THE GRAVEYARDS OF PRIORIES AND CONVENTS.
“Gone are all the barons bold,
Gone are all the knights and squires,
Gone the Abbot stern and cold,
And the brotherhood of friars;
Not a name
Remains to fame,
From those mouldering days of old!”
LONGFELLOW.
FITZSTEPHEN’S statement that “there are in London and the suburbs 13
churches belonging to convents, besides 126 lesser parish churches,” is
not a very satisfactory one, as he does not proceed to name these
several churches, or to tell his readers with what establishments they
were connected. However, he was probably under the mark in putting the
first figure at thirteen, for even in his time, and certainly very
little later, there were many more than thirteen monastic and conventual
buildings in London, and each had its church or chapel. The chief
amongst these establishments which existed in London in the twelfth
century, and which were made between that time and the dissolution of
the priories in the days of Henry VIII., were:—
_Inside the City Walls._
1. The Greyfriars or Franciscans, succeeded by Christ’s Hospital.
2. The Blackfriars or Dominicans in the west.
3. The Crossed or Crutched Friars, by Fenchurch Street.
4. The Augustine Friars, by Broad Street.
5. St. Helen’s Priory of Nuns, Bishopsgate Street.
6. The Priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate.
7. The Priory and Sanctuary of St. Martin’s le Grand.
8. Elsing Spital, London Wall.
9. The Priory of St. Augustine Papey.
10. St. James’s Priory, the Hermitage in the Wall, Monkswell Street.
11. The Priory of St. Thomas Acon, Ironmonger Lane.
12. The Fraternities who had the care of St. Paul’s Cathedral, including
the brotherhood of All Souls, specially connected with the Charnel
Chapel.
_Outside the City Walls._
13. The Whitefriars or Carmelites, south of Fleet Street.
14. The Abbey and the Convent of Westminster.
15. A Brotherhood of St. Ursula at St. Mary le Strand.
16. A Brotherhood of the Trinity, without Aldersgate.
17. The Knights Templars, in the Strand.
18. The Priory of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, at
Clerkenwell.
19. The Black Nuns of St. Mary’s, Clerkenwell.
20. The Benedictine Priory of St. Bartholomew, with St. Bartholomew’s
Spital, West Smithfield.
21. The Carthusian Priory of the Salutation, subsequently the
Charterhouse.
22. St. Mary Spital, without Bishopsgate.
23. The Nunnery of the Minoresses of St. Clare, the Minories.
24. The Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary of Grace, beyond the Tower.
25. St. Katharine’s Hospital, by the Tower.
26. The Convent of St. Leonard, at Bromley-by-Bow.
27. The Priory of St. Mary Overie, Southwark, with a “House of Sisters.”
28. Bermondsey Abbey.
29. The Nunnery of St. John the Baptist, Holywell.
30. The Convent of St. Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross.
A very complete list of the ecclesiastical institutions will be found in
Brewer’s “Beauties of London and Middlesex,” vol. ii. p. 39.
Some of these brotherhoods were but small, and were mendicants; and they
may not have had special burial-places of their own. In other cases
burials may have only taken place in the priory churches, which were
always much sought after for the purpose by outsiders, or in the
cloisters. But most of the conventual establishments had a cemetery of
considerable size—“the cloister garth,” and peeps are given us now and
then, by old writers, of the practices at the burial of the monks and
nuns.
In the Church of the Crutched friars were two Dutch Fraternities, one of
which was named in honour of the “Holy Blode of Wilsuak,” and among
their rules and orders is the following:—
“Also when any Brother or Suster of the same Bretherhede is dede, he or
she shall have 4 Torchys of Wex of the Bretherhede, to bring the Body in
Erthe: And every Brother and Suster shall come to his Masse of Requiem,
and offer 1d and abide still to the Tyme the Body be buryed, uppon Pain
of a l. Wex, yf he or she be within the Cite.”
[Illustration: BURIAL OF A MONK.
(_From a Harleian Manuscript_).]
