A
Saxon saint, very popular in the early medieval period, St. Botolph had four churches
dedicated to him in London, all close to the city gates. St. Botolph without Aldgate, being right on the edge of the city,
survived the great fire but was rebuilt in the 1740’s. A chance remark by Ed Glinert in The London Compendium caught
my attention; “When the church was rebuilt by George Dance the Elder in 1744,”
he says, “the body of a mummified boy, frozen in a standing position, was found
in the vaults and churchwardens charged members of the public twopence to see
it.” This particular church inherited a famous mummified head from a sister establishment
in the 19th century but I’d never heard of the mummified boy until I
was browsing Glinert.
Disappointingly
I couldn’t find any references to the discovery of a mummy at St. Botolph’s in
the 1740’s in the newspaper archives but both the Wellcome Collection and the
British Museum have copies of a print, probably from the 1760’s which according
to its inscription purports to show the ‘exact
representation of a boy about 12 years old who was found erect with his cloaths
on in a vault ... in the year 1742’. The inscription goes on to say that
the boy ‘is supposed to have been shut in
at the time of the plague in London 1665 as the vault had not been open'd from
that period till the time above mentioned when the church was pull'd down. The
extraordinary circumstances attending this body are, that the skin, fibres, and
intestines, are all hard, and very little of the bones appears. It weighs about
18Ibs. He is in the possession of Mr J. Rogers of No 2 Maiden Lane, Wood
Street, London. This print may be had price 2s, with a ticket for a sight of
the boy.’
John
Rogers of 2 Maiden Lane was, according to his business card, a coal merchant.
We will probably never know where or how he acquired the body of the boy from
St Botolph’s but churchwardens corrupt enough to turn the corpse of a child
into a sideshow and charge tuppence a gawp for the privilege of looking at it
would have no doubt been open to offers for permanent acquisition, at the right
price. Rogers decision to commission an engraving of the mummy and sell them at
two shillings a shot (which included the price of admission to see the cadaver)
was inspired. No one knows how many he
sold or how much money he made but copies of the print still turn for sale from
time to time (if you are tempted there is a slightly tattered one on sale on
ebay at the moment, a bargain at just £250).
The
next description of the mummy was published in 1786 in Richard Gough’s groundbreaking
work of antiquarianism “Sepulchral
monuments in Great Britain.” In a
chapter entitled ‘Instances of extraordinary preservation of the Dead in their
respective graves’ (which was widely reprinted at the time, included by the Philological
Society of London) Gough discusses numerous instances of preservation from the
ancient world to contemporary London; “To
these may be added,” he says “the
famous instance of a poor parish-boy supposed to have been shut into a vault in
St Botolph's church, Aldgate, and starved to death, at the time of the plague, 1665,
since which time the vault was known not to have been opened, where he was
found, 1742, with the fancied marks of having gnawed his shoulder, only,
perhaps because his head reclined towards it. The skin fibres and intestines
were all dried and very little of his bones appeared. The body weighed about
eighteen pounds and was as exactly a counterpart of Lichfield's as could be. No
signs of any embalment appear, and the body is perfectly free from any fetid or
other smell.” Only Gough’s account mentions the grime detail of autophagy
implying that the boy was bricked up alive in the vault and had, in a futile attempt
to stave off death by starvation, tried to eat his own shoulder.
From
an account in the Morning Advertiser of Saturday 03 January 1818 entitled Species of Natural Mummy we know that
the 12 year boy of St. Botolph’s was by this time “in the interesting collection of Mr Symmons, of Paddington House.”
The report goes on to say that “this curious
morceau of mortality, after passing through various possessions, has become the
property of the above gentleman, whose elegant and classic taste corresponds
with the benevolence and amenity of his disposition.” The description of
the mummy is taken word for word from John Rogers print; there is at least one
version of the print surviving where the reference to Rogers is struck out and
the name of John Symmons added in large florid copperplate.
John
Symmons of Paddington House was born in 1745 in Pembrokeshire, the son of a
local landowner who was the MP for the Cardigan Boroughs. He was well connected
in society and was an important collector. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a
founder member of the Royal Institution and of the Linnean Society, and a
member of numerous other societies including the Horticultural Society, the
Literary Society and the Society of Antiquaries. At Paddington House he
employed the nurseryman William Salisbury to look after his garden of 4000
species of plants which Salisbury documented in a catalogue published as Hortus Paddingtoniensis. Symmons married
four times, generally to very wealthy women (his ultimate marriage being
contracted in 1828 when he was 83 years old) and guarded the explosive secret
that his parents had not been married at the time of his birth and that the
legitimate heir to his father’s fortune was his younger brother Charles. He
was, unsurprisingly, always financially generous to his younger brother who
probably had no idea that he was the true heir to the Welsh estate of
Llanistran. Among Symmon collection was
an ancient dagger found in Wales “supposed to be the Model of those which
ministered to the Massacre of the Britons at Stonehenge.” This mythical
incident, “the supposed massacre at Stonehenge, Mr Evans in the running title of his book
calls the treachery of the long knives and the story of this horrid slaughter
is to be found in the most authentic and most ancient Welsh MSS and even in the
writings of those contemporary with Jeffrey of Monmouth who rejected his fables.”
The dagger, like the mummy of the St Botolph’s boy, disappeared for ever following
Symmon’s death on the continent in 1831 and the breakup and sale of his
collections by his heirs.
