Burying or Unburying the Dead

A few weeks ago, while on my epic church crawl in north-east England, a brief chat on Notes about the gravestones in the photos led me to think about writing this post. In this country we are so blessed by the mountains of history around us, going back thousands of years, that the most recent elements are actually not of interest. So I made a throwaway comment about the gravestones in the picture being mostly 19th century and so not interesting to me. Actually, I have done quite a lot of cemetery crawling too and some gravestones are actually very interesting indeed, but that’s another story…

So this post is going to be a brief gallop through the history of Christian burial and gravestones, as seen through my travels around England.

Early Christians had no specific burial practices in terms of location and seem to have followed the prevailing customs of the societies around them. In the Roman world, this meant burial outside the settlement, usually along roads. We can see this in the burial locations of both St Peter and St Paul in Rome - St Paul alongside a main road. St Peter, while his burial site is now underneath St Peters, also seems to have been interred in some kind of construction along an area of small roads, a whole section of which is now preserved under St Peter’s basilica as it was buried in order to level up the area for subsequent rebuilding. We also know of burial in catacombs, which was also not an exclusively Christian practice.

As Christians emerged from the Persecutions, in the 4th and 5th centuries they started to bury people around their churches and by the 6th century this had become a common practice. In 563 the Council of Braga permitted burials around churches, but not inside them. The Council of Nantes in 660 allowed burials in the atrium and subsidiary buildings. It may be that actual practice got slightly ahead of the church authorities which is why they felt the need to make rules about it.

Take the church which St Augustine of Canterbury built, around the year 600. Architectural fragments remain from this church, along with some foundations and it shows a very Roman style of building, with columns and decoration that would have graced many buildings across the Roman world. I took photos of the information signs when I visited as most of it is not visible now.

St Augustine himself and his successors were buried in a portico on the side of the building, so outside the main body of the church. The portico on the other side was the burial place for the local aristocracy - some call them kings of England but that’s probably overstating their reach a bit.

Gradually churchyards were established around churches. Cuthbert, Archbishop in Canterbury in 742 is believed to have formalised and regulated the practice. It’s likely that this had been going on for some time. Some churches were built on very ancient pre-Christian holy sites (often with springs or pools) and already had circular enclosures around them being used for burial. Others were established by monks following celtic monastic practice and these also usually had circular enclosures so many churchyards go back that far. Burial inside a church came later and was first reserved for saints - the story of St Swithin is instructive here. He died in 862 and was buried outside the church. His body was moved inside the church on the 15th July in 971 and again in 1093. St Swithin apparently objected to this and the heavens poured with rain, giving rise to the saying that if it rains on St Swithin’s day we will have 40 days’ rain. Once saints started to be buried inside churches, high ranking church officials and local aristocrats followed, the lesser mortals remaining outside. We do have a number of examples of monks and nuns being buried in the cloister but it would have been physically impossible to fit them all in so many must still have been laid to rest in a monastic graveyard. Where a monastery church functioned as a parish church too, there would usually be two graveyards - one for the monks and one for the parishioners.

So back to graves. As we know, Christian burials are oriented with the head to the west and the feet to the East and it is common these days to have a headstone marking the grave at the west end of the grave. Gravestones don’t seem to be that common in antiquity - perhaps a wooden cross marked the spot - as carving stone cost money. The earliest gravestones we seem to have are from monastic sites and we can roughly date them because they usually have writing, the style of which is datable.

Here are two: on the left a gravestone from Lindisfarne, and on the right the Herebricht stone from the monastery at Monkwearmouth. Herebricht may well have known St Bede. The Lindisfarne stone is earlier than the Herebricht stone, which is 8th century.

Of course, most people did not have the money or available skills to have stones inscribed and so it’s likely that they didn’t have them. We have a big gap in the historical record for stones in the early medieval period, but the ones we do have are inscribed with symbols rather than writing.

Here are some fairly early and crude examples from Ovingham, Northumbria. The cross featured prominently and here we can see two symbols which recur for centuries. On one there is a sword and this is believed to refer to a man; on the other a pair of shears and this is believed to relate to a woman.

Here are some later ones; on the left you can just see a key which presumably had some meaning. On the right is another sword, while in the centre is a grave marker for a priest, with a chalice and paten.

In the norse areas of the country we also have some hogback tombstones from the 9th century (left below) which look like little houses. At Wirksworth in Derbyshire (right below) there is a fabulous stone which has gently sloping sides, like a roof, and which is believed to have covered the grave of some local saint, now lost to history, and is probably around 800.

The gravestones pictured here are no longer in situ and have been dug up in recent times, either through archaeological excavations or during church renovations, where they were discovered under floors or built into walls. The fate of many early medieval gravestones was to be reused in buildings. Here you can see a grave slab used as a lintel for a later window, and also two very small grave markers built into a wall to preserve them. These very small markers may have been fairly common; cheap to make but also easy to destroy and re-use in building work.

The question is why remove and effectively destroy them? The reason is because of re-use of the burial ground. Many of these churchyards have been in use for over 1000 years. These days we have an attitude of not disturbing the dead so when a churchyard is “full” it is closed to new burials. In earlier ages they would simply clear the remaining bones from the ground and re-use it. For this reason you often find that the ground on one side of the church is significantly higher than elsewhere - usually around the east end, the constant decomposition adding soil over the centuries.

So what did they do with the bones? In some acid soils it is likely that there were very few remains after a century or two, especially as people were buried in shrouds and not coffins. This also meant that you could pack more in - notice that the gravestones pictured here are narrower than their modern counterparts. But where bones did remain they were removed and kept in ossuaries.

This is St Leonard’s in Hythe (Kent), the most famous example in this country. They are kept in an area below the chancel of the church and have been very well studied. Most of the bones are female (over 90%) which has raised a number of questions - how did they know which graves were female, why exhume only them, being two for starters. Not many people these days are aware that until the late medieval period, churches were sex-segregated. Women stood/kneeled/sat on the north, men on the south. There were two doors to enter the church - north and south - though in many cases once sex segregation stopped, the north door was closed. Sex segregation is an ancient church practice, recorded in the early centuries.

So one of the thoughts about this collection of bones is that cemeteries were also segregated by sex and the reason these bones were exhumed is because in the 13th century the chancel was extended and this required their removal.

We do know that there were many ossuaries of this kind though not many exist now. In the post-Reformation turmoil of the 16th and 17th centuries, these places were often seen as centres of “popish” practices such as praying for the dead. The crypts where these remains were housed usually contained an altar where mass was said for their souls. Along with the relics of saints, it is likely that many of the bones of previous parishioners were burnt or reburied somewhere as beliefs changed. In later periods they may also have been burned to make fertiliser!

If you go round a graveyard of any church in England which existed before the Reformation, the oldest gravestones you will see are 17th century and there will be very few of them. Occasionally you will find 18th century stones but well over 90% of gravestones will be 19th century or later.

These days gravestones are mostly removed for health and safety reasons or to make the graveyard easier to maintain, with the bodies remaining in situ and the gravestones recycled into paths. Nowadays we have an aversion to disturbing the dead but in previous centuries people were not so squeamish; graveyards were finite in space so recycling was the order of the day.