The London Burial Grounds: Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present DayHolmes, Isabella M.
History
The London Burial Grounds: Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Holmes, Isabella M.
Cemeteries -- England -- London -- History
The Bethlem burial-ground had a more interesting history. In 1569 Sir
Thomas Roe, or Rowe, Merchant Taylor and Mayor, gave about one acre of
land in the Moorfields “for Burial Ease to such parishes in London as
wanted convenient ground.” It was especially intended for the parish of
St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, and was probably used for the interment of
lunatics from the neighbouring asylum, besides being used by St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital. It was enclosed with a brick wall at the
persuasion of “the Lady his Wife,” and she was buried there; and it was
the custom upon Whit Sunday for the Lord Mayor and Aldermen to listen to
a sermon delivered in this “new churchyard, near Bethlem.” We read that
in 1584 “a very good Sermon was preached ... and, by Reason no Plays
were the Same Day (_i.e._, Whit Sunday, as there used to be), all the
City was quiet.” But the Churchyard and the Asylum have disappeared,
Liverpool Street Station having taken their place, and hundreds of the
Great Eastern Railway goods vans daily roll over the mouldering remains
of the departed citizens.
[Illustration: CHELSEA HOSPITAL GRAVEYARD.]
Very different to the fate of these hospital burial-grounds is that of
another one I will mention. Facing Queen’s Road, Chelsea, is the long,
narrow graveyard of the Chelsea Hospital. It is neatly kept, with good
grass and trees. Here many a venerable pensioner has been laid to rest,
and, although it can no longer be used for burials, it still serves to
remind the living of their brethren who have gone before them. There are
some fine monuments and epitaphs to very long-lived invalids, two aged
112, one 111, one 107, and so on, and it is one of those quiet and
quaint corners of London which form so marked a contrast to the noisy
streets close by. One pensioner, who died in 1732, named William Hiseman
and aged 112, was “a veteran, if ever soldier was.” It is recorded that
he took unto himself a wife when he was above 100 years old. There is
something very peaceful about these old men’s graves; the grain gathered
in by the “Reaper whose name is Death” was fully ripe:—
“It is not quiet, is not ease,
But something deeper far than these;
The separation that is here
Is of the grave; and of austere
Yet happy feelings of the dead.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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