Necropolis: London & it's Dead (4 page)

Originating in the deserts of Mongolia in the 1320s, it spread to China and, by 1351, had killed two-thirds of the population there. Mongolian nomads then carried it west, along trade routes. The Black Death wiped out millions as it rampaged through these trade routes. Thousands perished in Constantinople in 1347. The following year, two-fifths of the population died in Cairo. Corpses were piled so high in the Egyptian village of Bilbais that bandits hid behind them during ambushes. One third of the Islamic world died as the plague spread on to Damascus, Jerusalem and Mecca. The Black Death derived its name from the internal bleeding that
caused black bruises to appear on the skin. There were three, interrelated forms of plague: bubonic, which caused buboes or tumours on the neck, armpit and groin, and from which victims occasionally recovered; pneumatic plague, which attacked the respiratory system; and septicaemic plague, which attacked the blood system and was always fatal.
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In 1346, Genovese merchants travelled to Caffa (now Feodosia) in the Crimea, where they came under siege from Tartar warlords. When plague broke out among the Tartars, their leader, Janibeg, ordered the survivors to catapult the corpses over the walls into the city. The Genovese fled, bringing the plague back to Italy late in 1347. Thousands died, and were thrown into mass graves. In Siena, one Agnolo di Tura buried his five children with his own hands. ‘So many died,’ he wrote, ‘they believed it was the end of the world.’ In
The Decameron
, Giovanni Boccaccio noted: ‘Such was the cruelty of heaven and, to a great degree, of man, that, between March 1348 and the following July, it is estimated that more than one hundred thousand human beings lost their lives within the walls of Florence, what with the ravages attendant on the plague and the barbarity of the survivors towards the sick.’
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Many Italian citizens felt that the only solution to the plague was to leave their families, their homes and their city. Neighbours avoided one another. Brother deserted brother. Worst of all, parents abandoned their children.

As the corpses piled up, the churches ran out of consecrated ground and the authorities were forced to dig mass graves, where bodies were buried by the hundred. ‘They stowed them away like bales in the hold of a ship,’ wrote Boccaccio, ‘and covered them with a little earth, until the whole trench was full.’ Another commentator observed that the mass graves looked like lasagne.

The Black Death soon reached France, killing over half the population of Marseilles. At Montpelier, only seven out of one hundred and forty Dominican friars survived. Attempts to treat the symptoms
with Theriac, a remedy which included crushed snakes, failed dismally. Cattle were slaughtered in the belief that they spread disease. Huge fires were lit to fumigate the streets. One theory was that the air had become stiff and needed to be dispersed: bells were rung and birds were released to fly around rooms. Eventually, the authorities realized that quarantine was the only way of containing the outbreak, and entire households were walled up. Many believed the plague was a punishment sent from God. An Order of Flagellants sprang up, who lashed themselves in an attempt to stop God attacking the world. As mass hysteria broke out, the populace sought a scapegoat for the epidemic. First lepers, then the Jews, were held responsible. In towns and villages across Europe, thousands of Jews were accused of poisoning the water sources and burned alive. In Frankfurt, the Flagellants organized the wholesale massacre of the entire Jewish population.

The plague struck England in June 1348, arriving by ship at Melcombe Regis (Weymouth) on bales of cloth from Burgundy infested with rat fleas. Spreading like wildfire from Bristol to Gloucester to Oxford, it attacked London in November 1348 and flourished in the city’s filthy conditions. London was a heaving anthill of overhanging timber-frame houses, where jutting rooftops met across narrow alleyways, trapping fetid air beneath. Pigs and cattle roamed between the houses; industrial waste, from the tanneries which boiled up wool and leather using animal excrement in the process, littered the banks of the river. Butchers turned out their offal into the open drains, which were no more than sewers. Edward III complained that, ‘When passing along the water of the Thames, we have beheld dung and lay stools and other filth accumulated in diverse places within the city, and have also perceived the fumes and other abominable stenches arising therefrom.’

Crammed together in rat-infested rookeries, the populace were vulnerable to infection, with the poor the inevitable victims; ideal conditions for a deadly virus to take hold. London was a death trap.

