The Graveyard of the Outcast Dead

Frank Turner's Tales From No Man's Land

Somethin' Else

History

4.8 • 674 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2019

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Discover the story behind Frank Turner’s song The Graveyard of the Outcast Dead. The so-called "Winchester Geese" are a group of forgotten women who in medieval times worked in the brothels on the bank of the River Thames. At the end of their lives many were buried in a mass grave for the “outcast dead”, which was closed in 1853. Years later, their bones were rediscovered and the site was turned into a memorial garden, now known as Cross Bones. In this episode Frank meets writer and activist John Constable, who has campaigned for many years to maintain Cross Bones as a garden of remembrance.

You can buy and stream Frank's album No Man's Land here.

This episode was produced by Hayley Clarke and the executive producer was Peggy Sutton. There was additional production from Paul Smith, Steve Ackerman, Josh Gibbs and Charlie Caplowe. Tales from No Man’s Land is produced by Frank Turner, Xtra Mile Recordings and Somethin’ Else.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Frank Turner. Welcome to Tales from No Man's Land, a podcast that accompanies my album, No Man's Land. It's about 13 women from history, who you probably haven't heard of, but definitely should have. Their stories are fascinating, moving, funny,
0:22.7	and most importantly, worth celebrating and sharing.
0:32.4	They buried my body on Christmas,
0:36.1	in the ground by the South River Bank.
0:40.5	Work to my death from my very last breath I'd the Winchester bishops to thank.
0:47.7	Welcome back, everybody, to Tales from No Man's Land. Most of the songs on my album focus on just
0:52.9	one woman, but this story is about a group of
0:55.3	women. It's slightly different. I do a lot of history walking in my spare time around London. It's
0:59.6	one of my passions. And on one of my walks in an area called South Bank of the River Thames,
1:04.8	I stumbled on this magic place that was called the Crossbones Graveyard. It's also known as the
1:09.6	graveyard of the outcast dead. It's also known as the graveyard of the Outcast Dead.
1:11.5	And he meets me in the graveyard, the graveyard where they made my bed.
1:19.0	Plants to white flower under cold stars on the grave of the forgotten dead.
1:32.5	It's a truly weird and remarkable place. I mean, just for starters, with a name like that,
1:37.5	you can't really not pay attention to it. And as you walk along, on the railings around the place,
1:41.2	there are hundreds of locks and ribbons and tributes that really draw the eye and make you want to find out what this place is and what it's about. So I walked over and I started reading about how this was a recently rediscovered mass grave
1:49.1	for women who'd worked in the medieval sex trade. And most bitterly, they technically worked
1:54.2	in the sex trade as employees of the medieval church. And after a lifetime of that kind of work,
1:59.3	they'd then been buried in unconsecrated
2:01.3	ground because of the work they've been doing for the church, which for me is bitterly ironic.
2:06.9	Over time, the grave had been forgotten and psalms were built on top of it and it slipped out
2:11.2	of popular memory. But in the late 20th century, when they were extending the Jubilee Underground
	...

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