London: City of the Dead E-Book

David Brandon

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

London: City of the Dead is a groundbreaking account of London's dealing with death, covering the afterlife, execution, bodysnatching, murder, fatal disease, spiritualism, bizarre deaths and cemeteries. Taking the reader from Roman London to the 'glorious dead' of the First World War, this is the first systematic look at London's culture of death, with analysis of its customs and superstitions, rituals and representations. The authors of the celebrated London: The Executioner's City (Sutton, 2006) weave their way through the streets of London once again, this time combining some of the capital's most curious features, such as London's Necropolis Railway and Brookwood Cemetery, with the culture of death exposed in the works of great writers such as Dickens. The book captures for the first time a side of the city that has always been every bit as fascinating and colourful as other better known aspects of the metropolis. It shows London in all its moods - serious, comic, tragic and heroic-and celebrates its robust acceptance of the only certainty in life.

Leseprobe

Cover image courtesy of Simon Marsden

First published 2008

Reprinted 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place,

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© David Brandon & Alan Brooke, 2008

The right of David Brandon & Alan Brooke to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9163 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press Ltd.

Printed by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

1.

‘A Good Send-Off’

2.

Resurrectionists and Bodysnatchers

3.

Controversies

4.

Bizarre Deaths

5.

Churchyards and Other Burial Places

6.

Death and the Afterlife in the Arts

7.

Irrational Aspects

8.

Death and Disaster

9.

Pestilence and Public Health

10.

Commemoration and Memory

11.

Curious Memorials and Monuments

12.

People and their Pains

13.

Chronicling Death

Bibliography

Introduction

London has always been lethal. Death – anticipated or brutally sud-den – has plucked the old, the young, the vulnerable, the innocent, the villainous, the foolhardy, the brave and the timorous from those around them and has done so with a callous and insouciant lack of discrimination.

Through much of the period under review, mortality in London was markedly higher than in any other part of the country. London could be a dangerous place. Life was short and early death was common. Death was a part of life and Londoners found ways of coping with its pervasive presence just as they managed to handle the other demanding challenges that came their way.

Has any city had more written about it than London? It seems that all the obvious and also every arcane or obscure aspect of its past have received the attention of writers over the centuries. Many of them have clearly been imbued with an absolute, uncritical love and awe of London. Others have been captivated, even spellbound, by the lure of the metropolis, but this attraction has sometimes been a mixed one, laced with concerns about London’s sheer enormity and the bewilderingly complex nature of its past. How can it be possible to comprehend even a small percentage of this? Yet others have found London at one and the same time fascinating and repulsive. For them it is like a great maelstrom: turbulent, confusing, threatening and on occasion destructive yet for all that, it is a constant source of attraction and excitement worthy of research and recording.

Because death has been such a feature of London’s past, it has inevitably been written about extensively and from a wide variety of approaches and angles. Books and articles galore have dealt with the effect of major epidemic diseases; with London’s murders and accidental deaths; its calamities and disasters; its judicial executions; the demise of particular Londoners, especially where these deaths have been unusual; with the development of measures to tackle avoidable death; with its statues and memorials; its rituals of commemoration; its places of interment, its cemeteries and ghosts; the evolution of mourning, death and burial practices; perceptions of the afterlife and controversies concerning death.

Why, then, another book dealing with death in London? This book is intended to be an informed, informative and hopefully entertaining general introduction to the subject of death in London. It is aimed at the general reader of history. It does not pretend to be all-inclusive; more specialised and detailed works on the subject are referred to in the bibliography and we have drawn on them extensively. The issue of death throws a fascinating light on so many aspects of the human condition and the development of culture and society. This book’s main thrust is to consider the ‘everydayness’ of death in the life of London’s citizens and how that has been reflected in the culture they have created. It is this approach that the authors believe offers something that has not been specifically done before. The book’s time frame runs from the medieval period to the end of the First World War.

1

‘A Good Send-Off’

Funerals, Feasts and Fashions

The pressing need to find more places to bury the dead in London became increasingly apparent as the population expanded from the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the century the population of London was approximately 70,000 with the majority living in the City, although there were significant numbers in Westminster and Southwark. By the late seventeenth century, this trend was reversed with about three-quarters of the population living outside the City. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, London witnessed a significant transformation: it changed from being a compact settlement to a sprawling metropolis. Fields and meadows, waste and woodland, particularly to the west of the City, were consumed by this urban expansion. As London grew, it experienced rising rates of mortality and these prompted differing responses to the problem of how they should be tackled. The administrative means and the necessary scientific knowledge to do so effectively did not exist at this time.

Although there was a continuity of some pre-sixteenth-century rituals in relation to death, there were also changes which, by the mid-nineteenth century, amounted to the emergence of a ‘mourning industry’. The Victorian period became associated with a highly visible culture of mourning although much of the groundwork for this had begun in the eighteenth century. The proliferation of popular publications such as newspapers, magazines and books of etiquette, provided an outlet as well as an influence for the growing industry of death. Commercialisation, of which advertising was an important part, allowed the purveyors of mourning – undertakers, businessmen, retailers, manufacturers of coffins and coffin furniture – to promote their goods and services.

