A Deluge of Dead Guys; or, What Do You Do With A Disused Churchyard? Part One: St. Paul's

If you're unfamiliar with St. Paul's Cathedral, watch this video and edumacate yourself.

This is literally the only thing you need to know about St. Paul's.

Ok, maybe not really. Here's a little more. St. Paul's is to the Anglicans what St. Peter's is to the Catholics. It sits on top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London, and for a long time was the tallest building in London. It has what is called a protected view- that is, new buildings can't go up if they will block somebody's line-of-sight to St. Paul's. The current building is the fifth cathedral to sit on the site and was designed by Christopher Wren. There has been a church on the site since at least 604 AD; this one has been there since the seventeenth century. The cathedral has an extensive crypt, where all manner of famous and important people are interred. (But, seeing as how I'm interested in marginalization, I honestly couldn't give a bent pin about them. Vivent les paysans!) It also has a very nice green surrounding it.

Roses, which will bloom soon.

A wonderful statue of Thomas Beckett. Becket? I am not too sure on the spelling of that.

Here we see the church partaking in one of those 'modern' burials where you just have a cloth on your face and your body is left for the birds to eat. Or maybe this fella's just napping.

However, its churchyard wasn't organized as the lovely garden it is now and landscaped until 1878.

What do you think it was before then?

Did you say graveyard?

(Please, please, please tell me that you said graveyard. If you've been following this blog at ALL, you said graveyard. If you haven't, well, then I forgive you. But, uh, given the title of the blog... you shoulda guessed graveyard anyways.)
 
It was a graveyard. And, as is the case in many of the city squares and greens that were once places of final rest, this one has several monuments still standing. However, most are very poorly conserved and are either partially or entirely illegible. In some cases, the writing is completely gone, and sometimes this is intentional. This is because many of the parks use the monuments as art pieces- they lend atmosphere and help keep the mood serious. It's hard to play handball when there's a mini-mausoleum in the way.

"But hold on a tick!" you might be saying. "Back up a bit. Mind explaining gravestone conservation to the rest of us normal people- the ones who DON'T spend their spare time hanging out in graveyards?"

Certainly! Many gravestones in active cemeteries are regularly grit-cleaned so that the information is readable. They are considered historically important because of the information on them, whereas in the churchyard parks, they are often not maintained because the aged look of the stone is what they're going for. It's entirely aesthetic. They can do this because the old churches kept immaculate, if illegible records of who was buried where. 

So, what's the condition of what was once the Anglican church's most important graveyard?

Let's take a look then, right.

I thought these were flat stones, left in place.

Whoops, turns out they're dry riser grates.

Cute little mini-maus...

That seems to be used for some kind of storage.

Nearly all of the stones are in terrible condition, writing-wise. Unless I zoom in, there's no words discernible to the naked eye, the camera lens, or the rubbings. Yes. I made rubbings.

A flat stone that might be a gravestone. Argument for: it's awkwardly flat and in the middle of a flower bed. Argument against: it's very uncharacteristically shaped and it's made using what looks to be blue shale, which isn't a period-accurate common material for gravestones, which were typically marble, granite, or slate.

What is even the point of this gate.

This is an example of a paired memorial, where the husband and wife share it. Memorials like these were exempt from the 1842 cemetery laws; as such, you often see later dates on them.

An example of the condition many of these monuments are in. Granite gavestones in the cemeteries that are nearly contemporary with this one are often still readable.

Seriously, this was carved only a year before the cemetery laws took effect.

There are no vertical headstones or flat ground slabs remaining in St. Paul's; along that line, there are no individual graves. All of the following monuments had at least two messes of engraving that were once hypothetically names/dates.

Here's an example of what I meant earlier. This guy, William Meller, Esq., was interred in 1850 because his family, who is listed on the stone's other three sides, were all interred earlier.

A zoom-out on Mr. Meller's side.

If you move widdershins, this was the side you saw.

The obverse of the Meller monument.

Many of the memorials were incorporated into the flower beds.

This one had a lot of names on it, all part of the Simmon family.

It seems that many of these remain because they couldn't be removed otherwise. Standing headstones are a lot easier to remove and a lot easier to put in a crypt storage room or hang on the wall. However, by using these pieces as part of the landscape, they do find a use for them, barring their original intent. People sit on these. They picnic on them. It's all very reminiscent of that scene in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil when the narrator and his guide around Savannah have a bourbon picnic on top of a gravestone shaped like a bench. It's a really nice old-world sort of attitude that keeps even these disused churchyards as active spaces that people engage with on a regular basis.

Even if it's just for a power-nap.

Curse You, Redwall!

The view crossing Westminster Bridge a half-hour before sunset.

I have a hard time with abbeys. On one hand, they're majestic, gorgeous, beautiful buildings.
On the other hand, friggin' Brian Jacques has ruined me for life. It's a kneejerk reaction. You say abbey, I say mice and squirrels.

