about two or
three years after the plague was ceased, that Sir Robert Clayton[320]
came to be possessed of the ground. It was reported, how true I know not,
that it fell to the King for want of heirs (all those who had any right
to it being carried off by the pestilence), and that Sir Robert Clayton
obtained a grant of it from King Charles II. But however he came by it,
certain it is the ground was let out to build on, or built upon by his
order. The first house built upon it was a large fair house, still
standing, which faces the street or way now called Hand Alley, which,
though called an alley, is as wide as a street. The houses in the same
row with that house northward are built on the very same ground where the
poor people were buried; and the bodies, on opening the ground for the
foundations, were dug up, some of them remaining so plain to be seen,
that the women's skulls were distinguished by their long hair, and of
others the flesh was not quite perished; so that the people began to
exclaim loudly against it, and some suggested that it might endanger a
return of the contagion; after which the bones and bodies, as fast as
they[321] came at them, were carried to another part of the same ground,
and thrown altogether into a deep pit, dug on purpose, which now is to be
known[322] in that it is not built on, but is a passage to another house
at the upper end of Rose Alley, just against the door of a meetinghouse,
which has been built there many years since; and the ground is
palisadoed[323] off from the rest of the passage in a little square.
There lie the bones and remains of near two thousand bodies, carried by
the dead carts to their grave in that one year.

Fourth, Besides this, there was a piece of ground in Moorfields, by the
going into the street which is now called Old Bethlem, which was
enlarged much, though not wholly taken in, on the same occasion.

N.B. The author of this journal lies buried in that very ground, being
at his own desire, his sister having been buried there a few years
before.

Fifth, Stepney Parish, extending itself from the east part of London to
the north, even to the very edge of Shoreditch churchyard, had a piece
of ground taken in to bury their dead, close to the said churchyard; and
which, for that very reason, was left open, and is since, I suppose,
taken into the same churchyard. And they had also two other burying
places in Spittlefields,--one where since a chapel or tabernacle