The Hill of Bones: the story of Bunhill Fields

Originally a stretch of open land to the north of the City of London, Bunhill Fields got its name from its use as a burial ground during the Saxon period and a macabre event that took place in the mid-sixteenth century.  Cartloads of bones from the charnel house at St Paul's Cathedral were transported out of the city and dumped in such large quantities that they formed a hill of bones, with a thin layer of soil covering the mound.  This "Bone Hill" was large enough to accomodate three windmills on top, which were presumably installed to make the most of the elevated ground.

 

The charnel house at St Paul's had been used since the 13th Century to store old bones disturbed by later burials.  During this period the concept of purgatory had become an official part of Church doctrine and it became acceptable to disinter human remains when no flesh remained on the skeleton, as it was believed that the soul only remained with the body as long as there was flesh on the bones (cremation was not authorised for Christians at this time).  This had a useful practical application as old graves could be reused for new burials, freeing up space in churchyards. The dry bones removed from old graves were then stored in charnel houses and this practice continued in Britain until the Reformation.  After the Reformation, the use of charnel houses was seen as Popish so most of them were demolished and their contents removed, which helps to explain why the human remains were removed from St Paul's and taken to Bunhill Fields.

In 1665, a century or so after the Bone Hill was created, Bunhill Fields was given authorisation to be used as a plague pit.  Thousands were dying of plague in London and the rural location of Bunhill Fields, only a short distance north of the city, made it an idea location for mass burials.  However, it is unclear whether the site was ever used as a plague pit.  It is also unclear what became of the bones from the charnel house of St Paul's.  The land passed into private hands in the 1660s and burials began in what was referred to as "Tindal's Burial Ground" after Mr Tindal, who had taken over the lease of the land.  As the burial ground was not associated with an Anglican church, it became popular with Nonconformists - those Christians who did not belong to the Church of England.  A separate burial ground for Quakers was also opened close to Bunhill Fields in 1661 - sadly today very little of it remains due to severe bomb damage during the Second World War.

Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries Bunhill Fields became the major burial ground for London's Nonconformists.  Robert Southey, a 19th century poet, described it as "the Campo Santo of the Dissenters" as so many influential Nonconformists and their families were laid to rest there.  Isaac Watts, a celebrated hymnwriter, is buried in Bunhill Fields, as is preacher and pamphleteer Richard Price, and Thomas Newcomen, a preacher and early developer of steam engines.  The mother of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, is also buried in Bunhill Fields, as is a grandson of Oliver Cromwell and the grandfather of JRR Tolkien.  The most prominent memorials today are of the famous literary figures of Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and William Blake.

 

Daniel Defoe (yep, two blog posts in the same week featuring the same bloke) is most famous for writing the novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but during a prolific career also produced a great deal of pamphlets and non-fiction as well as his famous, pioneering novels.  It is thought that when he died in 1731, Defoe was on the run from his creditors.  In 1870, the imposing obelisk memorial to Defoe (pictured above) was unveiled.  It was funded by an appeal in the weekly newspaper Christian World.

John Bunyan, author of the famous allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Progress, also has an impressive memorial at Bunhill Fields.  Bunyan was a popular preacher, and found himself imprisoned twice for illegally preaching in the years when it was still against the law to belong to a church other than the official Church of England.  The Pilgrim's Progress, which was probably written during his periods of imprisonment, was published in 1678 and has never been out of print since.  His impressive memorial, featuring a carved effigy of Bunyan and images representing scenes from The Pilgrim's Progress, dates from 1862.

William Blake was an artist and poet, who spent most of his life in London.  During his lifetime he was considered to be mad, but today he is regarded as one of Britain's greatest artists and poets, and his work continues to have a considerable influence on popular culture.  One of his most enduringly famous works is And did those feet in ancient time, which was adapted into the popular hymn "Jerusalem".  It is uncertain exactly where Blake's grave lies, as gravestones were moved around when the site was remodelled in the 1960s.  None were present when I visited Bunhill Fields to take photographs for this blog post, but Blake's grave is often adorned with trinkets and flowers left by his fans.

