Sunday 4 August 2019

Bricked up alive?; the boy mummy of St Botolph's Without Aldgate


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. 






10 comments:

  1. You hav eto wonder about these things, the body of the boy, seems a little suspect to me. Was the poor might a more recent death made to look old, a little like the dagger.

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    1. We'll never know Bill as the mummy has now completely disappeared.

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  2. Poor child...even making allowance for the mores of a different time, it all feels utterly ghoulish. Shame on the churchwardens (and I don't think much of J. Symmons supposed "elegant and classic taste")

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    1. Yes Symmons' "elegant and classic taste" seems more than a little dubious these days.

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  3. Oooh, you'll probably get a spike in your traffic this weekend. Undine's given this post a link in her Strange Company blog's Friday Link Dump!

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    1. It isn't the first time but it has been a while since Undine honoured me with a mention in her weekend link dump. And yes, there was an associated spike in my traffic.

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  4. Interesting! I have seen studies of objects found inside house walls, but I'd be curious to see a report of bodies found walled up, particularly in churches. I studied for several months in a town in Tuscany; one of its churches had apparently found a body within the walls fairly recently. Not sure if it was mummified like this poor lad at St Botolph's, but the consensus was that it was centuries old.

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    1. The accounts say he was found in a vault which is basically a brick or stone lined burial chamber excavated in the church floor. Some vaults were small crypts with places for dozens of coffins, others are just big enough for a couple of coffins. The fact that he wasn't in a coffin means he presumably wasn't an official burial. The later added detail of gnaw marks on his shoulders probably needs taking with a pinch of salt. If you were starving to death and decided to consume yourself you would surely start with something easier to chew on, like a finger, rather than try and take a bite out of your own shoulder?

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  5. Hi there, not sure if this is of interest, but I came across a reference to the boys remains in “Guide to the surgical instruments and objects in the historical series with their history and development” by C.J.S. Thompson published in 1929, which documents the objects held at that time in the Hunterian Museum, RCS. Page 80 states:

    Case 9, Shelf A. Mummies of two infants, young crocodiles
    and a cat.
    Shelf B. Human remains found five feet below the surface
    in virgin peat moss at Underbarrow, Westmoreland.
    Bones from a prehistoric interment at Constantine Bay,
    Cornwall, in a remarkable state of preservation.
    The dried body of a boy about twelve years of age, found
    erect with his clothes on, in 1742, in a vault under old St.
    Botolph's Church, Aldgate. He is supposed to have been shut
    in and forgotten at the time of the plague of London in 1665.

    Not sure if the Museum still has the remains, if they would say even if they did, or if the remains were destroyed during the Blitz, but worth a query if you are interested.

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    1. This is very interesting! He ended up in the Hunterian - he was there by 1860 at the latest as I've found a magazine article in 'Once A Week' by Andrew Wynter from then which mentions him as being there. There is nothing in the current on line catalogue of the museum about him and I suspect that you might be right about the blitz. The museum took a direct hit in May 1941 and some of the more unusual mummies in the collection were destroyed - John Sheldon's preserved woman and Maria Van Butchell. As they were in adjacent display cabinets according to your source it seems very likely that the St Botolph's boy went up in flames as well. Thank you for letting me know about this!

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