• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Plague Pits

Well it's lost a lot of its original charm now, as it was surrounded by abondoned factories, warehouses and a derelict power station now it is surrounded by a rather nice new housing development. It's on a road called the stowage just off creek road. If you are planning on pubs afterwards I would advise you walk the few hundred metres into greenwich where you are far less likely to get glassed. Unfortunately I am out of london at uni at the moment.
 
Charterhouse Square, between the Barbican Centre and Smithfield Market, is the resting place of (supposedly) 30,000 plague victims. On one side is a complex of almshouses founded in 1611 for the relief of 'poor gentlemen'. The site is a former monastery, and during the dissolution some of the hapless monks ended up being nailed to the top of the outside walls! It's a very Fortean locale: Some martyrs were burned alive round the corner near Bart's hospital, William Wallace was executed there, and there's a ghost in Bart's chapel called Rahere, as well as many others in the vicinity. Someone on the 'It Happened to Me' thread claims to have seen a Spring Heeled Jack type character nearby!
 
We seem to have a common feature developing. Almost every open space north of the city boundry - Bunhill Fields, Finsbury Square, Charterhouse Square all seem to be plague pits!
 
Charterhouse Square, between the Barbican Centre and Smithfield Market, is the resting place of (supposedly) 30,000 plague victims. On one side is a complex of almshouses founded in 1611 for the relief of 'poor gentlemen'. The site is a former monastery, and during the dissolution some of the hapless monks ended up being nailed to the top of the outside walls! It's a very Fortean locale: Some martyrs were burned alive round the corner near Bart's hospital, William Wallace was executed there, and there's a ghost in Bart's chapel called Rahere, as well as many others in the vicinity. Someone on the 'It Happened to Me' thread claims to have seen a Spring Heeled Jack type character nearby!
 
Well it would make sense wouldn't it - big heap of dead people, stick them in a hole in the ground outside the city walls... south of the river would have been a pain as there was only London Bridge or a ferry (wouldn't fancy the ferryman would volunteer for that job), so stick 'em on your cart and head north or east.
 
Look - you've got a lot of building to do, labour's scarce and there's a bloody great hole that needs filling in. The locals dustbin bags can only do so much so you start lobbing in the scabby stiffs as hardcore.

Simple, innit?

On Deptford church...

Now I've been returned to my glorious books I can report the following little information...

Christopher "Kit" Marlowe was murdered in a tavern on the Deptford Strand on 30th May 1593. Allegedly due to a drunken brawl, one Inrgam Frezer stabbed him just above the eye. That Frezer was a servant of Sir Thomas Walsingham (an Elisabethan spymaster), that Marlowe was an anti-Catholic spy and starting to get loud about his atheism would result in a very public trial and Frezer was only charged with breach of the peace are all indicators for Elisabethan conspiracy theorists to indulge in the "grassy knoll" of flatlining famous people to stop 'em blabbing.

Within hours, Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas at Deptford Green, just behind Creek Road. And Frezer was charged with only a breech [sic] of the peace.

The human skull and bones sitting on the wall of St.Nicholas's, known to locals as the sailors church, were adopted by pirates as the symbol on their flag, the Skull and Cross Bones.

The Handbook Guide to London Murder! Horror!
Click to expand...

Apart from the codswallop about the gatepost originating the Jolly Roger, this book is quite interesting.

I also know of a neat little walk, starting at Monument and finishing at London Bridge, taking in several church ghost tales and three (count 'em, three!) haunted pubs in about 1.75 hours (not including beer breaks) for those interested. After UnCon, natch!
 
Marlowe

I second the stuff about blackheath being a plague pit I think there were some areas that the men digging for ballast weren't allowed to go near.

I seem to be hijacking the thread a little here but have you read 'the reckoning' its a sort of biography of marlowe; specifically the run up to his death. Very telling sentance "he didn't fall in with the bad people - he was the bad people" Marlowe was an extremely shady and suspicious character, the spying was only the half of it, he was also involved in counterfeiting, sodomy - very illegal at the time, selling secrets to the enemy and possibly murder. The men he was in the room with were the elizebethan equivalent of the Kray twins. All very scary murderous gang leaders. Not a nice man by all accounts and most of the country wanted him dead.
 
As a lad, I was told that the Mount Pond on Clapham Common is the site of a plague pit.
 
Ages ago I was an archaeological digger. We were to dig near a reputed plague pit so, just in case, we were given jabs for bubonic plague. Or that's what we were told anyhow.

Storm "Guineapig" Khan.
 
Isn't it a common old wive's tale that people won't dig up plague pits for fear of catching the ol' buboes? Surely thats one big silly superstition....
 
Isn't it a common old wive's tale that people won't dig up plague pits for fear of catching the ol' buboes? Surely thats one big silly superstition....
Click to expand...

Dunno about plague, but when they were converting the Hawksmoor church on Clerkenwell road a coupla years back, they had to use people over a certain age to remove the bodies. This was in case of any latent smallpox spoors among the well-preserved corpses... apparently school kids in the UK are no longer vaccinated against smallpox. But if you were over the certain age (can't remember it... 35?) you would have been. I think they also took this precaution when moving coffins at Christchurch, Spitalfields (another Hawksmoor church) which features heavily in Alan Moore's 'From Hell'.

Stormkhan! Which are those haunted pubs? I'm about 200 yards from Monument right now!
 
same thing during the work done at kings cross after the fire.

or is this an Urban myth?

They had to delay the work a bit due to the horse hair in the plastering etc containing anthrax/ smallpox etc etc?
 
The vaccinations business is true. I saw a nice Discovery prog once (well, OK, about 6 times!) about a company in London which specialises in moving remains from old cemeteries ready for land re-use, and they employ labourers from eastern Europe because they are both hardworking and suitably vaccinated.