In 1853, Bunhill Fields was deemed to be full, having received around 120,000 burials since the 1660s.  Around this time, churchyards and older burial grounds were being closed and large, suburban cemeteries were being planned and laid out.  The last burial in Bunhill Fields took place in January 1854.

After the cemetery's closure, Bunhill Fields was designated as a public park and underwent some remodelling in the late 1860s.  Some memorials were removed and many were restored or relocated.  The main centre for Nonconformist burials shifted to Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, one of the new cemeteries that made up London's "Magnificent Seven".  Charles Reed, a directer of Abney Park, was also involved with the preservation of Bunhill Fields and its conversaion to a public garden.

Bunhill Fields as we see it today is a postwar creation - heavy bombing during the Second World War prompted major landscaping work and the northern part of the burial ground was cleared of its memorials, leaving a large grassy area lined with benches, which is popular with workers on their lunchbreaks.  The areas containing tightly packed gravestones were fenced off to protect the monuments, and many new trees were planted.  Today, the City of London Corporation is making effors to improve the biodiversity of the area by encouraging wildlife and wild flowers to thrive in the burial ground.  The peace and the abundance of plant and animal life make a contrast with the office blocks and busy roads nearby.

In 2011, Bunhill Fields was designated as a Grade I listed cemetery, affording it special protection.  In addition to this, 75 individual monuments are also Grade II listed, and Bunyan and Defoe's memorials are Grade II* listed.  Due to the large number of Nonconformist burials on the site, most of the gravestones are fairly plain and austere, and many of them have become worn and illegible over the years.  The gravestones are huddled much closer together in Bunhill Fields which gives it a different feel to big Victorian cemeteries such as Abney Park or Kensal Rise, which were intended from the beginning to serve as parks as well as burial grounds.  Bunhill Fields is quite a unique spot - and it is quite mind-boggling to think that 120,000 people are buried on such a small site.

 

Bunhill Fields is located between City Road and Bunhill Row in London EC1 (the nearest tube stations are Moorgate and Old Street), and it is open all year round.  Information about guided tours and access to the fenced-off areas can be found at http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/city-gardens/visitor-information/Pages/Bunhill-Fields.aspx

The lonesome grave of a travelling labourer

As a native of Lancashire, I returned to my hometown of Preston to visit my family at Christmas, and on a bright Sunday morning I visited the nearby village of Ribchester, probably best known as an old Roman fort.  I often visited this place as a child, as there was (and still is) an excellent children's playground there.  We would also inevitably visit the ruins of the Roman bath house, which were not fenced off and to a small child presented an exciting labyrinth of tumbled stones and low walls to clamber over.  In Roman times, Ribchester was called Bremetenacum Veteranorum - a possible translation of this is "the hilltop settlement of the veterans."  Some ruins of the fort, including the bath house and granaries, can still be seen today, and many buildings in the village have reused Roman stones and columns.

Ruins of Ribchester's Roman granaries, close to the church of St Wilfrid

Ribchester is home to the church of St Wilfrid, an ancient church believed to have been founded by St Wilfrid himself in the 7th Century.  St Wilfrid, Bishop of Ripon and Archbishop of York, travelled extensively across the north of England, founding churches and monasteries.  It is possible that a church already existed when St Wilfrid came to Ribchester, but it is thought that St Wilfrid founded the first stone church on the site.  This building was subsquently improved and enlarged between the 11th and 16th centuries.

St Wilfrid's is surrounded by a large churchyard, which contains a number of gravestones surviving from pre-Victorian times.  It was while exploring and photographing this churchyard, making the most of the beautiful winter sunlight, that I came across an old headstone standing apart from the others.

At first glimpse, it's a fairly ordinary 18th Century headstone.  However, when I crouched down to dechiper the inscription, I found that it told rather a sad and poignant story.

Here lieth the body of

Thos. Greenwod who

died May 24 1776

In ye 52 year of his age

Honest, industrious

seeming still content

Nor did repine(?) at what

he underwent

His transient life was 

with hard labour fill'd

And working in a

makle(?)pit was kill'd.