Burials did not always take place in the evening, as might be imagined
from the mention of torches and tapers, but often after mass, before
dinner, and always with as little delay as possible. The written
absolution was placed on the body of the monk or nun, and buried with
it. Very solemn they seem to have been, these monastic funerals,
especially when the body to be buried was that of an abbot, a prior, or
a canon, with the procession of monks, the lighted tapers, the
sprinkling of holy water, the chanting of psalms, the singing of the
requiem mass, and the ringing of the bell. Strype gives a detailed
account of the finding of four heads in pots or cases of “fine pewter,”
in a cupboard in the wall of the demolished building which belonged to
the Black friars, when the rubbish was cleared away after the Great Fire
of London. They were embalmed or preserved, and had tonsured hair. He
imagined that they were the heads of “some zealous priests or friars,
executed for treason ... or for denying the King’s Supremacy; and here
privately deposited by these Black Friars.” It is probable that these
heads were afterwards bought and taken to the Continent to be exhibited
as holy relics. The City must have been a strange place in the
thirteenth century, with the numerous churches and the very large
priories and convents hedged in by narrow streets of wooden houses,
where, even in those early days, men were busy, in their own several
manners, in getting money. Neither the monks, nor the nuns, nor the
mendicant friars were always exemplary in their behaviour, but at any
rate the charitable works done at that time—the care of the sick, the
prayers for the evil, the prayers for the souls of the dead, the
building of the churches and the hospitals—were carried out by them, and
we cannot imagine how we could have got on in our matter-of-fact
generation without their efforts and their work. It is also pleasant to
look back occasionally and to try and picture the life led in the more
secluded priories outside the City, surrounded by fields and close to
the Holy Wells, where there was time for prayer and meditation and good
deeds.
“Yes, they can make, who fail to find,
Short leizure even in busiest days;
Moments, to cast a look behind,
And profit by those kindly rays
That through the clouds do sometimes steal,
And all the far-off past reveal.”
Of the cloister garths there is very little which remains intact. The
burial-ground of the Greyfriars is now the quadrangle of Christ’s
Hospital, but few traces of the old cloisters are left there. Of the
grounds attached to Westminster Abbey I shall speak in the next chapter.
That of St. Bartholomew’s Priory, West Smithfield, was built upon many
years ago. The site of the priory cemetery and that of the canons are
marked on the accompanying plan, but
“Time has long effaced the inscriptions
On the cloister’s funeral stones,”
and nothing is left to us except glimpses of the customs which used to
take place there. The history of the establishment, founded by Rahere
about 1113, is comparatively well known, owing to the recent efforts
that have been made to restore what is left of the noble Norman Church.
But there is not much remaining of what was once an extensive group of
buildings except the choir of the original church, with its restored
lady-chapel, crypt, and transepts. The nave has gone, and its site is
marked by the churchyard, the bases of the pillars being buried among
the bones. Leading out of the south transept is the “green-ground,”
another small churchyard, and a paved yard on the north side of the
church was once the pauper ground.
According to a writer in the _Observator_ of August 21, 1703, the
cloisters of the priory and the space which still existed there became
the resort of very low characters, “lords and ladies, aldermen and their
wives, squires and fiddlers, citizens and rope-dancers, jackpuddings and
lawyers, mistresses and maids, masters and ’prentices” meeting there for
lotteries, plays, farces, and “all the temptations to destruction.” Stow
describes far more respectable gatherings in “the churchyard of St.
Bartholomew,” when the scholars from St. Paul’s, Westminster, and other
grammar schools used to meet for learned disputations, for proficiency
in which garlands and prizes were awarded; but these meetings finally
degenerated into free fights in the streets, and had to be discontinued.
[Illustration: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew The Great.]
Some of the priory burial-grounds have survived in the parish
churchyards, or at any rate parts of them have. The churchyard of St.