I'm old enough to have had the smallpox jab at school.

Please don't start me on the subject of vaccinations. One of my heroes is Edward Jenner, the 'cowpox doctor', and I find the subject fascinating.

Did you know-
The process of introducing a live but harmless infection into a patient to protect them from a more dangerous one is called 'vaccination' in honour of its first recorded medical use with cowpox, 'vaccus' being Latin for 'cow'.

Told you not to start me off. :)
 
escargot said:
Please don't start me on the subject of vaccinations. One of my heroes is Edward Jenner, the 'cowpox doctor', and I find the subject fascinating.

Did you know-
The process of introducing a live but harmless infection into a patient to protect them from a more dangerous one is called 'vaccination' in honour of its first recorded medical use with cowpox, 'vaccus' being Latin for 'cow'.

Told you not to start me off. :)
Click to expand...
Benjamin Jesty is a distant relation of mine and comes from the village next to the one where I grew up.
here is his house.

Back on subject I was of the understanding that there was a plague pit found under Carnaby Street in the 80's
Some say he had the idea first
 
Dr John Snow was a hero - and the pub named after him is rather jolly good!

Yonks ago, I worked for archaeologists in Kent and, once it was determined we had to excavate near (not in) a plague pit, we were all given innoculation jabs - for Bubonic plague IIRC.

I can't help thinking that - where strange phenomena are encountered - the plague pits of England act as the same raison d'etre as Indian burial grounds in the States or Dreamtime sites in Oz.
 
This topic came up while talking with my Dad in a tapas bar in Blackheath a few days back. Has anybody got a link to any more details on this supposed Plague pit beneath the heath? Dates? Numbers?
 
theyithian said:
This topic came up while talking with my Dad in a tapas bar in Blackheath a few days back. Has anybody got a link to any more details on this supposed Plague pit beneath the heath? Dates? Numbers?
Click to expand...

<<I learned that the dead were buried in places such as 'Black heath', hence the name. Is this true, and where else were the bodies buried?

The idea that Blackheath got its name from its use as a burial pit goes all the way back to the medieval period, when it was almost certainly used for the disposal of the dead during the 'Black Death'. Virtually every part of London has a local tradition about plague pits under, say, the local school or the bakers. Certainly there were pits dug all over the place. The sheer number of bodies meant that the traditional church yards became, as one contemporary put it, 'overstuft' very quickly. >>

Source for the above

Opposing view here:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encycl ... london.htm

Peter Ackroyd's book about London might mention this; I'll see if I can dig it out.
 
I don't blame these reluctant animals at all. I'm reading Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer at the moment - not a very great outlook for our future.
 
But think of all the housing which would be put onto the market again.
 
Back in the mid seventies my Dad was a joiner on a building site in Bristol, I think at Frenchay hospital. During excavations and general construction type digging, a plague pit was discovered and ALL the workers on site that day had to attend hospital for check ups and vaccinations as we apparently still dont know how long the disease can last (although 300 odd years seems ambitious for any lifeform).
 
Labourers working on British cemetery 'relocations' have to have been vaccinated agianst smallpox, which is why a lot of Eastern European workers get those jobs. Brits don't get that jab routinely any more whereas eastern European people do.
 
And next on the menu, we have Bird Flu and MRSA.... :shock:

(See you next week - if I'm spared...)
 
I got the smallpox jab when I was a kid, but there probably aren't a lot of people younger than I am who had it. (My dad had *4* vaccination marks on his arm; I've only got the one. I wonder if they were all for smallpox)
 
I'm sure I'm posting this in the wrong section (please be gentle with me), but many stories about plague pits have a strong, er, whiff of UL to me. It's the way that, depending on who you ask, you'll be told that virtually any open space in Greater London has a plague pit beneath. For example, I've heard this about Trafalgar Square, and pretty much every suburb that has a patch of grass but no Tube station (the story generally goes "they started to dig, but when they found bodies, they had to close it up and re-route the line...").
I imagine that record-keeping wasn't exactly a priority while people were dropping like flies, but does anyone know where the pits actually are? I just can't believe there are as many as local gossip would have it, given the smaller population of London in those days, and the fact that much of what we think of as London now would then have been widely-spaced rural villages.
There might be a parallel with a story I heard in the Cold War 80s about there being an empty mass grave under Clapham Common, ready for a national emergency - anyone else heard that one?
Googling has turned up some interesting information, but no hard facts. So does anyone know how I'd find out where the pits actually are? Or has anyone heard stories like this? I'm asking because I've found myself in pub conversations about this subject twice in the last month, which suggests that I should either brush up on my history or get some new friends.
 
IIRC, there are some old city maps that detail where some of the larger burial sites once were. But I imagine that, with the death toll being so high, many could have possibly gone unmarked. One basic rule of thumb is that most of the larger mass graves were placed outside what was then the city walls - and thus are now covered by much of Greater London itself. I think that there was a large grave at Aldgate, which is now of course covered by offices blocks, roads and steets.
 
Finsbury circus. Under the french boules green.

Plenty of old maps in the officers surrounding the green that show it as a plauge pit.

Nasty old scary basements too. Wonder whats on the other side of the wall......
 
Finsbury circus. Under the french boules green.
Click to expand...

not to doubt you, but isn't there an underground car park beneath the bowling green?

According to our very knowledgeable guide on a London Walk a couple of years back, there is certainly a mass grave not far away at the very Fortean Charterhouse Square. There were also pits at East Smithfield next to Tower Hill, where the Old Royal Mint is today.

And these at Spitalfields:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_cu ... k_04.shtml

I've also heard that Bank Underground Station is built into a plague pit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top