So, who was this man?  Parish records show that a "Thos. Greenwood" of Dilworth (a nearby township, now part of the village of Longridge) was buried at St Wilfrid's on 26th May 1776.  Parish records show a Thomas Greenwood, son of another Thomas Greenwood, was baptised in Colne - close to Pendle Hill on the other side of the Ribble Valley - on 13th September 1724.  There is no way of telling if this is the same Thomas Greenwood as the one buried at Ribchester but the dates of the records seem to match up fairly well, if we assume that "in ye 52 year of his age" means that Thomas was 51 when he died.

Records show that Greenwood was a common name in the Ribchester area at the time of Thomas' death, so it is possible that Thomas had relatives in the parish of St Wilfrid's.  As an itinerant worker it is unlikely that Thomas was a wealthy man, so it is likely that his headstone was paid for by others, perhaps relatives or friends from Ribchester.  Certainly the little rhyme on his headstone suggests that he was held in some regard, the eulogy painting him as a noble, tragic figure.

The nature of Thomas' death seems clear - he died in what we'd now call a workplace accident.  But where was he working?  The word on the bottom line of the gravestone is unfamiliar - M-A(?)-T/K-L-E pit.  "Pit" is a good place to start.  There is a long history of quarrying in the Ribble Valley and East Lancashire - in the nineteenth century stone was quarried in large amounts at Longridge Fell, with Longridge stone being used to build - amongst others - the docks at Liverpool and town halls in Preston and Lancaster.  Quarrying also took place in Clitheroe and Rossendale, and at other sites further afield in Lancashire.  Perhaps the mysterious pit where Thomas met his death was some kind of quarry.  If he lived at Dilworth at the time of his death he may have been working on nearby Longridge Fell.

The "transient life with hard labour fill'd" that Thomas led is another pointer that could suggest that some of his work at least involved quarrying.  Before the Industrial Revolution quarrying in Lancashire was carried out on a relatively small scale, with most stone being quarried to meet local demand.  This "on-demand" feature of quarrying would probably have created a situation where quarry workers would travel around the area, moving to where the work was and moving on when a job was finished.  Was this how Thomas lived his life, moving between quarrying jobs in rural Lancashire?

Another possiblilty is that Thomas was a miner - another tough, physical occupation.  The ambiguous word on the gravestone may be an old spelling of metal.  Lead mining took place in East Lancashire in the 18th Century, on a small scale (source).  It was never particularly succcessful.  Perhaps Thomas was involved in one of those ventures, and died in a mining accident.

All of this is speculation, of course. How much can we really know about a person, when scant records only tell us when they were baptised and when they were buried?  It is possible that no other written records of Thomas Greenwood exist or survive.  The only thing we know definite is the record of his burial at St Wilfrid's.  The Thomas Greenwood baptised in Colne in 1724 may have been someone else altogether - we just don't know.

Interestingly this is one of the few older gravestones that remains in the churchyard.  If at some point  old gravestones were removed (this is likely, as old graves were often reused), it's possible that Thomas' gravestone was kept because of its poignant, rhyming eulogy.  The older part of the churchyard, seen behind Thomas' grave in the photograph above, has few gravestones compared to the Victorian and later sections.

It's humbling to think that if this headstone with its rhyming eulogy had never been created, or had been disposed of, Thomas Greenwood would be completely forgotten, anonymous bones in an unmarked grave.  Research and speculation paints a vague but poignant story of a hard life and a sad death.  The presence of the gravestone points to the likelihood that someone cared enough about Thomas to erect a memorial and write a eulogy.  The continued existence of the gravestone suggests that at some stage, someone might have been moved enough by the story it told to leave it in place.

An ordinary gravestone: the stories it can tell, or inspire.

Fallen comrades: Caroline of Brunswick's life and death in Hammersmith

Hammersmith, with its riverside factories and wharves, was badly bombed during the Second World War - but that's a story for another blog post.  Amongst the postwar concrete of the immediate area around Hammersmith tube station, a few older buildings and facades remain: a Georgian building that now houses a Chinese restaurant, rows of 19th Century villas leading down towards the river, and the splendid Gothic church of St Paul, built from a distinctive pinkish stone.

