90 
A Second Study of the English SliuU 
this quadrangle was a tower, like a martello tower, with a flag attached to it. This 
tower remains after the archway disappears, and serves to identify the quadrangle. 
It appears, for example, in Ryther's map of IGO-i, and we see that it was in the 
centre of the plot, which in maps of somewhat later date is marked as Old 
Bethlem Burial Ground. There can be little doubt accordingly, that Sir Thomas 
Roe fenced in a portion of the Bethlem quadrangle as the burial ground, and that 
this burial ground was originally separated by the buildings terminating in the 
archway (over Brokers' Row as it was called later) from the street afterwards termed 
Old Bethlem, which indeed may have partially covered the site of these houses. 
Thus from the very founding of the burial ground it is improbable that it ever 
covered the south-west corner of the plot. It would be difficult to determine when 
these houses disappeared, but they were gone before the middle of the l7th century, 
and from this time to Hollar's map of 1706 we find the western and southern 
boundaries of the Bethlem plot are marked as separate enclosures. 
The improbability that the bones are directly due to interments in Old 
Bethlem Burial Ground is increased by the fact that they were uncoffined. Even 
in excavating for Broad Street coffined bones were only found on a portion of the 
excavated site*. Such burials are characteristic not of ordinary interment, but of 
interment during an epidemic, and the want of any arrangement noted in both 
1863 and 1903 tends to confirm the view that on the borders of Sir Thomas Roe's 
ground plague pits were dug at one or another period. 
If we turn to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year we find that he gives a long 
list of plague pits, and there is little doubt that although he was a child at the 
time, he was still able as a man to get recent and authentic information. After 
enumerating various spots where there were pits, he continues : 
"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 although not 
wholly taken in on the same occasion-f." 
This description seems to fit well the spot where the bones were found, i.e. the 
corner where Old Bethlem ran into Moorfields, and further accounts fully for 
the uncoffined mass of bones without arrangement extending from 4 to 8 or 10 ft. 
below the surface. 
It is not of course possible to assign dogmatically a definite date and character 
to these Moorfields crania, but we may hold with a high degree of probability that 
they were drawn from the plague pit referred to by Defoe, and accordingly date 
from 1665. 
Those who incline to believe that they originally came — as in the case of 
a clearance pit — from the burial ground, can assign any date from 1569 to about 
1750, the ground being probably in most use not very far from the plague pit date. 
* See Notest and Queries, August 1, 1863. 
t Morley's Edition, p. 295. The "uot wholly taken in," clearly refers to the already existing 
Bethlem burial ground alougside. 
