Bland Family Monument, South Enclosure

635-1/0/10263 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Bland family monument, South enclosure

GV II Headstone of the Bland Family, 1767

LOCATION: 532707.5, 182219.6

MATERIALS: Slate, its durability ensuring a clearly legible inscription.

DESCRIPTION: The headstone has a shaped top and an inscription on one side. It commemorates first Master Thomas Bland, died June 1767, aged 10 months, and then his mother Mrs Mary Bland, died December 1767, aged 26. Her epitaph reads: 'Here rests a woman, good and without pretence, / Blest with plain reason and with sober sense. / So unaffected, so compos'd a mind; / So firm, yet soft; so strong, yet so resign'd. / Heaven as its purest gold by tortures try'd, / The saint sustained it, but the woman dy'd.' Finally, it records the death of Mr Thomas Bland, Mary's husband, in 1777.

HISTORY: Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5. Nothing is presently known of the Blands, other than what is revealed by their headstone.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902). A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to the Bland Family is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It is a well-preserved slate headstone of 1767 * The inscription is clearly legible, something of a rarity in Bunhill Fields, and the pious epitaph is representative of the many lost inscriptions on other headstones in the burial ground. * It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed monuments in the south enclosure.