Charterhouse Square — The Black Death Pit

Charterhouse Square in London sits directly above a major 1348 Black Death burial ground containing the remains of tens of thousands of plague victims just 2.5 meters beneath the ground. Leased by knight Sir Walter de Manny, the trench cemetery was London's largest plague site before he founded a Carthusian monastery above it in 1371. Excavations in 2013 uncovered 25 skeletons carrying Yersinia pestis bacteria.

London · from the walk “Monks, Martyrs & Marxists” · audio ~3 min · Generated

Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6AN

What was discovered beneath Charterhouse Square during Crossrail excavations in 2013?

Take a look around you. This quiet garden, with its neat hedgerows and iron benches... this is Charterhouse Square. And right beneath your feet, just two and a half meters below the surface, lie the remains of tens of thousands of people who died in one of the worst catastrophes in human history.......... It was the autumn of thirteen forty-eight. In the city of London alone, an estimated sixty percent of the population would perish over the coming years. The churchyards filled up fast. Bodies were stacked in graves, and still there wasn't enough room. The chronicler John Stow later wrote that the Bishop of London purchased a piece of ground called "No Man's Land" for the burial of the dead.......... But it was a soldier who truly shaped this place. Walter de Manny, a knight from Hainault, had arrived in England aged seventeen in the retinue of Philippa, who was on her way to marry the young King Edward the Third. He became a fearsome warrior of the Hundred Years War... but when the plague hit London, this battle-hardened knight did something unexpected. He leased a parcel of land from Saint Bartholomew's Hospital just outside the city walls, and it became London's largest plague burial ground.......... Now here's what most people get wrong. This was Not a chaotic dumping ground. Recent research has shown that this was an official burial ground with individual, ordered graves, carefully designed to prevent the further spread of plague. The pits took the form of narrow trenches, with bodies laid in neat rows.......... In twenty thirteen, Cross-rail engineers sank a shaft right here... and struck bone. They found twenty-five skeletons surrounded by fourteenth-century pottery, and testing confirmed the presence of Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. And the bones told extraordinary stories. Many of the skeletons were malnourished, and one in six showed signs of rickets. Forty percent had grown up Away from London, and many showed signs of brutal manual labor. One man had the point of an arrowhead lodged in his spine, the bone fused around it, showing he had survived that appalling injury... only to be claimed by the plague.......... According to Manny's own account, no fewer than fifty thousand people were buried here in that terrible year. And what did he do with this land of death? In thirteen seventy-one, an adjoining portion was used to establish a Carthusian monastery, with Sir Walter as its principal founder. It fell to the monks to pray for the souls of those buried in the plague pit beneath them. Manny himself died the very next year... and was buried right here, before his own altar.......... In nineteen forty-seven, during post-war restoration, archaeologists found his skeleton in a lead coffin, identified by a papal seal of Pope Clement the Sixth still around his neck.......... A warrior, a plague, a monastery built on bones. And above it all... this peaceful little square, where Londoners walk their dogs without a second thought.

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