Medieval burials generally followed a standard Christian procedure but would vary according to social rank. Burials in this period included interment without a shroud; with a shroud (which was more common); in a shallow grave, wooden coffin, lead-lined coffin or stone sarcophagus; mausoleum burials; laying in an east–west alignment and embalming. For the majority however the standard practice was burial in a shroud without a coffin. The distinction between a ‘good death’ (a natural death, one which had been prepared for) as opposed to a ‘bad death’ (unnatural such as suicide, accident or murder), was of absolute importance. Hence, the expectation was that one should be ready for death and be able to fulfil all the appropriate religious rituals and practices.

The deathbed epitomised a good death. As death became imminent, doors and windows would be opened in order that the soul could be released. A priest would usually arrive to administer the last rites and the dying person would be asked to declare his or her faith and to make confession. Having been absolved, anointed and commended in prayer, and once death had taken place, the body was washed, the eyelids closed (as this is the first part of the body where rigor mortis sets in), orifices plugged, body straightened then wound in a clean linen cloth or garment. In the period between death and burial, the body would be ‘watched over’, a ritual that dates back to at least the fourteenth century. Elements of this practice – the wake and the viewing of the body – have continued down to the present. After Mass the body was taken to the grave and sanctified by a priest. Family and friends would normally accompany the funeral procession bearing candles or torches. Those who were wealthy or held a prominent position were generally interred inside the church with a memorial. Most people would be buried outside the church in the graveyard or a burial site and could expect little more than a shallow mound marked with a wooden cross. In times of mass death such as during plague epidemics, disposal became more urgent and corpses were buried in large pits such as the Black Death cemetery in East Smithfield.

The elite classes predictably had more elaborate burials. For such dignitaries, until the late thirteenth century, the body might be embalmed ready for their funeral display. The process of embalming had been known since ancient times. During the medieval period, embalming involved cutting the body open from the throat to the groin, evisceration (removing organs and intestines), immersing the body in alcohol and inserting spices, preservative herbs and salt. The body would then be wrapped in tarred or waxed sheets. This process was used on a number of kings such as Canute, William the Conqueror and Edward I.

The people of medieval London were reasonably free to choose their place of burial. However, after the sixteenth century increasing pressure on space meant that previous burial sites were removed to make way for new ones. Another method was the formation of vaults or repositories for the bones or bodies of the dead. These charnel houses were often found in church crypts. In addition to the 107 pre-Reformation parish churches in London, there were also religious houses that accommodated burials such as the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces near the Tower and the Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary Spital on the north side of Folgate Street.

The Museum of London Archaeological Service has cast much light on the history of burials in London. Excavations at St Mary Graces near the Tower between 1986 and 1988 found large parts of a medieval burial ground with some 420 burials from the fourteenth century. In the parish cemetery of London Blackfriars in Carter Lane, burials from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century revealed wooden coffins, one lead coffin and grave linings.

At the monastic Cemetery of Bermondsey Abbey burial sites have been found dating from 1099 until the dissolution in 1538. Excavations of the site of the medieval graveyard of St Lawrence Jewry near the Guildhall, which dates from the eleventh century, showed that copper alloy bells were found in a number of graves. At the Augustinian Priory of St Mary Merton 738 burials were found, some of which consisted of stone-lined graves and also monolithic stone coffins with a lining of grey ash and charcoal. Some of the graves contained artefacts such as chalices, copper buckles, leather straps, and in one case, a pendant lamp. Burials at St Benet Sherehog (lost in the Great Fire) in Sise Lane (now off Queen Victoria Street), were consistent with other graves revealing skeletons lying with their heads to the west end of the graves.

Post-Reformation burials, such as those at Chelsea Old Church (destroyed in the Second World War), and St Brides Cemetery on Farringdon Street, show that the dead were interred mainly in wooden coffins, some with lead lining and coffin plates. An excavation at the Cross Bones Cemetery in Southwark, which served a poor parish and eventually became a pauper’s graveyard in 1769, found remains of clothes and shrouds.

Another pauper site used up until the seventeenth century was found at St Thomas’ Hospital in Southwark where more than 200 interments were found. These bodies had been buried without coffins and large numbers of shroud pins were present.

By the early sixteenth century a widely accepted set of rites and practices had become associated with burial. The Church, which had largely taken responsibility for burying the dead, specified what was essential regarding the service and ceremonial. Burial orders issued in the 1550s made the length of the burial service much shorter. In addition to the provisions made by the church, a number of secular rituals continued and, as we will see later, expanded. These included the conduct around the deathbed; the watching of the corpse; the procession to church; bell-ringing and the distribution of alms. Eating and drinking after the burial varied in scale depending on the status of the deceased person.