Catherine Cree, in Leadenhall Street, is the successor of the
burial-ground of Holy Trinity Priory, the church itself having been
built in this cemetery. It was originally called Christ Church, which
got corrupted to Cree Church, and so on. The churchyard is associated
with the performance of miracle plays, moralities, or mysteries, and it
was probably in this place that some of the latest of these shows were
held. They are frequently mentioned by different chroniclers from the
tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Such events as the Massacre of the
Innocents, the Shepherds feeding their flocks on Christmas Eve, and the
scenes in the history of St. Catherine, &c., were usually portrayed
inside the churches; but Bishop Bonner put a stop to this practice in
1542, after which time stages were erected by strolling players in
streets, by the wells, and in private houses. In London the churchyards
seem to have been frequently used for the purpose, and in an old parish
book belonging to St. Catherine’s was the following entry, quoted in
“Londinium Redivivum”:—“Receyved of Hugh Grymes, for lycens geven to
certen players to playe their enterludes in the churche-yarde from the
feast of Easter, An. D’ni. 1560, untyll the feaste of Seynt Mychaell
Tharchangell next comynge, every holydaye, to the use of the parysshe,
the some of 27s and 8d.” The miracle plays were a prelude to a more
advanced form of dramatic representation, and after the establishment of
the theatres we hear no more of them. The modern “flower service”
originated, I believe, in the church of St. Catherine Cree, having been
instituted by Dr. Whittemore.
[Illustration:
S. EAST S. WEST
VIEW OF THE CRYPT ON THE SITE OF THE LATE COLLEGE OF
St. MARTIN LE GRAND.
_Discovered in clearing for the New Post Office_
THE CRYPT OF ST. MARTIN LE GRAND IN 1818.]
Recent discoveries have shown that the priory cloister of the Augustine
Friars was immediately to the north-east of the Dutch Church in Austin
Friars. St. James’s Priory, the Hermitage in the Wall, had a graveyard
under the wall, on the other side of which was, and is, the churchyard
of St. Giles’, Cripplegate. Huge warehouses and offices now cover its
site. The burial-ground of the Priory of St. Thomas Acon, in Ironmonger
Lane, where pilgrims were buried who died on their visits to the chapel
in honour of Becket, has also disappeared; but that of the priory of St.
Augustine Papey survives in the little churchyard of St. Martin Outwich,
in Camomile Street, which was presented to the parish by Robert Hyde in
1538, while the nuns of St. Helen’s were probably buried in what is now
St. Helen’s Churchyard, Bishopsgate Street, which used to be, according
to Stow, much larger.
No trace is left of the burial-places of the monks of Elsing Spital, the
Crutched Friars, the White Friars, or the Black Friars, or of that of
the splendid priory and sanctuary of St. Martin le Grand; they have gone
with the buildings, of which only slight traces remain here and there,
such as the porch of St. Alphege, London Wall, which belonged to Elsing
Spital Priory. Probably they all had burying-grounds within their
precincts. The crypt of St. Martin’s was opened out in 1818, and a very
perfect stone coffin found in it, when the present Post Office Buildings
in Foster Lane were erected. The churches themselves were always much
resorted to as places of interment by those who were not connected with
the priories, especially the four magnificent churches, all of which are
now gone, of the Greyfriars, the Whitefriars, the Blackfriars, and the
Augustine Friars. The Dutch church is the successor to the nave of the
last named. The site of the Greyfriars’ church is occupied by the
present church and churchyard of Christ Church, Newgate Street. Here
were buried Margaret, second wife of Edward I., Isabella, Widow of
Edward II., Joan Makepeace, wife of David Bruce, King of Scotland, and
Isabella, wife of Lord Fitzwalter, the Queen of Man, besides the hearts
of Edward II. and Queen Eleanor, the wife of Henry III., and, according
to Weever, the bodies of “four duchesses, four countesses, one duke,
twenty-eight barons, and some thirty-five knights,” in all “six hundred
and sixty-three persons of quality.” Malcolm states that ten tombs and
140 gravestones (the fine monuments at the east end of the church) were
destroyed and sold, in 1545, by Sir Martin Bowes, Lord Mayor, for fifty
pounds.
I have given a list of the principal convents and priories outside the
city. The site of St. Katharine’s is buried in the Dock, and that of St.
