City burial-grounds were crowded to excess. Their limited area would invite such treatment, and it was only natural that the City parishioner should choose to be interred in the parish churchyard, unless the still greater privilege were afforded him of being buried in the vaults under the church. The other churchyards in the City which have been laid out for public recreation are those of St. Paul’s Cathedral; St. Olave, Silver Street; Allhallows, London Wall; St. Katherine Coleman, Fenchurch Street; St. Mary, Aldermanbury; St. Sepulchre, Holborn; and St. Bride, Fleet Street; while the churchyard of St. Dunstan in the West, situated in Fetter Lane, is the playground of the Greystoke Place Board School; and that of St. James, Duke Street, is the playground of the Aldgate Ward Schools.

ST. MILDRED’S, BREAD STREET, ABOUT 1825.

Most of the remaining City churchyards are quiet little spaces, surrounded by huge warehouses. Many are only approached through the churches, and are invisible from the road. St. Mildred’s, in Bread Street, is unfortunately used as a store-yard for ladders of all sizes, and it seems, from the accompanying illustration, to have been turned to account many years ago, while the very small piece that remains by the tower of St. Mary Somerset, Thames Street, where the Weavers of Brabant used to hold their meetings, is full of old iron, &c. One or two are private gardens, such as St. Michael’s Churchyard, Queenhithe. Others have been paved and added to the public footway, such as that of St. Mary Abchurch, their extent being still visible. This is the Case with the churchyard of St. Michael Bassishaw, in Basinghall Street. The ground is now part of the pavement, but the two large trees which grew in it are still flourishing. On the site of the churchyard of St. Benet Fink, in Threadneedle Street, is Peabody’s statue. The untidy little yard in Farringdon Street, which is used as a volunteer drill-ground, was once an additional burying-place for St. Bride’s, Fleet Street. It was given to the parish in 1610 by the Earl of Dorset, on condition that no more burials should take place in the southern part of the churchyard which was opposite his house. The house was destroyed by the Great Fire and the churchyard used again. The graveyard of St. Christopher le Stocks is the garden of the Bank of England, and Timbs states, although he does not vouch for the authenticity of the story, that the mould for the burial-ground of Whitfield’s Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road was brought from this churchyard, “by which the consecration fees were saved.”

GROUND PLAN OF ST. BENET FINK IN 1834.

Of the City churchyards which have been completely annihilated, apart from other kinds of burial-grounds within this area, there must have been at least forty. And this destruction has been due to the dissolution of the priories, the formation of new streets, and the invasion of the railways. Norden mentions three churches in Farringdon Ward Within which have gone—St. Nicholas in the Fleshshambles (which was in Newgate Street), St. Ewans (south of Newgate Street), and St. Genyn within St. Martin le Grand. When Queen Victoria Street was made the churchyards of St. Mary Mounthaw, St. Nicholas Olave, and St. Mary Magdalen, Knightrider Street, disappeared; that of St. Michael, Crooked Lane, a plot of land given by one Robert Marsh and consecrated in 1392, was sacrificed for King William Street; and that of St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf (now the Welsh Church), where Inigo Jones was buried, for St. Benet’s Hill. A complete list of them will be found in the Appendix. Cannon Street Station of the South Eastern Railway covers the churchyard of St. Mary Bothaw; and for Cannon Street Station of the District Railway that of St. John’s, Cloak Lane, was destroyed, the human remains being “dug up, sifted, put in chests with charcoal, nailed down, put one on the top of the other in a brick vault and sealed up for ever, or rather till some others in time come to turn them out again.” Part of the General Post Office is on the churchyard of St. Leonard, Foster Lane; the Mercer’s Hall is on that of St. Thomas Acons, where the pilgrims were buried; the Mansion House Station is on that of Holy Trinity the Less; and the Mansion House itself is on that of St. Mary Woolchurch Haw, in which a balance used to stand “for the weighing of wool.”

THE CHURCHYARD OF ST. BENET, PAUL’S WHARF, 1838.

Most of the existing churchyards have but few tombstones left in them, several have none at all. But some of them can still boast of fine trees, which add much to the interest and picturesque appearance of the City streets, and I hope it may be a long time before those in Stationers’ Hall Court, under which there were vaults belonging to St. Martin’s, Ludgate, and in the churchyards of St. Peter Cheap, Wood Street, and St. Dunstan in the East, cease to grow and flourish.

We want to see all of these little churchyards opened to the public and provided with seats. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association is always ready to put them in order, but it is difficult to secure their maintenance. The parish funds which might be available for such a purpose have been so cut down and diverted by the Charity Commissioners that it is, in many cases, impossible for any provision to be made for the upkeep of the churchyard, small though the cost may be. But I trust that this difficulty may be, before long, removed, and then we may expect a great improvement in the condition of the City churchyards which have all been closed for burials for upwards of forty years, and which are so singularly well suited for conversion into “outdoor sitting-rooms” for those who can take a few moments of rest from their work in the surrounding offices and warehouses. And they are worthy of the utmost respect, for they contain the ashes of some of the noblest citizens of London, some of its greatest benefactors and its hardest workers, those who have helped, stone by stone, to raise the great city to the height to which it has attained in its influence in the world.

In 1668 the Lord Mayor “issued out a Precept, commanding, amongst other wholesome orders ... that the Inhabitants, Householders, and others concerned, should not throw or suffer any Ashes, Dirt, or other Filth, to be cast out ... before any Church or Churchyard ... upon pain of 20 shillings.” But in 1896 we need visit very few of these same churchyards before we come to one in which rubbish of all kinds is allowed to accumulate and to remain. Yet they are sacred spots, consecrated ecclesiastically and historically, and instead of being permitted to sink into the oblivion of insignificance they should all be made beautiful in memory of the dead and for the benefit of the living, for in them are “the tombs of the wealthy and the humble heaps of the poor.” The Old Society for the Protection of City Churches and Churchyards did something towards their preservation, and lately a new City Church Preservation Society has been formed, the Chairman of Council being Mr. H. C. Richards, M.P., and the Hon. Secretary the Rev. Rowland B. Hill. It has already displayed most praiseworthy activity, and is, at the present time, endeavouring to save the church of St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street (built by Hawksmoor) from being demolished for a railway station. There is a very small churchyard attached to this church.

And it may be interesting here to give particulars of a case in which the decision arrived at is valuable to those who are fighting the battle of protection. In the Session of 1881 the London School Board, through the Education Department, introduced a Bill, called the Elementary Education Provisional Order Confirmation Bill, for the purpose of acquiring compulsory powers over the burial-ground in Bream’s Buildings, Fetter Lane, belonging to the church of St. Dunstan in the West, and which adjoins the Greystoke Place Board School. The rector and churchwardens, supported by the vestry of the parish, entered an opposition to the Bill, and appeared against it before the Committee of the House of Lords. Their opposition was entirely successful (and it must be remembered that the Disused Burial Grounds Act had not then been passed), and the London School Board was merely given a right of way to the school through the graveyard. The costs of the opposition amounted to £236 12s. 10d., which was charged upon the poor rate. The auditor disallowed the charge, but on appeal to the Local Government Board it was sanctioned.