Necropolis: London & it's Dead Read Free Page B

Sutton Hoo, the ultimate in grave goods, was buried, a fittingly glorious end to what must have been a glorious life.
    The advent of Christianity brought such magnificent examples of paganism to a close. The Church imposed its own pattern on burial, but there was still plenty of opportunity for extravagant funerals and elaborate monuments. There would also be a new challenge to Londoners on how they coped with their dead en masse , in the form of the Black Death.

3: MEMENTO MORI
    The Theatre of Death
    When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
    The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. 1
    Life for the Elizabethans was nasty, brutish and short. Londoners lived with the constant prospect of violent death. There were, for instance, the lethal knife-fights, such as the one that killed dramatist Kit Marlowe in the Deptford Tavern; public executions; and, of course, the plague, which continued to menace the city from the outskirts of town, ‘pitching his tent in the polluted suburbs, like a Spanish leaguer, or stalking Tamberlaine’, according to the excitable polemicist, Thomas Dekker.
    Long before the epidemic of 1665, London endured a series of outbreaks of the plague, the worst of which occurred in the year of the Queen’s death, 1603. In his ironically entitled The Wonderful Year , 2 Dekker portrayed London as one vast burial ground, gaping with a hundred hungry graves. So many coffins harassed the churches that there was no room left for weddings, and every individual faced a grisly end, and ‘must one day be thrown, like stinking carrion, into a rank and common grave’.
    Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann’s, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones. 3 There is an echo of this in Hamlet , as the tragic hero commands Yorick’s skull: ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’ 4
    Hamlet ’s gravediggers are hearty artisans, who regard themselves akin to Adam, the first man and the original gardener, and see no shame in their occupation. They are not unsympathetic creations. Public opinion, however, had already revealed a degree of antipathy to those who made a living from death. Dekker referred to ‘merry sextons, hungry coffin-sellers, and nasty grave-makers, employed, like moles, in casting up of earth and digging of trenches’. Bosola, about to murder the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s tragedy of the same name, describes himself as a tomb-maker, and in Act 4, Scene 2, asks: ‘Do we grow fantastical in our death bed? Do we affect fashion in the grave?’ Bosola, who enters another scene with a human leg over one shoulder, is a grotesque creation, a necrophiliac monster, but a monster familiar to the audiences of his time.
    The sixteenth century was still a period when the living shared their space with the dead; churchyards continued to be employed for a variety of activities. St Paul’s Churchyard, which extended further to the north than it does today, was a worldly place, put to a number of uses that would today be condemned as inappropriate. The historian William Maitland noted that in 1569, ‘A Lottery was set on Foot in St Paul’s Churchyard, where it was begun to be drawn at the West Door of the Church on the 11th of January, and continued incessantly drawing, Day and Night, till the 6th of May following.’ 5
    The Cathedral became a judgment-hall for foreign heretics who were condemned to be burned at Smithfield. One tract describes the south aisle in the late sixteenth century as being a centre of ‘usury and popery and the north side for simony’ (buying or selling of ecclesiastical preferment). In addition to all kinds of rendezvous andbrawls, intrigues and conspiracies, there was a horse-fair, and the middle aisle, Paul’s Walk, was a fashionable promenading ground for the rich and eccentric every morning and