St Paul's Church, Hammersmith

Today St Paul's also has a modern extension, and is surrounded by a pleasant green space full of blossom trees, a magnet for workers from nearby shops and offices during their lunch breaks.  As with so many green spaces in built up areas of London, this piece of land was once a burial ground - indeed, archaeologists uncovered many burials during the construction of the church's extension in 2009-10.  Only a small number of gravestones remain, clustered by the church's tower, tucked away in a corner of the churchyard.

The grave of Richard Honey and George Francis

One of these gravestones - pictured above - is protected by English Heritage, not because the men whose grave it marked were rich or illustrious but because of how they died, and how their friends and colleagues chose to commemorate their deaths. Richard Honey and George Francis were ordinary working men who met an untimely end when trouble flared at the funeral of George IV's estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, on 14th August 1821.

Caroline Amelia Elisabeth of Brunswick was a German princess, a first cousin of George IV (her mother had been the sister of George III).  She became engaged to the future George IV in 1794.  George was already secretly married to Maria Fitzherbert, though this match was not legal as George had not sought the permission of his father the King to marry, as set out in the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.  This Act had come into existence to prevent members of the Royal Family from marrying anyone deemed unsuitable after George III's brother married a commoner, Anne Horton, in 1771.

George III refused to give financial help to his debt-ridden, wayward heir unless he got married.  Caroline of Brunswick was considered a suitable match and she and George were engaged despite having never met.  Concerns about Caroline's suitability were first raised when the diplomat Lord Malmesbury went over to Brunswick to bring Caroline over to England for the wedding.  Malmesbury expressed reservations about Caroline's lack of tact and poor personal hygiene.  Nevertheless, Caroline made the journey over to England, arriving in Greenwich on 5th April 1795.

The marriage between Caroline and George was a disaster from the start.  Both parties were immediately repelled by the other.  George, upon seeing Caroline for the first time, simply called for a glass of brandy.  He was extremely drunk during the wedding ceremony.  It was rumoured that Caroline had been suggested as a possible bride by George's mistress at the time, Lady Jersey, in the hope an unappealing wife would ensure that George continued his relationship with his mistress.

Caroline gave birth to a girl, Princess Charlotte Augusta, on 7th January 1796, nine months after the wedding.  By this time, rumours were already circulating about the poor state of the royal marriage and in April 1796 the couple formally separated.  Princess Charlotte did not live with her mother, but Caroline visited her often.  Caroline also brought a number of other children into her household.  One of these children, a little boy called William Austin, was alleged to be Caroline's illegitimate son.  This claim led to Caroline being subjected to investigations over her fidelity, during which time she was unable to see her daughter.  The accusations of infidelity were not able to be proved, but Caroline became increasingly isolated socially and left England for mainland Europe in 1814.

George IV when he was Prince of Wales.  When Caroline first met him, she remarked that he was a great deal fatter than she'd been led to believe.

Caroline settled in Italy, where a man called Bartolomeo Pergami was hired as her servant.  Pergami rose to become the head of Caroline's household, and before long scurrilous rumours about Caroline's relationship with him began to spread back in England.  In 1817, Princess Charlotte tragically died in childbirth at the age of 21.  George declined to inform Caroline of their daughter's death, and Caroline only heard the news by chance from a passing courier.

By this time, George was keen to divorce Caroline, something which could only be done if one of the parties admitted or was found guilty of adultery.  After the death of George III in 1820, Caroline returned to England to assert her rights as Queen, and it was then that George intensified his efforts to legally end their marriage.

What followed was an infamous, highly publicised trial that sought to prove Caroline guilty of adultery with Pergami.  However, what George and his government had not considered was Caroline's popularity with the general public.  George was deeply unpopular - he was seen as an incompetent drunk - whereas Caroline was viewed as the wronged wife.  Many petitions, altogether collecting around a million signatures, were collected supporting Caroline's cause.  The Bill of Pains and Penalities, which sought to remove all of Caroline's priveliges and titles as George's wife, was defeated in the House of Lords.

