In Agas’ Map of London, “Civitas Londinum,” _circa_ 1560 (see end of _London in the Time of the Tudors_), there is represented, lying on the west of Aldersgate Street, an irregular square or place called Charter House Square: it has a small church in the middle, and on the north side are monastic buildings; on the north of these are gardens and orchards; one of them with a small building which may be meant for a church enclosed with a wall. Some of these monastic buildings, with later additions and alterations, still remain to the present day; the square remains, but the orchards and gardens are built over, with the exception of the ground once enclosed by the cloister, which is now the play-ground of the Merchant Taylors’ School. Before the middle of the fourteenth century this place formed part of “No Man’s Land,” a swampy plain, covered, like Smithfield and Moorfield, with ponds and reeds and rushes. In the year 1349 the Black Death arrived; and as the City churchyards were becoming so full that they could hold no more, the Bishop of London bought a piece of this ground which he enclosed for a burial-place, building a chapel, “which is now,” says Stow, “enlarged and made a dwelling-house,” and the place was called Pardon Churchyard. It was afterwards used as a burial-place for suicides and criminals and persons who died a violent death. The body was put into a cart, hung with black cloth, belonging to St. John’s Hospital; on the black cloth was the white cross of St. John; within the cart hung a bell which rang with the jolting and the shaking of the hearse—a doleful sound and a doleful sight. In 1350 or 1351, the plague still continuing, Sir Walter Manny bought thirteen acres of ground, adjacent to the Pardon Churchyard, and gave this to the City as a new burial-ground; the chapel stood somewhere in Charter House Square, perhaps about the middle of it. There used to be a stone cross in this burial-ground with the following inscription:— “Anno Domini 1349, regnante magnâ pestilentiâ, consecratum fuit hoc cœmiterium in quo et infra septa presentis monasterii sepulta fuerunt mortuorum corpora plus quam quinquaginta millia præter alia multa abhinc usque ad presens: quorum animabus propitietur Deus, Amen.” In the Charter House Precinct, to this day, whenever the ground is opened bones are found.