The closing of the burial-grounds included the closing of the vaults. There is hardly a church in London, and but few chapels, with a graveyard attached, which had not also vaults used for interments under the building, and there are many churches and chapels which had vaults but not graveyards. The earliest burials took place in the churchyards, the south side being always the favourite. It seems originally to have been customary to bury only stillborn infants, felons and suicides on the north side of the building. It became a fashion of later times to bury in or under the church, and the first place used was the porch. But when once the custom was established the inside of the church became the privileged place, and the most honoured dead were laid nearest the altar. The ancient crypts, such as those at St. Bartholomew’s and Clerkenwell, were not, I imagine, originally intended for burying in, although coffins were put in them later on. But the vaults, such as those under the City churches and the parish churches outside the City, were expressly made for the purpose, a few having been used for beer or wine instead of bodies. Many vaults were private, such as “Lady Jersey’s Vault” and “Holden’s Vault,” both in St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and in this same church there is a “Doctor’s vault.” St. Clement Danes and other churches have a “Rector’s vault,” and St. Saviour’s, Southwark, can boast of a “Bishop’s vault.” The bodies from under some of the City churches which have been pulled down were moved to others; the coffins from St. Michael, Crooked Lane, were divided between St. Edmund King and Martyr and St. Mary Woolnoth, and those that went to the latter place have had a second removal, the vaults having to be cleared out a few years ago. In many places there were vaults under the vestries, the adjoining schools, almshouses, the sextons’ houses, &c., and at Lambeth, among the places of interment closed by order in Council, was a “vault under the station-house.” A list of the London churches and chapels which were provided with burial-vaults, but not with graveyards, will be found in Appendix C. It is not unlikely that many of these will have, in time, to be cleared out. In some cases the coffins or remains have already been collected and reinterred in cemeteries, the one at Woking having been especially favoured. They are very liable to become a nuisance, and are far more dangerous to the living than the human remains under the plots of ground open to the air. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII GRAVEYARDS AS PUBLIC GARDENS.