From
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...-ground-bedlam

Extract:

Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, Thursday 8 August 2013

Every day hordes of London commuters have passed unknowingly over the
bodies of thousands of their predecessors, buried a few metres under the
roaring traffic and rumbling trains at Liverpool Street, and which are now
being exposed for the first time by the huge Crossrail construction
project.

The bodies include those of mentally ill patients from Bethlem, the ancient
and notorious asylum from which the word Bedlam entered the English
language. Bodies that were never claimed by their families – often those of
beaten, starved and exploited inmates – would have ended up in the burial
ground alongside rich and poor, old and young, victims of plague and war,
from across London.

Jay Carver, lead archaeologist on the Crossrail sites – the largest
archaeology project in the UK on the largest infrastructure project in
Europe – described the site as exceptionally interesting. "Because of its
history, we know that this is one of the most diverse burial grounds in
London, a real cross section of its people across two centuries. Bone
preservation is excellent in the finds we have already made, and we are
expecting many important discoveries when we get into the main phase of the
excavation."

The trial trenches have already yielded the first treasure from the 40
archaeology sites along the route of Crossrail's tunnelling: a
thumbnail-sized golden coin from Venice, pierced so it could be stitched on
as expensive decoration on some costly garment – and likely a bad loss when
the thread broke and it fell into the gutter some 400 years ago.

The archaeologists have also found a stretch of a superbly engineered Roman
road that probably led to a bridge across the river Walbrook. Builders laid
logs and brushwood on the boggy ground before building it up in layers,
finishing with gravel and rammed clay still so solid and sound it looks
modern. Embedded in the road surface was a human bone, possibly washed out
of earlier burials nearby, and another loss that must have caused some
cursing: a horse shoe. More Roman finds are confidently expected.

The walled, two-acre burial ground was opened in the mid-17th century by
order of the mayor of London. It was the first built away from the city's
parish churches and their bursting, grossly overfilled graveyards and was
usually known as Bedlam because it was on land formerly occupied by the
mental hospital, which had recently moved to Moorfields. It would move
again to the present site of the Imperial War Museum, and finally to
Bromley in Kent, where it survives today as the Bethlem Royal hospital.

From the start, because it had a preaching pulpit but no church, it was
associated with dissenters — as Bunhill Fields later became. Carver hopes
to find evidence of two particularly interesting characters known to have
been buried the 'Freeborn John' – John Lilburne – a radical campaigner
and pamphleteer for the rights of the common man who greatly influenced the
Levellers, was imprisoned in the Tower of London, exiled twice and
eventually died while on parole from his final jail term.

John Lockyer, a soldier in Cromwell's New Model Army who was executed for
his involvement in the Bishopsgate Mutiny – when the army defied orders to
leave London – was also buried there after a funeral that terrified the
authorities, attended by thousands of mourners wearing the Levellers' green
ribbons.

The victims of several outbreaks of plague were also buried there; as it
filled, there were appeals for more top soil to keep the bodies decently
covered, and by the time it closed in 1714 it held a 2m layer solid with
corpses. Because the bodies came from all over London, those buried there
are unusually diverse socially. This poses a problem for Carver; there are
no surviving burial records for the cemetery, and instead names are
scattered through thousands of records in the parishes where they lived or
died. He hopes to ask the public for help in tracking them down.

Part of the cemetery was excavated in the 1980s by the Museum of London,
when the Broadgate Centre was built But while towering office blocks
gradually replaced the Victorian townhouses, factories and warehouses –
which in turn displaced the warren of poor Georgian buildings – an
extensive stretch of the burial ground survived under Liverpool Street
itself. The busy road, following the route taken by the Romans almost 2,000
years earlier, kept the site as open ground and preserved the remains from
being destroyed by pile driving and foundations.

The remains of several hundred individuals have already been found in the
trial pits and the trenches dug to relocate utilities. Carver believes he
will find up to 4,000 more when the main excavation starts next year.