The Church took the responsibility for burying the dead through the work of joiners, gravediggers and clergy. In pre-Reformation England, the Knights Hospitallers buried executed felons while officers of the College of Arms (founded 1484) controlled the management of funeral ceremonies for the elite classes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the College of Arms lost this trade with the emergence of undertakers at the end of the seventeenth century. One of the earliest known of London undertakers was William Boyce in 1675 whose trade card advertised him as a ‘coffinsmaker at the White Hart and Coffin … Ould Bayley near Newgate.’ Sir Anthony Wagner (1908–1995), who was one of the leading authors on heraldry and genealogy as well as an officer of arms at the College of Arms, claims that the first modern undertaker was William Russell, a member of the Painter Stainer’s Company and a painter of hatchments for heraldic funerals who took up coffin-making later. His trade card was illustrated with a skull and crossbones. Although modern funeral undertaking arose in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, it began to flourish in the eighteenth century. Read’s Weekly Journal in June 1739 reported that Azariah Reynolds was ‘the oldest undertaker for funerals in town’ when he died at his house in Hackney at the age of ninety.

With the growth of the undertaking business came advertisements, trade cards and a whole culture of mourning. During the eighteenth century when the undertaker became well established, he continued a centuries-old tradition of supplying all the requirements of a burial – equipment, clothes, carriages, food, drink, flowers and invitations. In 1747 the London Tradesman wrote:

An undertaker’s business is to furnish the funeral solemnly with as much pomp and feigned sorrow as the heirs and successors of the deceased choose to purchase.

With this growth in the number of undertakers and the commercial enterprise that accompanied the trade, accusations of greed were inevitable. Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), secretary to the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, made harsh criticism of undertakers who dealt with funerals of the working and middle classes. Commenting on the large number of undertakers in London in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843), he argued that a small number of masters actually monopolised the trade thus giving rise to a corrupt system of exorbitant costs. He noted that the ‘greatest severity on the poorest classes, acts as a most severe infliction on the middle classes of society … and involves so many other evils’.

What pushed up the expense of funerals was all the accompanying pomp of horses with plumes, silks, hearse and the coachmen and mourners. The latter rightly invited much scorn. Professional mourners included staff-bearers and ‘mutes’. Mutes wearing white or black sashes, top hats, gloves and carrying staffs draped in cloth, were a common sight in the capital. Looking suitably solemn on the day of a funeral they positioned themselves near the church door or the home of the deceased. Charles Dickens portrayed the image of the mutes and the accompanying funeral pomp in Martin Chuzzelwit (1844):

[on] the day of the funeral … two mutes were at the house and door, looking as mournful as could be expected of men with such a thriving job; the whole of Mr Mould’s establishment were on duty … feathers waved, horses snorted, silk and velvets fluttered; in a word, as Mr Mould emphatically said, ‘everything that money could do was done.’

The mutes would then accompany the funeral procession and, as Chadwick recorded in his Report, they would often stop ‘in parties in public houses on their return from burials’ thereby making a ‘mockery of solemnity’.

By the mid-nineteenth century, there were 750 undertakers in London. William Tayler, a footman who worked in the employ of a wealthy widow at No. 6 Great Cumberland Street (now Great Cumberland Place) opposite Marble Arch, started to keep a diary in 1837. In February he recorded an outbreak of influenza in London. It was so great, Tayler noted, that ‘every day the streets are regularly crowded with funerals and mourning coaches … all the undertakers are making their fortunes.’

Despite the extravagance of some high-profile funerals such as Nelson’s and Wellington’s in the nineteenth century and the perception of the Victorian age as one associated with the outpouring of mourning and all its trappings, there were many among the middle and upper classes who requested low-key funerals. Chadwick identified a strong case for the reform of funeral ceremonies when he acknowledged the claim by undertakers that the well-to-do classes were requesting in their wills to have a plain and simple funeral. Two notable London funerals within the space of two weeks in 1845 proved to be relatively private: The Marquis of Westminster expressed his opposition to a public funeral in his will, and the following week the Earl of Mornington requested a private funeral with only close family in attendance.

No matter how private or plain these funerals were, neither compared with the stark poverty and the stigma of a parish funeral. An example of this is given in a letter of October 26 1849 in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, 1849–50 in which a poor woman conveyed her experience:

A friend gave me half a sovereign to bury my child. The parish provided me with a coffin, and it cost me about 3s … I would give the undertaker three shillings to let a man come with a pall to throw over the coffin, so that it should not be seen exactly that it was a parish funeral. Even the people in the house don’t know … I had to give 1s 6d for a pair of shoes before I could follow my child to the grave … I think there’s some people at the docks a great deal worse off than us.

The great stigma in death, as in life, was to be recognised as a pauper. They were denied the send-off that befitted the respectability of a working-class funeral.