The rodent gargoyles everywhere didn't help.

I went to Westminster Abbey the other night to go to Evensong. It's a nearly etherial church service, especially the way they do it there. It's very... it really is otherworldly. They sing the late medieval plainsong and the voices seem to float. We were lucky and got to sit in what's called the quire. It's where the choir sits.

I had a lot of pictures I wanted to take. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me take pictures in the main space of the abbey. It was ok to take them in the chapterhouse and in the museum and in the cloisters, but not in the abbey proper. I did manage to get a couple of contraband pictures, thanks to the beauty that is the video camera I got for Christmas. It's glorious. It's terrifically easy to use, it has a wonderfully fast shutter speed, and it's silent. You can whip it out, steal a picture, and put it back in your pocket or bag before the scurrying little security guards realize what you've done.

Me in the cloisters, with the Abbey Green behind me. Kelly took this.

What a pretty tower!

The medieval chambers were definitely open for pictures, as was their museum. So here's some medieval architecture for those who like it. The chapterhouse in particular was very cool. A chapterhouse is basically a meeting room attached to a church. The one at Westminster is entirely  medieval, with glorious floor tiles and murals. The stained glass is modern, though, because most of it was destroyed in the Blitz.

This is the Pyxis Chamber.  They kept hosts and stuff in here.

Edmond Halley's memorial (he was buried in the floor). It's not just a comet- it's in the shape of the comet-thing that appears on the Bayeux Tapestry. Pretty nifty.

What's left of Captain Cook is buried in the wall here.

The stairs leading up to the chapterhouse.

The stained glass windows in the Chapterhouse.

A better shot of the stained glass windows.

Part of the medieval mural on the wall. All of the animals are labeled with things like "Krokodyle" and "Kamel".

This is a video I made. There's no narration- it's just as much of the chapterhouse's ceiling and walls as I could get. I'm very sorry for the sheer number of times I say 'medieval' in this piece. And also 'chapterhouse.' (I think 'chapterhouse' is a better word than 'medieval'.) But it's pretty cool to see all this stuff. The Abbey was started in 960, and some of the stuff even dates from then.

This is one of the remaining pieces of medieval stained glass.

This is the medieval altarpiece. They made a duplicate of it a few hundred years ago to use in the Abbey's main church.

The opposite side of the quire.

The church from my seat. It's beautiful in the lamplight.

So that's all my photographs of Westminster Abbey. Perhaps more work stuff later? Or a post about the rambling walks I take? Or some graffiti? Something edutaining.

Skeletons in the Closet, Bodies in the Floor

Many of the churches in London are old. Very, very old. Several go back to the medieval period. The Victorians didn't want to tear them down- they were sacred spaces, after all, but the fact remains that they were kind of falling apart. So they'd try to fix them. They'd bolster the walls, redo the roofs, and relay the floors. The floors were a particular issue because of how uneven they were. It was almost as though they'd been dug up a lot and never really carefully redone.

This is exactly what happened. See, the medieval folks used the space outside of their buildings to graze animals, not for burying bodies. That would be undignified, so if you could pay for it, you'd do what you could to get buried in... alternate sacred space. This meant the floor of the church. Bodies would be piled atop of bodies, some going as far as twenty-five to thirty feet down. When the Victorians figured this out, they kinda freaked out. Victorian sensibilities couldn't deal with bodies under the floor. That was gross. Bodies led to cholera, and that was terrible. So they typically would dig them up, probably making grossed-out faces the whole time, and move them. With most of these bodies, it was a pretty easy decision about where to put them. They assumed that all the bodies were Christian and buried them in the nearest churchyard, often in a mass grave. It's kind of like how they treated poor and/or foreign (Irish) bodies. Little status in life, little status in death.

But what did happen to the high-statused bodies? If you look at the bodies of St. Peter Ad Vincula, seven still remain in the floor. All of them were connected to the Tudor dynasty in some way- Anne Boleyn, her brother, Lady Jane Grey, and several others. This is a small but visible sign of the way postmortem status was assigned to certain bodies. George Boleyn wasn't as important as other prisoners executed at the tower, but because of his family ties, he was included in the burials. It is interesting, though, to notice that those bodies remained in the floor and weren't vaulted. While they might have status, they were still traitors to the crown. They couldn't be treated like the other burials conducted in Peter Ad Vincula and given an above-ground memorial.

In some situations, the above-ground memorial was impractical, yet bodies were too important to go into the graveyard. This is incredibly evident in Westminster Abbey, which is filled with floor burials, wall burials, and monuments. Space in this ancient space is honestly pretty limited, especially with the huge memorials of the past, so the Victorians did continue to bury people in the floor. It'd be nice to find out more about the decision-making process when it came to Westminster burials, I think.