Caroline at her trial

During the trial, Caroline had brought her household to Hammersmith, to Brandenburgh House, a grand residence that had recently been vacated by the Margravine of Anspach.  Caroline quickly became popular with local residents, and it is said that when the Bill of Pains and Penalties was defeated, "the Hammersmith tradesmen who served her illuminated their houses, and the populace shouted and made bonfires in front of Brandenburgh House. After her acquittal, the poor queen publicly returned thanks for that issue in Hammersmith Church, and more deputations came to Brandenburgh House to congratulate her on her triumph." (source)

Media coverage of the trial was huge, and hugely sensational.  The Radical politican William Cobbett took up Caroline's cause.  A biography of Cobbett states that "from the moment of Caroline's arrival in England, [Cobbett] constituted himself her champion." (G.D.H. Cole - The Life of William Cobbett, p.166)  Cobbett and his Radical colleagues were able to utilise the popular press in support of Caroline's cause, with papers and news sheets being printed in large numbers and distributed far and wide.

"The story, according to Cobbett, reached “every cottage in the Kingdom”. It arrived there via a news-chain. At the top of the chain were the newspapers, which sold only a few thousand because the stamp duty kept their price at 7d (though the Times doubled its sales to 20,000 during the queen's trial by supporting her with more enthusiasm than its rivals). Those papers were lent out by libraries, read out in taverns and rented by the hour" (source)

This was a watershed moment for politics - for the first time, masses of ordinary people were engaged with a political matter and due to the pressures of public opinion, the Bill was defeated and the support of the public led to Caroline emerging victorious against her unpopular husband.

Brandenburgh House (right), the Hammersmith home of Queen Caroline (picture source)

Sadly, Caroline did not long survive the defeat of the Bill of Pains and Penalties.  Three weeks after George IV's ostentatious coronation, at which Caroline had been noisily refused entry to the ceremony, Caroline died.  She had fallen ill soon after the coronation, dying either of cancer or an intestinal obstruction on 7th August 1821.  She was 53 years old.

Caroline's funeral posed a problem for George and his government.  Caroline's will had instructed that she be buried in her native Brunswick, and it was feared that the procession of her coffin from Brandenburgh House through London to the port of Harwich would draw unruly crowds.  An attempt was made to divert the cortege's route outside of London, but angry crowds gathered to block routes out of the city, forcing the procession through the middle of the city.  The chaos that ensued led to troops firing on the crowds, and two men - Richard Honey and George Francis - were killed.

The Manchester Guardian (18th August 1821) reported that:

"It became necessary [for the Guards] to force a way for the procession through whatever impediments might present themselves. The people were equally bent on turning the procession, and forcing it into the route of the city. Here a contest arose, and here, we deeply regret to say, blood was shed!

Some stones and mud were thrown at the military, and a magistrate being present, the soldiers were sanctioned in firing their pistols and carbines at the unarmed crowd. Screams of terror were heard in every direction. The number of shots fired was not less than forty or fifty. So completely did the soldiery appear at this period to have lost the good temper and forbearance they previously evinced, that they fired shots in the direction in which the procession was moving."

The two men who lost their lives were ordinary working men.  Here the story might have ended, with the men disappearing into a common grave and eventually being forgotten.  However, the dead men's friends and colleagues raised money to provide the large headstone which still survives today.  The stirring, daring inscription reads:

Here lie interred the mortal remains of

Richard Honey, Carpenter,

aged 36 years, and of

George Francis, Bricklayer, aged 43 years,

who were slain on the 14th August, 1821, while attending the 

funeral of Caroline, of Brunswick,

Queen of England

The details of that melancholy event

Belong to the history of the country

In which they will be recorded

Together with the public opinion

Decidedly expressed relative to the

Disgraceful transactions

Of that disastrous day

Deeply impressed with their fate

Unmerited and unavenged

Their respective trades interred them

At their general expence [sic]

On the 24th of the same month

to their memory.