Mourning dress also became an important accessory to death, although black mourning clothes had been adopted from the late fourteenth century and mourning cloaks and hats continued to be popular with chief mourners until the late seventeenth century. Additional accessories gradually emerged for men such as black gloves, belts, waistcoats, hats, shoes, stockings and buttons. Women wore dresses made from black silk and white linen and black and white caps beneath veils or hoods. The wearing of a black armband, particularly among men during the eighteenth century, became an established symbol after the death of someone close.

In addition to the personal grief suffered by the loss of a loved one, death also had a deep impact on the financial vulnerability of widows. For working-class women in particular the loss of a husband or partner represented a huge deprivation in security and protection and many had to resort to parish support. There are many sad stories recalling how generations of widows finished their days in the workhouse. The Friendly Almshouses, formerly the Friendly Female Society in the borough of Lambeth, made few concessions to sensitivity when it advertised itself as a place for the ‘relief of poor infirm aged widows … who have seen better days.’ Others had to rely on the support of their family, a Friendly Society or simply had to try and make ends meet. Not surprisingly, many looked to the church or spiritual means for comfort and solace.

Class distinctions in death had been apparent from early times and were determined by what people could afford. Such distinctions applied on the Necropolis one-way train between London and Brookwood from its opening in 1854. First-, second- or third-class coffin tickets were available with separate carriages for Anglican and Nonconformist corpses, the latter divided between ‘Roman Catholics, Jews, Parsees and other Dissenters’. David Bartlett, an American writing in London by Day and by Night (1852) commented on the ‘unpleasant subject’ of ‘London burials’. Noting the grand tombs and memorials to the rich and powerful he asked: ‘where are the poor buried’? This question led him to discuss the issue of Enon Chapel in Clement’s Lane (opened 1823) off the Strand, which became a subject before a Committee of the House of Commons. A corrupt Baptist minister, Mr Howse, had promised that for a fee of fifteen shillings he could provide burials. In the vault, which was 60 feet long, 29 feet wide and 6 feet deep, he packed in some 12,000 corpses over a twenty-year period. One way of getting rid of these human remains was to mix them with loads of mingled dirt and then to throw them into the Thames on the other side of Waterloo Bridge. On one occasion a portion of a load fell off in the street, and the crowd picked a human skull out of it. Howse resorted to various other means of disposal including the use of quicklime to get rid of the corpses. One witness testified before the Committee: ‘I have seen the man and his wife burn them, it is quite a common thing.’ Samuel Pitts was a regular attendee at the Chapel who testified:

the smell was most abominable and very injurious; I have frequently gone home myself with a severe headache … there were insects, something similar to a bug in shape and appearance, only with wings … I have seen in the summertime hundreds of them flying about in the chapel … we always considered that they proceeded from the dead bodies underneath.

The case of Enon Chapel was not an isolated incident. St Martin’s in Ludgate, St Anne’s in Soho, St Clement’s on Portugal Street and many others were guilty of similar practices. The gravedigger at St Clement’s testified that the ground was so full of bodies that he could not make a new grave. He said, ‘we have come to bodies quite perfect, and we have cut parts away with choppers and pickaxes. We have opened the lids of coffins, and the bodies have been so perfect that we could distinguish males from females and all those have been chopped and cut up.’ Other gravediggers gave similar accounts, one describing his experience as ‘more horrible than ever Dante saw in Hell.’

At least the incident led to reform and the government were sent many weird and wonderful suggestions for ways of improving the burial of the dead. For example, one architect proposed the use of catacombs shaped like pyramids with each outer stone containing a coffin. Despite such ideas between 1837 and 1841, Parliament approved a plan for seven privately-operated ‘Gardens of the Dead’ to be laid out in London’s outer suburbs at Highgate, Brompton, Nunhead, Kensal Green, Tower Hamlets, Abney Park and West Norwood.

Ostentatious funerals, by the mid-nineteenth century, were beginning to be looked upon with some degree of disdain by various Victorian publications. The Times had been critical of the expense, pomp, ‘plumes’ and ‘undertaking millinery’ at the funeral of the Duke of Northumberland in 1865. The Lancet in 1894 expressed relief that the expense of funerals had been reduced, hailing the fact that ‘elaborate funerals of the past generations are almost as extinct as the dodo.’

The mourning industry started to decline after the 1880s and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 marked the passing of an age in which the rigidity of mourning and all its regulations were dictated by the Victorian code of etiquette. The working classes could at least manage, by the assistance of death insurance from funeral clubs, to have a reasonable ‘send-off’. The trappings of the funerary industry became simpler and writers were still criticising what they saw as the shabbiness of the cheap undertaking trade. In an attempt to improve the status of their profession the British Undertakers Association was established in 1905.

