Waking the deadSkeletons and plague pits are grisly and surprisingly frequent finds in major construction projects.
Beneath the City of London’s modern buildings, bustling stations and gleaming coffee shops lie thousands of skeletons.
The capital’s burial sites and plague pits are testament to its often difficult 2,000-year history. During the Black Death, which is estimated to have killed between one third to half of the country’s population, the city quickly ran out of space to dispose of all the victims. In a mass grave next to Smithfield more than 200 corpses a day were buried. Excavation of East Smithfield cemeteries has revealed bodies were stacked five or six deep.
“[Charterhouse Square] is the site of one of London’s earliest plague pits,” says Alice Ford-Smith, Principal Librarian at Dr Williams’s Library, one of London’s oldest libraries. “Thousands of bodies were buried here during the Black Death and the pit was reopened during the Great Plague.”
“The use of mass graves was dictated not only by the difficulty of finding space in the already overcrowded burial grounds but also the need to bury corpses as quickly as possible to reduce the risk of infection,” she continues. “Visitors were banned from the area, initially to reduce infection but then to stop desperate people throwing themselves into the pit.”
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