Cross Bones Graveyard and the Outcast Dead

Across Southwark Street, a few hundred metres from the insanely busy Borough Market, is a little oasis of calm and mortality called the Crossbones Graveyard.

Truth be told this is simply a corner plot that had been abandoned behind high brick walls for a number of years. OS maps of c1900 show it as the site of St Saviour’s Parish School (separate buildings for boys and girls of course), but also marked with a bit of Gothic script (denoting an historic site) stating “site of the Cross Bones Burying Ground”.

This was a paupers’ graveyard that closed in 1853, the final resting place for the poor of an area of Southwark known as ‘The Mint’ (Henry VIII had established a mint here in the 16th century), an area of some of the most extreme poverty in the capital in the 18th and 19th centuries. When TFL built an electricity substation for the Jubilee Line extension on the eastern margin of the site 148 bodies were exhumed; it was estimated that this might be less than 1% of the burials, giving a total in excess of 15,000 (which are still under our feet). It is not surprising that the burial ground was said to be “completely overcharged with dead”.

In one of those bits of historical synchronicity, the land being developed right next door to Cross Bones (a development called ‘The Liberty of Southwark’ – more on ‘The Liberty’ shortly) has revealed a Roman Mausoleum (and some extraordinary mosaics). This ground has held London’s dead for over 1700 years.

Adding to this, a legend has grown up (one eliding through repeated telling as ‘fact’) that Cross Bones was the burial ground mentioned by John Stow in his 1598 Survey of London where the prostitutes from the brothels of Bankside were interred. Stow reports that these establishments (“bordellos or stews” he calls them), had been permitted since the 8th year of the reign of Henry II (so 1161). This refers to the power granted to Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, in that year to licence brothels.

Stow had been told “by ancient men of good credit” that the women working in the stews “were forbidden the rights of the church…and were excluded from Christian burial…and therefore there was a plot of land, called the single women’s churchyard, appointed for them”.

This reputed graveyard presumably didn’t exist in Stow’s time or he is likely to have mentioned its location, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to link Cross Bones with Stow’s secondhand report. Morgan’s 1682 map shows enclosed fields, but no marked burial ground.

The stews were situated around Bankside as this was a ‘Liberty’, an area outside the jurisdiction of the City of London and of the Sheriff of the county of Surrey; laws and regulations were looser. The ‘Liberty of the Clink’ as it was known, was under the control of the Bishop of Winchester (the remains of the Great Hall of Winchester Palace can still be seen in Pickford’s Wharf, just next to the Golden Hinde). The bishops were therefore deriving income from the licences they granted to the stews in the area; prostitutes here became known as ‘Winchester Geese’ in ‘recognition’ of this.

Stow says that the rights granted to the bishop were revoked by Henry VIII in 1546, “put down by the king’s commandment, which was proclaimed by the sound of trumpet,” but it’s clear that the area continued as a ‘red light district’ in some form or other. It also became associated with other activities that the City and the County of Surrey would rather not host – entertainments such as bull and bear baiting, and (worst of all) theatres. It was in the Liberty that the Rose Theatre opened in 1587, followed by others such as The Swan and The Hope and, most famously, The Globe in 1599.

The modern ‘rebirth’ of the Cross Bones graveyard as a garden and place of remembrance comes about from the late ‘90s when a local writer called John Constable wrote poems and plays under the name ‘John Crow’ which he said were channelling a secret history revealed by someone/some spirit called ‘The Goose’. I will pass swiftly over the esoteric New Age mumbo jumbo inherent in the project, but on a real world level Constable and his associates erected a ‘guerilla garden’ within the walls of this derelict piece of ground. The red iron gates on Redcross Way were turned into a shrine which is still used as a place of remembrance, ribbons and photos being tied to the metalwork.

The site is now run by Bankside Open Spaces Trust who secured a lease from TFL which was recently confirmed for the next 30 years as part of the ‘Liberty of Southwark’ development on the land adjacent to the burial ground (this is the building work that revealed the Roman mausoleum).

You can visit Cross Bones on Wednesday, Thursday and Fridays (and the last Saturday of each month) between noon and 2pm. Details here on the Trust’s webpages.