The term ‘wake’ stems from an old tradition of watching over the body in the hope that life might return. Later the practice became particularly associated with the aftermath of the funeral service when food and drink are served. The wake has a long history in Ireland and many Irish immigrants who came to London continued this tradition, as depicted in illustrations and satirical cartoons in the eighteenth century such as The Humours of an Irish-Wake as celebrated at St Giles London. The picture shows the deceased still laying on his deathbed surrounded by fifteen people in various states of grief: some praying, others sobbing and two drinking.

As early as 1180, William FitzStephen commented upon the way in which Londoners were famed for their celebrations, which included ‘their care in regard to the rites of funerals and the burial of the dead.’ The Drapers Company in 1523 recorded the death of Sir William Roche, alderman. After the pomp and ceremony of the funeral, guests came back to the home where they drank wine, beer and ate spiced bread. The following day they attended church, which was followed by a meal at the Draper’s Hall consisting of ‘First, brawn and mustard, boiled capon, swan roast, capon and mustard’. The second course consisted of pigeons, tarts, bread, wine, ale and beer. In addition, Lady Roche provided them with ‘four gallons of French wine, a box of wafers and a pottell [measure equivalent to two quarts] of ipocras’. The latter was a rare sweet wine reserved for royalty or special ceremonial occasions.

Henry Machyn recorded many funerary feasts in the sixteenth century, such as that in November 1550 held in honour of ‘Lady Judde, Mayoress of London and wife of Sir Andrew Judde, Mayor of London, and buried in the parish of St Helen in Bishopsgate Street’. After the burial, Machyn commented that the ‘lord mayor and his brethren … and all the street and the church were hanged with black’ and there followed ‘a great dole and a great dinner’. In May 1551, he noted that on the following day of the burial of Lady Huberthorn, there was a sumptuous dinner. In the same month the funeral of Lady Morris, wife of Sir Christopher Morris, knight and the master of the ordnance by King Henry VIII, there was ‘a great dole and a great dinner as I have seen of fish and other things’. In July 1553, at the funeral of Ralph Warren, Knight, mercer and alderman, ‘there was as great a dinner as I have seen.’

Funeral feasts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were important aspects of the funeral and often entailed half of the total cost. Thomas Sutton (1532–1611) was a civil servant, businessman and moneylender and one of the richest men in England. On his death in December 1611 his body was embalmed and his funeral procession from Paternoster Row to Christ Church in Newgate Street took some six hours. His funeral feast took place in May 1612, as it was often the custom to celebrate the funeral of eminent persons some time after their internment. The feast took place at the Stationers Hall and it was a sumptuous affair consisting of:

32 neat’s [cow’s] tongues, 40 stone of beef, 24 marrow-bones, 1 lamb, 40 capons, 32 geese, 4 pheasants, 12 pheasant pullets, 12 godwits [large wading bird], 24 rabbits, 6 hernshaws [heron], 43 turkey-chickens, 48 roast chickens, 18 house pigeons, 72 field pigeons, 36 quails, 48 ducklings, 160 eggs, 3 salmon, 4 congers, 10 turbots, 24 lobsters, 4 mullets, 9 firkin and a keg of sturgeon, 3 barrels of pickled oysters, 6 gammon of bacon, 4 Westphalia gammons, 16 fried tongues, 16 chicken pies, 16 pasties, 16 made dishes of rice, 16 neat’s and tongue pies, 16 custards, 16 dishes of bait, 16 mince pies, 16 orange pies, 16 gooseberry tarts and 6 grand salads.

Such lavish expense did not go down very well with the puritans who campaigned against such excesses of pomp and display and many requested that their own funerals be kept frugal. One such was William Ambler, who was buried in Bunhill Fields. He asked that no more than ‘twelve persons be invited to my burial because the most of what I have is in other men’s handes.’ There were many others beside puritans who did not spend lavishly on food and drink after the funeral. In March 1664, twenty guests attended the funeral of Tom Pepys, brother of Samuel, and were served ‘six biscuits a-piece and what they pleased of burnt claret’. Ned Ward (author of The London Spy) wrote before his death in 1731:

No costly funeral prepare,

Twixt sun and sun I only crave,

A hearse and one black coach to bear,

My wife and children to my grave.

An irreverent depiction of an eighteenth-century wake is Hogarth’s series of illustrations, The Harlot’s Progress, which tells the story of Moll, a twenty-three-year-old prostitute. The last engraving in the series is a funeral wake which depicts a telling mixture of grief and indifference. Many of those assembled have been fuelled by drink. The parson has a glass of brandy in one hand whilst his other hand is up the skirt of a girl. Another girl can be seen stealing the undertaker’s handkerchief. Moll’s madam is appropriately drunk whilst other prostitutes are distracted in various activities which include admiring themselves in the mirror or showing off their sores. The only one demonstrating any grief is Moll’s maid who is disgusted at the use of Moll’s coffin as a bar for drinks.

