Here's a Guardian article about a medieval charnel house in London: House of the medieval dead lurks in lawyers' basement.
Posted on July 7, 2005 09:17 PM. Filed under: history & archaeology.The charnel house was a consecrated store for bones from the cemetery at Spitalfields in London - sited in the "hospital fields" which gave the area its name - allowing graves to be re-used at a time when, archaeological evidence suggests, the hospital was overwhelmed by the plague.
One of four charnel houses surviving in England, it is the only medieval building in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.
Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank, a neighbour, praised the building as a conduit to the beliefs of medieval Londoners. "This is a beautiful house of the medieval dead, where bones were preserved against the day of judgment when the righteous would enjoy paradise while the damned were consigned to the torments of hell."
More than 10,000 buried human remains, the largest single excavation in Britain, were found in the 14th-century building. It was discovered in 1999 during archaeological excavations and has been integrated into the basement of a Norman Foster building which houses law firm Allen & Overy. [continue]