With the eventual creation of large, park-like graveyards, the tradition of burials in churches pretty much died out. The Dean of Westminster's got to give permission for any more burials in the Abbey, and, furthermore, there's no bodies allowed. Only ashes. People who have served the Abbey in an official capacity, such as an Organist or Surveyor of the Fabric (I... don't actually know what that is) may be buried here and important British artists and scientists and such can be considered as well. The most recent burial was Sir Laurence Olivier in 1991.

One of the interesting problems about living on an island has always been the disposal of dead bodies. This only gets more complicated when your religion, culture, or ideas about sanitation prevent cremation. In Haiti, they tend to do reusable above-ground concrete vaults, similar to the solution worked out in New Orleans. In London, they've tried a number of things to deal with the problem, from literally building bodies into the infrastructure of their churches to artificially raising the terrain level of their Victorian cemeteries to keep reusing them. At Kensal Greens, for example, some of the ground is six to ten feet higher than it was back when it opened so that they can keep using the space. It's been interesting tracing funerary trends as the economy shifted from agricultural (any extra land goes to animal grazing) to industrial (creation of big sprawly class-distinct graveyards) to service (blurring of class lines in graveyards). I might end up doing more with this as a smaller project, or including it in my marginalization thesis as a sort of ending bit.

The Hidden Dead of St. Martin in the Fields

 This is St. Martin in the Fields.

This is the back of it with a cool warped window.

There's been a church at this site since at least 1222 or earlier- pretty long time for a church to exist. The oldest grave found here is from 471. Now, given London's tendency to bury their pious dead in churchyards- the first independent cemetery didn't crop up until 1819- one would think that the St. Martin's churchyard would be full to bursting. After all, that's simply how it went. Certainly a lot of churchyards look pretty full- lots of tombstones, many at interesting angles. That, however, is not the case here.

The St. Martin in the Fields churchyard, 24 January 2011.

The St. Martin's churchyard is only about two hundred feet by two hundred feet. Clearly, for a church as centrally located as this one (it's in Trafalgar Square), this was insufficient. A second St. Martin's churchyard exists, down in Pratt Street. Mostly the poor parishioners were buried here- the wealthy were buried in the churchyard proper. They're still there, but their headstones aren't. Although some remnants of cartouches and memorials are down in the crypt, most of the stonework is just... gone.
Kinda weird to think about. Here in America, most of our cemeteries are either family plots or big, sprawling things in the model of Nunhead and other Victorian cemeteries. We simply had more space to work with.  In London, they didn't, and so cemeteries get pushed aside or paved over.

This is the last remaining memorial in the paved-over churchyard. It's a fountain, could be piped- the lions have little bits of metal in their mouths- but it is January and there is no water.

So what happened at St. Martin's? Well, it is the royal family's parish church and is connected to the Admiralty and 10 Downing Street. You don't want that connected with a cholera epidemic, or to have a messy, difficult-to-maintain old graveyard. You want that to look nice. You want it to blend in with the stately marble buildings of Trafalgar Square. And so you remove the stones and pave it over and pretend it never was anything but a flagstone plaza. It's just something to think about. You think cemeteries and memorials will be forever, but they're not. In this case, it wasn't even a financial thing- the residents of this churchyard ended up paying for their prime real estate, while their less wealthy fellow parishoners still have their monuments. Nobody knows who's buried there- indeed, unless you go and look, there's no indication that anybody is. In short, it's kind of mysterious and would make for a really interesting research project...

But for now, I'm just using it as an introduction to the piece I'm writing about the Spa Greens. ^_^

Stonehenge and Bath- Pictures

The rest of my Stonehenge and Bath stuff is going to be pretty philosophical and anthropologically concentrated, so if you're not interested in that, or you just want to see pictures, this is the post for you!

From left to right: Other Caitlin, Kimberly, Anna-na-na, me, tourists, rocks.

Me. In a picture. Willingly. Holy crap.

Stonehenge's footpath is pretty amazing. From several angles, it's totally possible to get shots with no people. Here's what it looked like when we got there...

Five minutes later, on the other side of the stones. Where did the people go?

Another angle

Yet another angle.

Aaaaand how about some of Bath?

The tower of the Bath Abbey. We couldn't go in, unfortunately.

More abbey. I kept looking for mice and squirrels, for some reason...

Cool fountain. I have no idea who that man is.

ARCHITECTURE.

A view of the River Avon.

This is the Pulteney Bridge, one of only four shop-lined bridges in the world. It was designed by Robert Adams in the 18th century.

A much prettier view of the river.

And some pigeons!

I, uh, never found out the name of this church. But isn't Bath a lovely town?

This is part of the old medieval town wall. The plaque told me so.

The Circus, a lovely example of Georgian architecture.

The Royal Crescent, another lovely example of Georgian architecture. I *think* that's my roommate Kelly taking a picture there.