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Churchyard Inscriptions of the City of London
Percy C. Rushen
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Original Publication Date: 1910
Original Publisher:
Phillimore & Co. Ltd.
Total records: 1,400 (approx)
This article published: December 30, 2020
Background
In the early 1900's, a Londoner named Percy C. Rushen embarked on a project to record the monument inscriptions of churchyards throughout the City of London.
Rushen was inspired after noticing numerous churchyard monuments having fallen over or decaying under the elements. In addition, the City of London, at the time, had demolished old buildings in an effort to widen streets, and had encroached on these old burying grounds.
In all, Rushen recorded the readable monuments of 59 churchyards throughout London.
It's important to note that Rushen did not visit all churchyards in London, only those that appeared to be neglected and/or in danger of being demolished.
Recording Monument Inscriptions
In his Introduction, Rushen explains that he was not able to record the full inscriptions mainly because much of what was inscribed had little to no value to the historian or genealogist, and that recording the full inscription would take his entire lifetime to examine, read, and determine what had been eroded over time across the entire City.
He instead transcribed "abstracts", just the more important information for resesarchers.
Rushen also states that he had to obtain authorization to enter these churchyards, and after doing so, found that most of these monuments were completely unreadable. In one case, he entered a churchyard and found only two (2) partially readable monuments.
Download the Full Book Here
An actual copy of the book was obtained by Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, IN who in turn scanned all the pages, OCR'd the text, and uploaded it to Internet Archives (archives.org). The finished product was then made available for public download there.
We downloaded the PDF version of this book, then stripped out the blank pages to decrease the file size, and reassembled it into a condensed version linked here...
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