By January 1349, the ‘deadly pestilence’ had become such a threat that Parliament was prorogued (suspended but not dissolved), because ‘grave fears were entertained for the safety of those coming here at the time’, according to Robert of Avesbury, an eyewitness. Avesbury recalled that:

Those marked for death were scarce permitted to live longer than three or four days. It showed favour to no-one, except a very few of the wealthy. On the same day, twenty or forty or sixty bodies, and on many occasions many more, might be committed for burial together in the same pit. The pestilence arrived in London at about the feast of All Saints [1 November] and daily deprived many of life. It grew so powerful that between Candlemass [2 February] and Easter [12 April] more than two hundred corpses were buried almost every day in the new burial ground made next to Smithfield, and this was in addition to the bodies buried in other graveyards in the city.
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According to William Maitland, who compiled a massive
History of London
in 1756, the new burial ground came into being because the plague:

…continued to rage in a most deplorable and dreadful Manner, till the common Cemeteries were not capacious enough to receive the vast Number of Bodies so that several well-disposed Persons were induced to purchase Ground to supply that Defect: Amongst whom we find Ralph
Stratford
, Bishop of
London
, who in 1348, bought a Piece of Ground called
No-Man’s Land
, which he enclosed with a Brick Wall, and dedicated to the Burial of the Dead.
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The Bishop of London consecrated this new cemetery, but it became so full that an extension had to be opened:

…a Place called
Spittle-Croft
, the Property of
St Bartholomew’s Hospital
, containing thirteen acres and a Rod of Ground, which was also purchased and appropriated to the same Use of burying the Dead by
Sir Walter Manny
; in which were buried 50,000 Persons, who died of the Plague, as recorded by antient Historians and was long remembered by the following Inscription fixed on a Stone Cross upon the Premises:
A great Plague raging in the Year of our Lord 1349, this Burial-Ground was consecrated, wherein, and within the Bounds of the Present Monastery, were buried more than fifty thousand Bodies of the Dead, besides many others thenceforward to the present Time: Whose Souls the Lord have Mercy upon
.
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Another cemetery was subsequently opened at East Smithfield by ‘one
John Corey
, a Clergyman, for the same Use’ later that same year; dedicated to the Holy Trinity, ‘in which were also buried innumerable Bodies, during the Time of this Pestilence’. Maitland believed that, ‘With the Addition of those buried in other Grounds, Church-yards, and Churches, may convince us of the Assertion, that not one in ten survived this divine Visitation, and that there could not die less than 100,000 Persons in the whole.’
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Archaeologist Duncan Hawkins of the Museum of London has taken issue with Maitland’s figures. The population of London between 1300 and 1348 has been estimated at around forty to one hundred thousand. Of these, between a third to half perished during the Black Death. Whatever the figures involved, Hawkins argues, it is obvious that the victims of the Black Death overwhelmed the existing provision for the dead in churchyards and religious institutions. Recent excavations suggest that between ten and twelve thousand bodies were buried at the new cemeteries.
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Hawkins discovered that Londoners who succumbed to the Black Death were treated with considerably more reverence than in Italy. Between 1986 and 1988, Hawkins led excavations at the East Smithfield cemeteries, which lie beneath the Royal Mint; these
revealed that, far from being hurled into mass graves, the majority of the dead were stacked neatly, five deep, with their heads at the west and feet to the east, in keeping with the Christian practice that bodies should be facing the right direction when they were resurrected on Judgement Day. Even at the height of the plague, many victims were decently interred, in shrouds and coffins.

The cemeteries did not remain as such once the first wave of the plague had abated in London in 1350. Real estate was already at a premium in England’s capital. Spittle Croft, where more than five thousand bodies were buried over a twenty-year period, became the site of the Charterhouse or Carthusian Priory, built in 1371. At the cemetery of the Holy Trinity, ‘just without the wall’, the Abbey of St Mary of Grace was founded, for Cistercian monks. The development covered the victualizing office and adjoining houses.

