Monument To Joseph Jenkins, Middle Enclosure

635-1/0/10228 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Monument to Joseph Jenkins, Middle enc losure

GV II Headstone of Joseph Jenkins, early C19

LOCATION: 532668.3, 182263.6

MATERIALS: Sandstone

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of an upright stone slab with a shaped top. The inscription commemorates the Revd Joseph Jenkins D.D. along with his daughters Sarah and Priscilla, both of whom died in 1801 aged seven and eleven respectively. A verse beneath reads: 'Corruption and worms / Shall but refine this flesh / Till my triumphant spirit comes / To put it on afresh.'

HISTORY: Joseph Jenkins (1743-1819) was born in Wrexham and educated in London and at King's College, Aberdeen. After graduating in 1765 he moved to London, where he was baptised at Samuel Stennett's church in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Around 1770 he returned to Wrexham, becoming pastor of the joint Baptist-Independent church known as the Old Meeting, formerly presided over by his father. His twenty-year incumbency was marked by disputes over doctrine and the practice of infant baptism, which he strenuously opposed. He returned to London in 1795, serving as minister to various congregations before founding a new church in the Old Kent Road. He published a number of sermons and devotional works, and was made Doctor of Divinity by the University of Edinburgh in 1790.

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.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902). J H Y Briggs, entry on Jenkins in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (retrieved on 9 June 2009).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to Joseph Jenkins is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It is a well-preserved early-C19 headstone commemorating a leading Particular Baptist minister and writer of the late 1700s. * It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the middle enclosure.