Richard Honey left one female orphan.

George Francis left a widow and three young children.

Victims like these have fallen in every age

Stretch of pow'r or party's cruel rage

Until even handed justice comes at last

To amend the future and avenge the past

Their friends and fellow-men lament their doom

Protect their orphans, and erect their tomb.

Although organised labour as we would recognise it today was then in its infancy - in the early 1820s trade unions were officially illegal - the inscription on this large tombstone, paid for by the donations of ordinary working people, shows the solidarity between Caroline's working class supporters and their determination that their fallen comrades would not be forgotten.

The inquest into the deaths recorded a verdict of "wilful murder against a life guardsman unknown" for Francis and manslaughter for Honey, who unlike Francis did not die at the scene but succumbed a few hours later to his injuries.  The fact that no individual was ever named or prosecuted for the deaths was picked up upon by commentators at the time, as the cartoon below shows.

A caricature by George Cruikshank (source)

Brandenbugh House is long gone, demolished not long after Caroline's death, but Hammersmith has not forgotten her. Queen Caroline Street runs close to St Paul's church where the two shot men lie at rest, even though their surroundings are completely changed from that of the little riverside churchyard they were orignally buried in.  Their grave is well worth a visit to see the inscription, a moving example of solidarity amongst the working classes.

For a more detailed account of Caroline's scandalous trial and its political fallout, I recommend the entertaining book "Rebel Queen" by Jane Robins.

Skulls, astrologers and the sands of time: a Georgian graveyard in South West London

One of the best things about living in London is the great potential for discovering wonderful places completely by accident. In this instance, I was required to go to Mortlake to pick up a parcel from the sorting office that had been too big to fit through my letterbox.  Whilst walking up Mortlake High Street my eye was caught by some worn old gravestones peeping out through bushes and shrubs.

This graveyard belongs to the Anglican church of St Mary the Virgin, pictured below.

The St Mary's we see today was built in 1543, replacing an earlier church that had been situated nearby.  Only the tower survives from the 16th Century, and major alterations were made to the church in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  The church interior, pictured below, dates from the early 20th Century.

Some of these memorials look as though they were once situated inside the church, before it was renovated in the early 20th Century.

The churchyard, however, mostly contains gravestones from the Georgian period, from about 1715, with the most recent graves dating from the early Victorian period.  The Burials Act of 1851 closed London's ancient churchyards and from then onwards the residents of Mortlake had to be buried elsewhere.

A number of my previous blog posts have focused on 19th Century graveyards, and the funerary symbolism used in this period, much of which invoked Roman urns, clasped hands, broken pillars and extinguished torches.  Many of these symbols had their origins in the Classical period.  Earlier gravestones, however, use different images and probably the most distinctive of these is the skull, or death's head, an obvious signifier of death.  Some more examples of death head symbolism on gravestones can be found here.

The monument pictured above also depicts what appears to be a book, which may signify knowledge, or perhaps the Bible. 

Time waits for no man

The gravestone pictured above shows another symbol of mortality - the hourglass.

So why are the symbols on 18th Century graves so different to those on Victorian graves?  In the Victorian period death became a money-spinning industry, with grand memorials, specially laid out cemeteries and ostentatious funeral processions becoming popular amongst the moneyed.  Death was dressed up and became an event - look at the way that black mourning clothes and black-edged writing paper became important and very visual parts of mourning.  At the same time, the symbols used to represent death became more distant - no more scary signifiers of mortality such as skulls, bones or ominous signs of time passing.  This in part reflected differing fashions and tastes in the Victorian period, with grand Gothic and Classical images becoming common in the new burial grounds that opened after inner city churchyards were shut.

The poor, of course, continued to be buried in common graves with no memorial or perhaps a small, simple stone.  Dotted around old graveyards are little headstones adorned only with a set of initials and dates of birth and death.  The graves of non-conformist believers have also traditionally been more austere.

