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 came at them, were carried to another part of the same ground and
thrown all together into a deep pit, dug on purpose, which now is to be
known 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 meeting-house
which has been built there many years since; and the ground is
palisadoed 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.

(4) 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.]

(5) 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 has been built for
ease to this great parish, and another in Petticoat Lane.

There were no less than five other grounds made use of for the parish of
Stepney at that time: one where now stands the parish church of St Paul,
Shadwell, and the other where now stands the parish church of St John's
at Wapping, both which had not the names of par