Necropolis: London & it's Dead (11 page)

John Donne, who appears in a magnificent shroud in his effigy at St Paul’s Cathedral, was quick to seize on the dramatic possibilities of the shroud, posing for his own effigy some years before his death.

Once the corpse had been dressed, complete with a nightcap which kept the jaw closed and created the impression that the dead person was but sleeping, it was placed in an open coffin. This was lined with a sawdust mattress, to absorb the by-products of early decomposition, and scattered with pungent herbs such as rosemary to disguise the smell. Traditionally, bodies went on display for at least two days before burial, so that mourners could pay their last respects, and the important practice of ‘watching’ might be observed. Prior to the Reformation, ‘watching’ had been allied to the Roman Catholic custom of praying for the departed and consoling the bereaved, and formed the origins of the Irish Wake.

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Wakes, in their more exuberant form, did not form part of the conventional English funeral, but food and drink played an important role. A tradition of sharing a cup of wine, placed on the coffin for the purpose, persisted into Stuart times; in other instances, it was common to hold a glass to the lips of the corpse, as if drinking with them for the last time.

Just as the rituals of the heraldic funeral included welcoming in the heir–‘the King is dead–long live the King!’–the food offered during the common funeral had the same purpose. It celebrated the life of the deceased, and welcomed in his successor. The fare reflected the status of the family. The poor provided little more than a bread roll apiece, with a collection circulating to pay for the ale. Further up the social scale, the deceased often left elaborate instructions for baked meats, game, cakes and cheese, washed down with wine and ale. Specialities included prunes, appropriately black, served with a white ‘posset’ or fool. One funeral feast from 1673 clearly did not come up to scratch when mourners were offered: ‘nothing but a bit of cheese, a draught of wine, a piece of rosemary and a pair of gloves’.
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After a period of two days or so, the corpse was taken for burial at the parish churchyard. If the body were in a coffin, this was placed on a stretcher or funeral bier. Burial in one’s own parish was preferred, though in some cases bodies had to be transported longer distances, by funeral coach. These journeys were fraught with difficulty. The roads within London were narrow and uneven. When Charles II set out for Parliament in his State coach, bundles of sticks had to be thrown under the wheels to prevent them falling into potholes. The open roads consisted of a single high ridge with mud-filled ditches at either side. Lurid tales circulated of coaches overturned and coffins bursting open to display their sad cargo to the world.

Such trips were also expensive. John Evelyn had occasion to arrange the funeral of a friend: ‘I caused her corpse to be embalmed, wrapped in lead and a brass plate soldered on, with an inscription and other circumstances due to her worth.’ The body was taken to Cornwall, in a hearse with six horses, attended by two coaches of as many, with about thirty relations and servants. Every night, the corpse was removed from the hearse and placed in the house, surrounded by tapers and with servants in attendance. It is scarcely surprising to learn that this funeral cost over one thousand pounds.
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In many cases, where the family could not afford a coffin, the body was ‘chested’, or carried in a box to the graveside, and buried in nothing more than a shroud. The Order for the Burial of the Dead, from the
Book of Common Prayer
, introduced in 1554, does not even mention coffins: ‘We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

It was traditional for the party to pause at the lych-gate, the roofed gateway of the churchyard. The term derives from the German ‘leiche’ or corpse, for it was here that the corpse rested while the first part of the burial service was read, in the days when it was thought inappropriate for the burial service to be conducted in the church.

Finally, the coffin was placed in its grave, with the head to the west and the feet to the east so that it would be standing in the right direction on Judgement Day.

Traditionally, although burials took place south, east and west of the church, the north was reserved for outsiders and outcasts. A suspected murderer might be buried on the north side; his victim in a place of honour–east, west or south.

Even in London, where space was at a premium, churchyards were traditionally filled with trees, evidence of a lasting pagan influence. However much the early Christian missionaries had struggled to make the English give up their tree-worshipping ways, paganism triumphed, retained in such traditions as holly and
mistletoe at Christmas. The rowan or mountain ash with its vivid red berries protected against witchcraft. Yew trees, from which bows were made, had a symbolic value, guarding the churchyard from invasion, albeit that most churchyards would have been hard pushed to manufacture more than one bow out of their available stock. The cypress had been associated with death since Roman times, when it was customary to leave branches on the porches of villas to indicate that the family was in mourning.

But now, London was changing. Within fifty years of the Great Fire, London had become the largest city in Europe, and its inhabitants were polarized. Grasping the opportunities for property development, speculative builders bought up vast tracts of west London, which soon became the fashionable end of town. The poor drifted east, where the expanding docks offered employment. Burial customs were inevitably affected as a result. Among the poor, the rudimentary common burial continued, with families interring their dead as best they could, and the nobility maintaining their own traditions of the heraldic funeral. But a new social category was emerging: the merchant class, born from the commercial expansion that was transforming London. These were the people who had made a fortune trading in colonial goods such as tea, coffee and tobacco, or on the Stock Exchange, compensating for their perceived lack of gentility with lavish displays of conspicuous consumption. And for the nouveau riche, this extravagant approach extended to death itself. It was no longer enough to be chested to your graveside by devoted friends. Burial became an industry–and so the undertaking business was born.

Litten tells us that undertaking as a specific trade became established in London during the eighteenth century. Even then, undertakers were not popular. Regarded as hard-hearted men who made a living by exploiting the death of their fellows, they were mocked in dramas such as Richard Steele’s
The Funeral, or, Grief A-la-Mode
. Anyone could set up as an undertaker. There were no exclusive guilds or chapels, and no written code of conduct,
although, as Dr Litten has observed, there seems to have been an unofficial rule by which most contractors stuck to their own part of London.

