The deceased were elsewhere, in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory…” But then in the very next paragraph, ?ropos the medieval habit of drinking, fighting and dancing on hallowed ground, she claims: “We should remember that the bond between the living and the dead was very different from today. There are a few repetitions and huge jumps in the timespan of the narrative (Romans to Anglo-Saxons to medieval times in a hop and skip, for example). In one paragraph she describes the medieval attitude to death as follows: “The concept of returning to the grave of a loved one, and communing with their memory, was unknown. The Courtauld fortunes were built on sales of black crape after Prince Albert’s death rendered heavy mourning fashionable; there were four shops selling mourning in Regent’s Street, including Peter Robinson’s Mourning Warehouse, and department stores sold widows’ outfits with names like “The Aesthetic” and, oddly, “The Houri”.Arnold occasionally gets herself in a bit of a knot, historically. (Though the actress Sheila Gish specified: “No black to be worn please (unless of course it’s your best colour).” What does the carving of an urn draped in cloth, a familiar sight in a Victorian cemetery, signify? It marks the grave of the head of a family. Why are mourning clothes traditionally black? The fearful Romans believed that black rendered mourners invisible to vengeful spirits.

The custom may have arisen as a way of baffling a lingering ghost.Arnold’s book abounds in deliciously uncanny detail. Anne Boleyn, headless, bundled into a chest, was uncovered during Victorian renovations at the church of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower, and solemnly reinterred under the marble floor. In 1866 a body pierced through with a stake was dug up by a gas company in Cable Street; it was thought to be that of the infamous Ratcliff Highway Murderer, John Williams, who committed suicide after being accused of battering seven people to death.Williams had been buried at a crossroads; Arnold relates that the last case of crossroads suicide burial was probably that of another murderer-suicide, John Mortland, in 1823, outside where Lord’s Cricket Ground now stands. The Charterhouse was built in 1370 on a plague pit filled with victims of the Black Death. In Necropolis, Catharine Arnold conjures up an appalling vista of endless grinning skulls stretching back into prehistory.Bodies are occasionally retrieved from the universal maw. In 1549, a chapel in St Paul’s was demolished and 1,000 cartloads of bones from the vault and charnel house were removed to Finsbury Fields Three windmills were erected on the rising ground. Liverpool Street Station stands on a plague pit, and Arnold reports that “when a bookshop in Oxford Street was rebuilt in the early 1920s, numbers of human bones were found eight feet down, not in rows, but buried indiscriminately, as if the bodies had been flung in.” The Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington is said to curve around “a pit so dense with human remains that it could not be tunnelled through”.
Overflowing cemeteries and the high price of real estate were not new issues, even in Pepys’s day.

The victims of the plague of 1665 rapidly overflowed existing provision. A thousand people died in Stepney alone in one week; coffins ran out, then burial plots; soon cartloads of bodies were flung into pits, which could fill up in a couple of days. After the pestilence subsided, the land was swiftly reused; the foundations of a mansion in Bishopsgate cut through bodies which could still be identified as male or female by their flesh. In times of plague and war, the dead definitely seem to be getting the upper hand. But London seems to be one huge charnel house, a veritable lasagne of corpses, and at times in the city’s history they have threatened to overwhelm the living with their demands for psychic and physical space.

Catharine Arnold explores this complex interplay between the two states in her grimly entertaining survey of death rituals, mourning and the practicalities of disposal. Anyone who watches Time Team will know that if you dig enough holes in English fields and back gardens, eventually you’ll find human remains lying peacefully under the greensward. Apart from anything else, it is full of dinner-party titbits: Bonaparte falling off the Arcole Bridge (as notably not painted by Horace Vernet); General Ducrot observing the surrounding Prussian army and sighing “We’re in a chamber-pot and about to be shat on.” The Judgement of Paris is a good read and good history; as unusual a pairing as its twin subjects.. “One of the first duties of a sovereign,” observed a shrewd Napoleon, “is to amuse his subjects.” If less directly, Manet was as much the Emperor’s man as Meissonier.King’s is a brilliant book, a micro-history that feels like a macro-history.

But it was also Napoleon who was behind the Salon des Refus?of 1863 where Le Bain was first shown. Keen to distract public attention from reverses in his Mexican adventure, the Emperor insisted scandals like Manet’s should be given a show of their own. Remembrance of Civil War was seen as so seditious after Napoleon III’s coup that the court fed Meissonier commissions to keep him from painting anything like it again Thus the pierrots and ruddy drinkers. One reason for Meissonier’s fall from grace was his identification with the Second Empire. Le Bain was inspired by the Raphael which gives King’s book its title, Olympia by Titian’s Venus of Urbino – pedigrees that would have had the Academic Meissonier nodding with glee.But the real fascination of The Judgement of Paris is in King’s linking of his subjects to events outside the art world.