Bubonic Plague, Black Death and Crossrail

Recently Sam Pfizenmaier of Museum of London Archaeology has been leading the excavation of a burial ground started as a Black Death cemetery outside of St Bart's Hospital at the London Charterhouse, funded by Crossrail as part of the required engineered route of new rail tunnels




The land for the Charterhouse, at Spital Croft,  was rented as a cemetery from St Bartholomew's in 1348. A chapel and hermitage was constructed there, and this became a Carthusian priory later in the century (the "Charterhouse"). The cemetery has remained as open land, whilst the Priory was forcibly dissolved (the Prior hung drawn and quartered - and his arm nailed to the door - whilst fellow Carthusians died on the scaffold or starved to death in Newgate Prison. The Charterhouse became a Tudor courtyard mansion after much modification, and graveyard remained open space as "the green".

Charterhouse from the Green in 1813

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From 1611, the Charterouse was endowed as a charity by the legacy of it's then owner - who owned coal mines near Newcastle - and since then has been run as a school and an almshouse. Later "Brethren" (almshouse dwellers, musicians, businessmen, etc) are buried at the former Bow Cemetery (now Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park), in 8 burials per grave. This is a higher density than the burials in the original Plague Cemetery.

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London Landscape Observer: Bubonic Plague from Black Death victims in the Eas...: In 1985, I excavated the first plague pit to be recognised on Spital Square excavations. It started with me recognising two skeletons onoother, one buried face up, the other face down. And then I recognised the other skeletons in the group, all intact and with the outer skeletons slightly bent to the sides of a square pit. Now skeletons from Spitalfields and "East Smithfield" (the Mint) may have yielded DNA confirming that Bubonic Plague was the cause of Black Death.

Spitalfields - the historic name for the area of which Spital Square is just a part - is a corruption of Hospital Fields and is named after the hospital of St Mary without (outside) Bishopsgate, which lay to the east of the main road north leading out of the City of London. It was later built over and became an immigrant suburb. It was characteristically "East End" of London, with markets and low wage jobs. The Corporation of the City of London built a new wholesale market there (markets had been held there since the 17th century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spitalfields_Market ). This displaced residents for whom the Corporation built the flats I live in  

http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Housing/Council_housing/Housing_estates/dron.htm  . The area is still a hotspot for a modern plague, tuberculosis, with 60.5 cases per 100,000 in 2009 compared with 15 per 100,000 in England as a whole Tower Hamlets Factsheet . It always was a hotspot for the disease and Heliotherapy was pioneered at the Royal London Hospital (who treated king George V with it in 1928). My Grandparents, Bernard and Elizabeth Sefton, osteopaths from the 1930s, used ultra-violet lamps in their practice, they did not cure, but did control their daughter, my auntie Olive's TB gland in her neck. A neighbour and colleague was greatly weakened by tuberculosis, which contributed to his death in the 1980s. People and Landscape....

(Y. pestis is a recently evolved descendent of the soil-dwelling bacillus Yersinia pseudotuberculosis)