The trade had three branches: coffin-making, undertaking and funeral furnishing. Coffin-making was a lucrative sideline for joiners and cabinetmakers, whilst the undertaker made coffins and also performed funerals. Like any other business, there was a hierarchy. France & Banting, undertakers to the Crown, ran a top-drawer operation and even had their own crest, featuring black chevrons and a silver unicorn. At the other end of the scale, coffins were built by local joiners, who frequently conducted the service themselves.

The majority of coffins and trappings were produced in Whitechapel and Southwark. Spitalfields was the centre of the ‘black stuff’ industry, producing the silks and velvets used in the trade. Matt black crape, the distinctive mourning fabric, was introduced by Huguenot refugees. Other manufacturers supplied coffin plates, sheets, carriages and feathers.

Like all salesmen, undertakers advertised vigorously. The trade card of William Boyce, whose premises were at
ye WHIGHT HART & COFFIN, in ye Grate Ould Bayley, near Newgeat
offers
all Sorts & Sizes of Coffins & Shrouds Ready Made
, while William Grinly,
At ye lower Corner of Fleet Lane at ye Signe of ye Naked Body & Coffin
promised
Coffins, Shrouds, Palls, Cloaks, Hearses and Gloves
, all on reasonable terms, in 1710.

Funerals became ostentatious social events, for which invitations were issued. William Hogarth designed one for Humphrey Drew, the Westminster undertaker, in 1720, depicting the street procession of a middle-class funeral. With Hogarth, a little satire creeps into the scene: a couple of mourners seem distracted by an event just out of sight; a slight altercation on the steps of the church between the priest and a flunkey suggests the group has arrived too early. Hogarth also depicted an undertaker’s premises in
Gin Lane
, where the dismal trade is represented by a shop sign consisting of a coffin.

The change in funerals, and the development of the undertaking trade, was a reflection of shifting attitudes towards death on the part of the emerging middle class. Not for them the stiff upper lip of the aristocrat, or the stoical acceptance of the peasant. With the new class came the concept of the family as an affectionate unit. The notion of childhood was born, with offspring becoming lovable in their own right, rather than treated as miniature adults, spawned to continue the family line. With affection, inevitably, came bereavement, and the need for consolation in the form of some lasting memorial, something more than a simple stone. And burial need no longer take place in a mere churchyard.

The new middle class demanded a permanent memorial for their dead. One of the most influential books of the time was Gough’s
Sepulchral Monuments
(1786), a massive two-volume survey of England’s celebrated graves. This work, which combines a gazetteer with sombre reflection, was introduced by its author as: ‘a mixture of private mixed with public life; a subject in which my countrymen have been anticipated by their neighbours’.
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At its most extreme, this fashion took the form of a craze for mausolea, such as Vanbrugh’s for Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which made such a terrific impression on the gothic novelist Horace Walpole that he observed it ‘would tempt one to be buried alive!’
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Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) had, like Wren, deplored burial in churches, and demanded that cemeteries be provided on the outskirts of towns. Vanbrugh had been inspired by a trip to the Colonies. In Calcutta, he visited the South Park Street Cemetery, where the English employees of the East India Company were buried. Both the design of the cemetery, with its Mogul tombs, and the layout of the new city that was to become the capital of British power in India, had impressed him. The craze soon caught on, with elaborate mausolea becoming a standard feature of the great English country houses. Rather than be buried in the family vault, the aristocracy found it infinitely more stylish to be interred in these temple-like constructions, among the rolling acres landscaped by
such luminaries as Capability Brown to represent the Classical paradise of the Elysian fields.

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, ‘the cult of sepulchral melancholy’ and ‘graveyard gothic’. Melancholia had always been a consistent strain in the English character, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621), a treatise on depression written by Robert Burton, a saturnine Oxford don rumoured to have hanged himself on completion of the work. But ‘graveyard gothic’ or ‘the cult of sepulchral melancholy’ focused specifically on death and bereavement.
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In its most benign manifestation, this fascination with death took the form of Gray’s
Elegy
(1751), a meditation inspired by a traditional country churchyard. By modern standards the sentiments might appear self-indulgent, but such gentle melancholy was a legitimate poetic form. It was also, essentially, Romantic. Here was the author, describing his own feelings and inviting the reader to emote with him, at the prospect of his own death, and that of the reader’s. Gone was the pragmatic acceptance of the peasant. To quote Ariès, the attitude had changed from
Et moriemur–
and we shall all die to
la mort de soi
–one’s own death–and
la mort de toi–
the death of the other, whose loss and memory inspired a new cult of tombstones, cemeteries and a romantic attitude towards death.
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The poet Edward Young’s
Night Thoughts
(1742) took as its theme the death of Narcissa, a pseudonym for his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Lee. Elizabeth was already terminally ill when she married Henry Temple in 1735. By the following autumn, Young and his wife accompanied the couple to the French Riviera, where it was thought the climate would be better for their daughter’s advanced tuberculosis. When Elizabeth died on 8 October 1736, her corpse represented a familiar problem for English subjects dying abroad.
Where was she to be buried? As a Protestant, Elizabeth was ‘denied a grave’ within the local Roman Catholic cemetery. Although records indicate that Elizabeth was eventually buried, without incident, at a Protestant graveyard in Lyons, the fictional Narcissa suffers a more Gothic fate. The narrator breaks into an existing grave and places her there, ‘more like her Murderer, than Friend’.
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Young was not alone in his relish of the macabre. In
The Grave
(1743), Robert Blair dwelt on ‘the mansions of the dead’, where, ‘In grim array the grisly spectres rise, grin horrible, and obstinately sullen, pass and repass, hushed as the foot of night.’
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