Although Christianity introduced some new festivals, there were many customs and rituals in existence before the Christian period. However, by the eighteenth century the rituals surrounding death combined a mixture of secular, folklore and religious practices with a growing commercial involvement. The custom of eating after the funeral is an ancient one but the custom of sin-eating seems to be more recent. Sin-eating as a funeral custom is mentioned in records from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and was practiced in parts of England, the lowlands of Scotland and the Welsh borders. For a small payment of money a local person was paid to take upon him or herself the sins of the deceased and their consequences in the afterlife by eating and drinking near the deceased body. The writer and English antiquary John Aubrey (1626–1697) noted that the ritual was performed when the deceased was being removed from the house for burial. A loaf of bread and a jug of beer were passed over the deceased, or actually briefly placed on the body, and then the sin-eater consumed them. By this action the sin-eater was assumed to have taken on the sins of the deceased and to have brought peace to the departed soul.

Other examples of giving out food after the death of an individual are those associated with medieval Requiems and the custom of giving alms (including food) to the poor in exchange for their prayers. In late Elizabethan London there were at least sixty-two separate distributions of bread to the poor every Sunday. For some of the benefactors it was a way in which they could sustain memories of themselves by the reading of their names before the distribution. In St Giles, Cripplegate, a stone slab commemorates the brewer Charles Langlie who died in 1602. Langlie donated annual gifts to the poor of the parish as well as an accompanying sermon hoping that others might ‘follow Langlies waies.’ Sir John Milborne, draper and mayor of London in 1521, required that his thirteen bedesmen (poor people living in his almshouses) displayed their gratitude for his charity by insisting that they attend mass every morning at 8.00 a.m. near the tomb of their benefactor. Nicholas Wilkinson, a Shakespearian actor who lived in Holywell Street, was given recognition by an altar erected in St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch as a benefactor who gave an annual six pounds and ten pence to the poor inhabitants of the parish.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century funeral feasts were an important element of the whole ritual of death and, for the wealthy, they could be on a very grand scale. By the nineteenth century, the feast continued and many working-class families made the most of giving the deceased a good ‘send-off’. However, for many middle- and upper-class families, the feast diminished in its scale and extravagance and became much more sedate.

The century after 1780 witnessed the distinct emergence of a mourning industry accompanied by a whole paraphernalia of pattern books, invitation cards, mourning dress, commemorative keepsakes, the commercialisation of undertakers and a complex set of rules regarding what to wear and the period of time spent in mourning. The growth of this industry created a demand for mourning fashions such as black hats with knotted bands, black woollen suits and dresses, which stimulated the tailoring industry. In addition, technological developments in printing assisted the placing of announcements and notices in newspapers regarding deaths and funerals. They also assisted the growth of advertising and promoted funerary fashions in the growing number of magazines.

The widespread expression of mourning reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. This century saw a continuation of some of the practices established in the eighteenth century as well as expansion and change in other practices. The period spent in mourning became more prolonged. This was particularly evident when Prince Albert died in 1861 and Queen Victoria undertook her long passage of grief. The regulations concerning mourning became more complex and rigid. The attempt to regulate what should be worn on these occasions had similarities to the old sumptuary laws, which had also tried to dictate what people should wear (and the number of courses they were allowed to eat). Mourning dress, as with other forms of dress, had been circumscribed in the old sumptuary laws, which tried to ensure that a person’s social class was identifiable by their dress. Edward III (1327–1377) has been described as ‘the King who taught the English how to dress’ by providing the first national sumptuary laws in 1336, 1337 and 1363. An example of the complex laws during the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) stipulated that ‘None shall wear … cloth of gold or silver, or silk of purple colour … except … Earls, all above that rank, and Knights of the King’ and so on down each rank of society. Although the penalties were harsh, very few people were prosecuted under the laws and James I (r. 1603–1625) repealed them.

Similarly, mourning dress from the eighteenth century was the subject of convoluted regulations. Etiquette dictated the wearing of different attire depending on the family relationship as well as the appropriate length of time spent in mourning. Mrs Humphry, a popular London writer and journalist, wrote in Manners for Women in 1897:

Widows’ weeds used to be worn for a year and six months. It was then reduced to a year and a month, the vulgar reading of which was a year and a day. During the last few years deep crepe and distinctive headgear have been dropped at the end of six months, the period known technically as ‘black silk’ then setting in, this lasting for six months instead of three, as used to the case when the very deep weeds were worn for a year.

If there was any doubt that these rules seemed trivial, Mrs Humphry quickly pointed out that ‘they are a crystallisation in externals of kindheartedness and those good manners that are the fruit of noble minds.’ However, wearing mourning dress did not commence until a week after the death for fear of the suggestion that the dress had been prepared in advance.