John the Baptist’s, Holywell (by Curtain Road, Shoreditch), has also
gone. The churchyards of St. Mary, Bromley, and St. Saviour, Southwark,
are the survivals of the conventual burying-places; the cemetery of the
nuns at Bromley was on the south side of the church, and upon its site
Sir John Jacob built the Manor House, the bones being put under the
house. But about two hundred years later (1813) the greater part of this
site was again added to the churchyard, and re-consecrated. The
burial-ground of Westminster Convent, with the Abbot’s garden, have
given place to the district and market of Covent Garden. The houses in
White Lion Street and Spital Square are on the site of the cemetery or
garth of St. Mary Spital. Here, after it ceased to be used for
interments and before it was built upon, Spital Square was an open plot
of ground with a pulpit in it and a house for the accommodation of the
Lord Mayor and Corporation when they came on their annual visit to hear
the “Spital Sermon.” Of the priory church of the Knights Hospitallers of
St. John of Jerusalem, in Clerkenwell, very few traces remain. The
beautiful old crypt, lately cleared of coffins and restored, is older
than the priory church (which was built over it), and dates from 1080 or
1090. The truly magnificent church was consecrated in 1185, the present
structure occupying merely the site of the choir, the nave having
probably extended the length of St. John’s Square, and, together with
the other buildings of the priory, it was pulled down at the
Dissolution. The exact site of the cloisters and burial-ground is
unknown. The present churchyard of St. John’s is a small, narrow one at
the eastern end, from which steps lead down into the ancient crypt.
Here, between the years 1738 and 1853, about 325 bodies were buried, or
rather the coffins were stacked, for they were above the floor. In 1893
a faculty was procured for their removal, and all the remains were
reverently conveyed to Woking, a vellum document recording the fact
being placed in the vestry of the church. The crypt is open to the
public on the first Saturday in each month. Its complete restoration is
still in hand. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. H. W. Fincham for
the picture of St. John’s Crypt, and also for that of the garden in
Benjamin Street, E.C.
The Nuns’ burial-ground at Clerkenwell, and part of the beautiful
cloister, existed until about one hundred years ago in the garden of the
Duke of Newcastle’s house, and its site is now occupied by the houses on
the west side of St. James’s Walk, a little north-east of St. James’s
Church. The Convent of St. Mary Rounceval was superseded by
Northumberland House, subsequently pulled down when Northumberland
Avenue was made; and the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Minories (now
merely a part of the road) _may_ be a relic of the Nunnery of the
Minoresses of St. Clare. The Priory Church of St. Mary Overie (over the
ferry) was purchased from the king by the parish in 1539, and has since
been the parish Church of St. Saviour, Southwark, henceforth to be the
Cathedral of South London.
[Illustration: CRYPT OF ST. JOHN’S, CLERKENWELL.]
In the Crace Collection at the British Museum there is a plan, made by
William Newton, purporting to show London in Elizabeth’s time, in
picture form. He marks the priories with their burial-grounds, but I
doubt if it is very trustworthy. In Van den Wyngaerde’s beautiful view
(1550), reproduced by the Topographical Society in 1881, and the
original of which is in the Bodleian Library, several of the conventual
churches appear, not the least interesting being that of “S. Maria
Spital.”
The Cistercian abbey of St. Mary of Grace and the Carthusian priory of
the Salutation were built on plague burial-grounds. (See Chapter VI.)
The former has disappeared under the site of the Royal Mint, the latter
survives in the Charterhouse. Probably they were very insanitary, but
such, according to Dean Farrar, was the case with all the conventual
establishments, and much accommodation was provided for sick monks.
Lastly we come to Bermondsey Abbey, the ancient and once famous
settlement of Cluniac monks in the ea or eye (island) of a Saxon named
Bearmund. Almost all traces of the abbey buildings have disappeared,
though a good deal existed at the commencement of this century. There
are some fragments of old windows and doorways among the shabby houses
south of Grange Walk, and some pieces of the wall in the churchyard of
St. Mary Magdalene. A considerable portion of the Abbey burial-ground
was added to this churchyard in 1810. Amongst the benefactors of this
establishment were William Rufus, Henry I., and King Stephen, and many
eminent people were buried in the priory church, while much of great
historic interest is connected with the history of Bermondsey Abbey.
* * * * *
The modern representatives of the ancient monasteries and nunneries lack
the antiquarian flavour which is so attractive to us, and yet there is a
certain interest attaching to them. But I have only to deal with their
burial-grounds, and therefore need mention very few.