Only No-Man’s Land retained its identity as a cemetery. Subsequently referred to as the Pardon Churchyard, it was used for the burial of the outcast and excluded, like heretics, executed people and suicides.

This was not the last Londoners saw of the plague. In 1361, another outbreak caused Edward III to order all cattle to be slaughtered, from Stratford in the east of London to Knightsbridge in the west. To no avail, as twelve hundred people died in forty-eight hours.

London recovered, eventually, but the aftermath of the Black Death was devastating. The epidemic destroyed the economy, causing mass starvation and anarchy. The shortage of men and women available to join and run the monasteries, and the decline in numbers of men who could enter the priesthood, undermined the authority of the Church.
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On a theoretical level, the Black Death led the devout to question the very nature of existence. Death, once the inevitable conclusion of a good Christian life, now became a terrifying apparition, striking without warning and wiping out an entire generation. This new manifestation of death was epitomized by the
danse macabre
.

Image not available

The
danse macabre
was a traditional form of iconography, popular throughout Europe, depicting Death engaged in a dialogue with every member of society, from the Pope to the common labourer. Death is portrayed as a ‘transi’ or half-decomposed corpse, enticing the living to join him, and serving to remind us all that
memento mori
: remember you must die, while the dance itself is not so much a dance as a procession, with the subjects advancing gravely and reluctantly, as though participating in a funeral procession. ‘Dances of death’ actually took place at European cathedrals following Mass, with the participants paid in wine.
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The message of the
danse macabre
consisted of three elements: first came the notion that we are all equal in the presence of death. Second was the idea of confronting the living with the dead, a familiar mediaeval theme reinforcing the vanity of human grandeur, and the third was the dance itself, which appears to have been an offshoot of the morbid ecclesiastical imagination, designed to frighten sinners into repentance.

Accounts from Europe indicate that the
danse macabre
took
another form, inspired by the Black Death, rather like our children’s rhyme ‘Ring o’ Ring o’ Roses’, which refers to the Great Plague. In 1374, a fanatical sect of dancers appeared in the Rhine, convinced that they could put an end to the epidemic by dancing for days and allowing other people to trample on their bodies. It is not recorded whether they recovered but, incredibly, they began to raise money from bystanders. By the time they reached Cologne they were 500 strong, dancing like demons, half-naked with flowers in their hair. Regarded as a menace by the authorities, these dancers macabre were threatened with excommunication.
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In London, the
danse macabre
became the central feature of a chapel in the Pardon Churchyard, which formed part of the old St Paul’s. Founded by Gilbert Becket, and rebuilt in Henry V’s time by Dean Moore, the chapel was surrounded by a cloister decorated with a mural depicting the
danse macabre
, described thus by the writer John Stow in 1601:

About this Cloyster was artificially and richly painted the dance of Machabray, or dance of death, commonly called the dance of Pauls: the like whereof, was painted about S. Innocents cloister, at Paris in France: the metres or poesie of this daunce, were translated out of French into England by John Lidgate, the Monke of Bery, & with y
^e
picture of Death, leading all estates painted about the Cloyster: at the speciall request and dispence of Jankin Carpenter, in the Raigne of Henry the 6. In the Cloyster were buried many persons, some of worship and others of honour; the monuments of whom, in number and curious workemanship, passed all other that were in that church.
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Jankin Carpenter, who really deserves the credit for persuading England’s leading poet John Lydgate to translate the verses, was the executor of the famous Lord Mayor of London, Richard Whittington. The people of all estates who appear in the poem and were depicted on the wall represented every level of society, facing
the inexorable power of Death. Pope, Emperor, Cardinal, Empress, Patriarch, King, Archbishop, Prince, Bishop, Earl or Baron, Abbot or Prior, Abbess, Justice, Knight or Squire, Mayor, Canon, ‘Woman Sworn Chaste’ [a nun], Gentlewoman, Astronomer, Physician, Merchant, Labourer, Minstrel, Child and finally, Hermit.
All erthely creatures to obey my noblynes
, states Death: there is no getting away from ‘Dr Machabre’.
Ryche & pore must daunce in
e same way.
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