war the year before, so that our trade that way was wholly interrupted;
but Spain and Portugal, Italy and Barbary, as also Hamburg and all the
ports in the Baltic, these were all shy of us a great while, and would
not restore trade with us for many months.
The distemper sweeping away such multitudes, as I have observed,
many if not all the out-parishes were obliged to make new burying-
grounds, besides that I have mentioned in Bunhill Fields, some of
which were continued, and remain in use to this day. But others were
left off, and (which I confess I mention with some reflection) being
converted into other uses or built upon afterwards, the dead bodies
were disturbed, abused, dug up again, some even before the flesh of
them was perished from the bones, and removed like dung or rubbish
to other places. Some of those which came within the reach of my
observation are as follow:
(1) A piece of ground beyond Goswell Street, near Mount Mill,
being some of the remains of the old lines or fortifications of the city,
where abundance were buried promiscuously from the parishes of Aldersgate,
Clerkenwell, and even out of the city. This ground, as I take it, was
since made a physic garden, and after that has been built upon.
(2) A piece of ground just over the Black Ditch, as it was then
called, at the end of Holloway Lane, in Shoreditch parish. It has been
since made a yard for keeping hogs, and for other ordinary uses, but is
quite out of use as a burying-ground.
(3) The upper end of Hand Alley, in Bishopsgate Street, which was
then a green field, and was taken in particularly for Bishopsgate
parish, though many of the carts out of the city brought their dead
thither also, particularly out of the parish of St All-hallows on the
Wall. This place I cannot mention without much regret. It was, as I
remember, about two or three years after the plague was ceased that
Sir Robert Clayton came to be possessed of the ground. It was
reported, how true I know not, that it fell to the king for want of heirs,
all those who had any right to it being carried off by the pestilence,
and that Sir Robert Clayton obtained a grant of it from King Charles
II. But however he came by it, certain it is the ground was let out to
build on, or built upon, by his order. The first house built upon it was
a large fair house, still standing, which faces the street or way now
called Hand Alley which, though called an alley, is as wide as a street.
The houses in the same row with that house northward are built on the
very same ground where the poor people were buried, and the bodies,
on opening the ground for the foundations, were dug up, some of them
remaining so plain to be seen that the women’s skulls were
distinguished by their long hair, and of others the flesh was not quite
perished; so that the people began to exclaim loudly against it, and
some suggested that it might endanger a return of the contagion; after
which the bones and bodies, as fast as they came at them, were carried
to another part of the same ground and thrown all together into a deep
pit, dug on purpose, which now is to be known in that it is not built
on, but is a passage to another house at the upper end of Rose Alley,
just against the door of a meeting-house which has been built there
many years since; and the ground is palisadoed off from the rest of the
passage, in a little square; there lie the bones and remains of near two
thousand bodies, carried by the dead carts to their grave in that one year.
(4) Besides this, there was a piece of ground in Moorfields; by the
going into the street which is now called Old Bethlem, which was
enlarged much, though not wholly taken in on the same occasion.
[N.B. – The author of this journal lies buried in that very ground,