[Illustration: THE REMAINS OF BERMONDSEY ABBEY ABOUT 1800.]
The third volume of Knight’s “London” commences with the following
words:—“It is a curious circumstance, and one in which the history of
many changes of opinion may be read, that within forty years after what
remained of the magnificent ecclesiastical foundation of the Abbey of
Bermondsey had been swept away, a new conventual establishment has risen
up, amidst the surrounding desecration of factories and warehouses, in a
large and picturesque pile, with its stately church, fitted in every way
for the residence and accommodation of thirty or forty inmates—the
convent of the Sisters of Mercy.” The writer of the article refers to
the convent by the Roman Catholic Chapel in Parker’s Row, built in 1838.
The chapel, with a small graveyard given in 1833 or 1834, existed
previously. The garden of the convent was used for burials until August,
1853, but there appear to be no gravestones in it, and it is a
neatly-kept ground between two schools, whereas the graveyard on the
east side of the church is untidy. Another disused burial-ground is
behind the Roman Catholic Chapel in Commercial Road. Here the tombstones
are laid flat, and the ground forms a garden of considerable size for
the use of the priests.
On the north side of King Street, Hammersmith, just east of the Broadway
Station, is the large red building known as the Convent of the Sacred
Heart, a seminary and establishment erected by the late Cardinal Manning
on the site of a Benedictine convent which was founded, according to
some authorities, before the Reformation, and according to others during
the reign of Charles II., and which included the Sisterhood of the
English Benedictine Dames and a famous school, where many ladies of
distinction received their early education. Brewer, in his “Beauties of
London and Middlesex” (1816), thus describes the burial-ground of this
convent: “The gravestones are laid flat on the turf, and the sisters are
placed, as usual, with their feet to the east; the priests alone having
the head towards the altar. There are several inscriptions on the
stones, of which we insert the following specimen:—Here lies the body of
The Right Reverend Lady Mary Anne Clavering, late Abbess of the English
Benedictine Dames of Pontoise, Who died the 8th day of November, 1795,
in the 65th year of her age.” Cardinal Manning disposed of this little
cemetery, which was by the lane on the east side, when erecting the
present buildings. “It was dug up and done away with,” according to the
statement of one of the sisters at present in the convent.
But two similar burial-grounds are still to be found in this immediate
neighbourhood, one is disused and the other is in use. The former is
behind the Convent of the Good Shepherd in Fulham Palace Road, only
about 14 by 12 yards in size, and closed a few years ago. The latter is
at the extreme end of the garden of Nazareth Home in Hammersmith Road,
under the wall of Great Church Lane. It is even smaller than the one in
Fulham Palace Road, and has been in use for upwards of forty years, but
as only the sisters are interred here it would appear to be still
available for about another twenty years. The graves are in neat rows, a
small cross is on each, with the name (or the adopted name) of the
sister whose body lies beneath. It forms a little enclosure in the large
space and garden behind the buildings of the Home, where many children
are taught and many old people live. Another enclosure contains their
poultry, and another a cow. The whole establishment is very interesting,
and not the least interesting part of it is this little cemetery, of the
existence of which, in all probability, very few of the inhabitants of
the surrounding streets have any knowledge.
I have visited one other convent burial-ground, and in each case it is
necessary to go through the ceremony of being peeped at through a
grating, and, when admitted, passed along passages and through rooms
while the doors are locked behind, and only granted permission to see
what I want after some time of waiting and a large amount of
explanation. I have been since told that I was singularly favoured by
being admitted into the Franciscan Convent in Portobello Road, where the
Mother Superior herself most kindly took me to see the little cemetery,
explaining that it was “sanctioned by the Home Secretary,”—of which I
was well aware. It is a charming little corner of a very pretty garden,
a triangular grass plot edged with trees, not above a quarter of an acre
in extent. It was formed in 1862 and first used in 1870, only five
burials taking place in twenty-three years. It is, of course, merely for
the interment of the nuns who, having given up the world and shut
themselves into the convent, find their last resting-place within its
precincts.
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