Tales from the Crypts

... good money was to be made by charging wealthy parishioners to stack coffins containing their dead family members under the church.

The daily blog Spitalfields Life publishes a timely item, A Brief History of Crypts, written by Malcolm Johnson, author of Crypts of London and formerly Rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate.

We learn that:

"in the eighteenth century most parishes received around seven per cent of their income from interments, although at St James Garlickhythe the average was nearly twenty-seven per cent. 

No wonder there was resistance from the clergy to the closure of London churches to further burials as a sanitary measure in 1852.