View report page

112
private dwelling house, and therefore specially excluded from the
operation of the Act. No appeal was taken, as the Solicitors considered
it better to take a fresh case, and the second case, which was similar,
was adjourned sine die in consequence.

Removal of Human Remains.
In the course of making excavations for an extension of buildings at
the corner of Clement's Lane and Portugal Street, a number of skulls
and bones were found, and the matter coming to the notice of the Home
Office, an order was made requiring all human remains to be removed
under my supervision.
The graveyard in Portugal Street was purchased by the Parish of
St. Clement Danes in 1638 for the use of such of the parishioners who
could not be accommodated in the churchyard (which then extended over
the space between the present churchyard and the end of Holywell and
Wych Streets), and Dr. Juxon, Bishop of London, granted the parish
a commission for a rate to wall in the burial ground in the same year.
The fees charged at Portugal Street were lower than those for burial
in the churchyard.
About the year 1848 considerable attention was directed to the scandalous
way in which burial grounds in London were conducted, and a
Committee appointed by the parish reported that this ground contained
14,968 superficial feet, or rather more than one-third of an acre, and
that from the parish books it appeared that the number of bodies
deposited in this space during the twenty-five years preceding 1848 was
5,518. They calculated that if these coffins had been laid out side by
side, without any earth intervening, they would cover an area of
1 acre 5,510 feet, so that in order to get them into one-third of an acre,
there must have been several coffins in each grave.
In 1850 Parliament passed an Act prohibiting interments within
the limits of the Metropolis, so that probably no further burials took
place after that date.
Joe Miller, who died of pleurisy on the 15th August, 1738,
aged 54, was buried in this graveyard; and Peter Cunningham, in his "Handbook of London, " published in 1850, speaks of Joe Miller's