After this, and also before the suppression of the friary cart, bodies were brought back by friends for interment in the parish churchyard. Here is a case in which a body so brought back was refused burial:— One Awfield had been condemned and executed at Tyburn for “sparcing abrood certen lewed, sedicious, and traytorous bookes. His body was brought into St. Pulchers to be buryed, but the parishioners would not suffer a Traytor’s corpes to be layed in the earthe where theire parents, wyeffs, chyldren, kynred, maisters, and old neighbors did rest: and so his carcase was retourned to the buryall grounde neere Tyborne, and there I leave yt.”[76] But many of the poor wretches hanged had no friends who would be at the charge of interment. The demands of the surgeons would be soon satisfied; with how little ceremony the residue would be treated we may learn from the narrative of Richardson, given in the Annals (1741). We read of two priests and sixteen felons executed at the same time, in 1610, being all thrown together into a pit. The stories of bones found in the neighbourhood of the gallows may probably be referred to forgotten burial places or to pits into which, after a busy day’s work, a score of bodies would be tumbled.[77] Strype, in his edition of Stow’s “Survey,” has a weird story of the finding of four embalmed heads in Blackfriars, in clearing away rubbish after the Great Fire of 1666:— “They came to an old Wall in a Cellar, of great thickness, where appeared a kind of Cupboard. Which being opened, there were found in it four Pots or Cases of fine Pewter, thick, with Covers of the same, and Rings fastened on the top to take up or put down at pleasure. The Cases were flat before, and rounding behind. And in each of them were reposited four humane Heads [he means one in each case; the margin has “Four Heads”], unconsumed, reserved as it seems, by Art; with their Teeth and Hair, the Flesh of a tawny Colour, wrap’d up in black Silk, almost consumed. And a certain Substance, of a blackish Colour, crumbled into Dust, lying at the bottom of the Pots.