The earliest known tombstone in the graveyard at St Mary's is that of the astrologer John Partridge.  Partridge was born in East Sheen, not far from Mortlake, and after initially starting a career as a shoemaker he studied in Holland and became an astrologer, having learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew.  He wished to see the Arabic influences astrology - which had become widespread in Europe during the Renaissance - removed and sought a return to Ptolemy's principles of astrology.

Although Partridge wrote a number of books of his own, he is best known through the words of his enemies.  A committed Whig and sceptical of the Church, Partridge was known to predict the deaths of those whose opinions on religion and politics he disagreed with.  This made him unpopular, and his astrology was suspected of being quackery.  In 1708 this came to the attention of Jonathan Swift, the Irish cleric best known for writing Gulliver's Travels, and writing under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff Swift mockingly predicted that Partridge would die on 29th March 1708.  On this date, he wrote another letter claiming that Partridge had died.  Partridge, very much alive, angrily refuted the claims but continued to be ridiculed, with Swift commenting that "they were sure no man alive ever to writ such damned stuff as this."  Swift even penned a eulogy for Partridge:

Here five foot deep lyes on his back
A cobbler, starmonger, and quack…
Who to the stars in pure good-will,
Does to his best look upward still.
Weep all you customers that use
His pills, his almanacks or shoes.

Partridge died in 1714 or 1715, and little is known about his final years.  He is buried in the tomb pictured below, very close to the church building.

The picture below shows close-up of the cherubs on Partridge's tomb.  A skull is also visible at the bottom of the plaque - it is quite worn and covered in lichen, and its most distinctive features are the eye sockets and nasal cavity.  The large and relatively ornate nature of Partridge's tomb suggests that he either died quite wealthy, or had friends who were able to pay for a grand memorial.

St Mary's also has a connection with the more famous John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician and magician who had a home in Mortlake close to St Mary's.  During Dee's time the boundaries between mathematics, science and magic were blurred, and - as this was the time before the frenzied witch hunts of the 17th Century - Dee enjoyed the patronage of a number of eminent Elizabethans, and even acted as advisor to Queen Elizabeth herself.   Dee travelled widely during his lifetime and kept his extensive library at his Mortlake home, a library which at the time was reckoned to be one of the greatest in the world.

John Dee

A history on the church's own website claims that Dee was buried in St Mary's after his death in 1608 or early 1609.  Dee died in poverty and relative obscurity, as James I's regime was unfriendly towards magic, and unfortunately no parish records of his death and burial survive, and there is no known gravestone.

If you look behind this tall monument, a low tomb to the right lies over a former Prime Minister.  (The reason why there isn't a proper picture of this tomb is because I read the little map in the churchyard wrong and took a picture of a different tomb close to that of the former PM.)  Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, was a Tory MP for Devizes and became Prime Minister in 1801 after William Pitt the Younger resigned.  By all accounts Addington was not an effective Prime Minister and he was ousted in 1804.  He did, however, live to the grand old age of 86, dying at the comfortable White Lodge in Richmond.

Probably the most distinctive feature of the churchyard is the picturesque archway in the middle.  This archway was originally part of the structure of the church, but was removed during rebuilding work in the 19th century and rebuilt in the churchyard, allegedly at the insistence of a parishoner.

Part of the churchyard is fenced off and designated as a "wild area", allowing plants and habitats for birds and insects to flourish. The whole churchyards is beautifully cared for by the Friends of Mortlake Churchyard, who have lovingly restored the graveyard after it became derelict.  More details about the Friends can be found under the "Churchyard" section of St Mary's website.

There is also a labyrinth on the side of the churchyard closes to Mortlake High Street.  The labyrinth, simply laid out with natural materials, is intended to be a space for quiet reflection.

The labyrinth consists of winding paths laid out around the gravestones

Finally, a little mystery.  I came across the following stone in the middle of the churchyard but couldn't find any information about it.  I have no idea of its date - it could possibly even be modern - but has anyone got any ideas of what it might symbolise?  My best guess is a green man, or perhaps a stone from the church building before it was restored.

Who am I?

A few more pictures...