Fashion magazines such as Queen and The Gentlewoman advised on many aspects of mourning including the strict dress code to be followed. The New York magazine, Harpers’ Bazaar, of April 1886 mockingly noted that we do not have ‘the mutes, or the nodding feathers of the hearse, that still forms part of the English funeral equipage.’ Mourning attire was regarded by many as an ideal way to display wealth and respectability. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, started in 1852 at two-pence a copy, was founded by Samuel Beeton, the husband of Isabella who as Mrs Beeton was the author of the extraordinarily successful The Book of Household Management. It was the first cheap magazine for women and included colour plates of fashion and cut-out paper patterns. It advised many widows ‘never to put on their colours again.’ Although the thought of wearing black clothes must have seemed dull, many women went to great lengths to appear fashionable in times of mourning. There were changes by the mid-nineteenth century in the style of skirts, shawls, shoes, fans, gloves and small displays of defiance by wearing hair beneath the bonnet. By 1875 the women’s magazine industry was well established. As more magazines started to appeal to lower middle-class and working-class women they marked a rejection of the more literary and elitist style of late eighteenth-century feminine literature.

Such prolonged and visible displays of mourning could be interpreted as a sign of respect for the departed, as help in coping with grief, the result of society’s expectations or a recognisable symbol that invited sympathy. Etiquette manuals and magazines gave some advice, as Pat Jalland points out in her book Death in the Victorian Family (1996). In Manners and Social Usages (1884) it was suggested that: ‘a mourning dress does protect from unwanted intrusion on private grief against the untimely gayety of a passing stranger. It is a wall, a cell of refuge.’ The Queen magazine in 1875, however, tempered the wearing of mourning dress against the unnecessary cost involved and advised women ‘to use common sense’ suggesting that ‘a plain black dress is by no means inordinately costly.’ Not everyone approved of mourning dress and there were those who either criticised it for the embarrassing pressure it placed on women or those who felt it was both wasteful and indulgent sentimentality. One reformer was Katherine Hume-Rothery who, in her 1876 publication Anti-Mourning, made a scathing attack on those who perpetuated and promoted elaborate mourning rituals. She argued that this ‘miserable custom’ was a burden imposed on the less wealthy classes who, ‘are, in the senseless slavery imposed by fashion [and] driven, to spend their last farthing, or worse, to incur debt they cannot pay … in this foolish mockery of supposed respect to the dead.’

Class distinctions prevailed through funeral attire but industrialisation made possible the production of cheaper dresses which found a market among people of limited income. In addition, magazines provided dressmakers with a template for copying expensive fashions at a lower cost. This was emphasised by Mrs Humphry in Manners for Women:

The making of mourning dresses is now conducted at such speed, as compared with the deliberate and leisurely mode of procedure of long ago … At first sight fashion would seem to have as little to do with mourning as it has with grief, but as those who wear the garb of woe are not invariably mourners in the strict sense of the term, fashion influences this form of dress very appreciably.

The proliferation of magazines and papers in the nineteenth century brought with it an increase in advertising and there was fierce competition between companies that offered services in relation to mourning. George Shillibeer (1797–1866) ran London’s first omnibus service which commenced on 4 July 1829 and shuttled between Marylebone and the Bank of England. Shillibeer was something of a maverick and he decided that meeting the needs of the bereaved made more business sense than running buses. In 1851 he advertised in the Daily News that he could save customers ‘one half’ if they used his company instead of any other undertaker. Large shops such as Jay’s of Regent Street opened as the London General Mourning Warehouse in 1841. Within a decade other shops along Regent Street were quick to follow. Pugh’s Mourning Warehouse (1849), Peter Robinson’s Court and General Mourning Warehouse (1853) and Nicholson’s Argyle General Mourning and Mantle Warehouse (1853) were all advertising and advising customers on what apparel to wear. Catalogues displayed illustrations of dinner dresses and mourning dresses for bereavement occasions. By 1862 Jay’s advertised ‘A complete Suit of Domestic Mourning for 2½ guineas’. Peter Robinson’s of Regent Street advertised in the Illustrated London News in January 1873: ‘Mourning for Families in Correct Taste.’ Robinson’s promoted ‘Skirts, in new Mourning Fabrics, trimmed crepe’ from thirty-five shillings to five guineas. Jay’s could boast the royal crests of arms above their window display as well as making the claim in advertisements in the Queen in 1890 that, ‘Messrs Jay are constantly receiving new millinery from the first houses in Paris, and the most approved forms are at once copied to suit every degree of Mourning.’

Manuals such as Cassells Household Guide (1880) offered advice and guidance on how to proceed after bereavement from registering the death, the costs of the funeral and the expense of burial in the various metropolitan cemeteries. It also added in volume 3:

The blinds of the windows of the house should be drawn down directly the death occurs, and they should remain down until after the funeral has left the house, when they are at once to be pulled up. As a rule, the females of the family do not pay any visits until after the funeral. Neither would it be considered in good taste for any friends or acquaintances to visit at the house during that time, unless they were relatives of the family.

With some alertness to the sensitivities of class it also stated:

It sometimes happens among the poorer classes that the female relatives attend the funeral; but this custom is by no means to be recommended, since in these cases it but too frequently happens that, being unable to restrain their emotions, they interrupt and destroy the solemnity of the ceremony with their sobs, and even by fainting.

In a similar condescending tone the Lady’s Magazine, commenting on the widespread mourning which accompanied the death of Princess Charlotte in November 1817, stated that ‘Considerable distress has always been occasioned by a general mourning’, especially to ‘the labouring class of manufacturers’. Giving more practical guidance, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) advised on the best approach to condolence visiting:

Courtesy would dictate that a mourning card should be used, and that visitors, in paying condoling visits, should be dressed in black, either silk or plain-coloured apparel. Sympathy with the affliction of the family, is thus expressed, and these attentions are, in such cases, pleasing and soothing.

The culture of mourning was changing by the late Victorian period. Acknowledging concessions to fashion as well as a decline in the display of mourning, Mrs Humphry wrote:

Of late years the periods for wearing [mourning dress] have been very much abbreviated, and many other changes have taken place in what may be called … the etiquette of mourning … We have all been wearing black crepe for so long that things have become rather mixed … Even widows do not wear their weeds nearly so long as was usual and they are seen in places of amusement … while still wearing deep mourning – a thing that would not have been tolerated by society ten years ago. The whole matter is undergoing a revolution.

Although some widows continued the practice of wearing mourning dress in the twentieth century, the ‘revolution’ Mrs Humphry wrote about was unstoppable and the Victorian rituals of mourning began to be observed less and less.

2

Resurrectionists and Bodysnatchers

If one crime above all others can be guaranteed to evoke an immediate shudder and sense of revulsion, it is probably the illicit seizing of unburied corpses and especially the exhumation of corpses for sale to teachers of anatomy and surgery. It intrudes on some of our most primeval and deeply-felt fears and taboos. It is a crime that we associate with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and late-Georgian society. By no means unique to the capital, it is, however, a crime that was associated with London!

Even in the present largely secular age, dinned into us and firmly rooted is the belief that the remains of the dead should be treated with respect. From earliest times, however, there has been a tension between this reverence and the needs and interests of wider society. Man’s innate sense of curiosity and desire to push back the boundaries of what is known, has led him to try to find out how the body works or what happens when it malfunctions. As far as doctors, surgeons and scientists are concerned, it has provoked a desire to understand bodily functions and be able to treat disease and malfunctions more effectively. The research needed to bring about developments which might benefit mankind as a whole has frequently conflicted with the powerful forces of established religion. Here we trace how and why the issue came to a head in England and how it manifested itself in London, particularly in the period from 1750 to 1830.

The robbing of graves was not a new activity. For example, thieves had eagerly plundered the untold riches to be found in the burial chambers of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs. Corpses have always attracted that minority of the population given to the black arts and to necrophilia. In England exhumation was occasionally used as a form of aggravated punishment. John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) was regarded as a heretic by the hierarchy of the Church and many years after his death his remains were taken out and burnt. King Richard III’s body was hastily buried in the abbey of the Greyfriars at Leicester after his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. At the Dissolution the building was ransacked and his body removed and supposedly thrown into the nearby River Soar. Richard III is the only English monarch to have no known grave. Two years after Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector died, his remains were removed from their resting place in Westminster Abbey. In 1661, during the reaction against the execution of Charles I, Cromwell and two other regicides were posthumously found guilty of treason. They were exhumed and their remains were dragged on hurdles to Tyburn where they were ritually hanged. After several hours their heads were hacked off and taken away while the bodies were supposedly dumped in a pit next to the gallows. The heads were displayed at Westminster Hall.

In the Middle Ages, knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was minimal. In 1300 the Church had outlawed the dissection of human bodies for the purposes of research or demonstration on the grounds that they were images of God and that a body that was incomplete would not be able to be reunited with its soul at the Last Judgement. Dire penalties faced those who dared to defy the ecclesiastical authorities. The Church taught that nothing could justify the dissection of humans, even if they were criminals who had committed heinous crimes.

For hundreds of years, men training to be physicians had to make do with the teachings of Galen (AD c.130–201), the great Greek anatomist. His observations, although unquestionably acute and profound, were based on the dissection of a wide range of mammals and what we now know as the incorrect assumption that the information derived from such sources was also applicable to human anatomy. While Galen’s teachings were acceptable to the Church, their continuance stood in the way of human progress.

A restless soul who could not reconcile what he knew empirically with what was being taught, was the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). His enormously-detailed, finely-illustrated and seminal work published in 1543, generally known as De Humani Corporis Fabrica, outraged the religious establishment, not least because it was clearly the product of its author’s extensive and systematic dissection of human bodies. Perhaps he started the whole thing because the first body that he systematically dissected was stolen to order. It was the remains of a felon dangling from a gibbet!