Part 1 of the *serialisation of ‘Public Graves, Workhouse Graves, Catacombs and Crosses‘ by Friends of Hull General Cemetery members Pete Lowden and Bill Longbone. See our Books page for more information on buying this and other books written by Bill and Pete.
If like me, you acquire, almost by default, the printed word in many forms, there comes a time when, to avoid negotiating moving to the living room from the kitchen without knocking into towering piles of books or newspapers, something has to be done.
About six months ago whilst leafing through a number of magazines before they went to the charity shops, I came across an article from the 2018 Heritage Open Days brochure. I’d missed it before so I sat down to have a quick read.
The article talked about public graves in Hull General Cemetery and by mentioning ‘communal coffin’ it implied that poverty was the deciding factor in their place of rest. Still later in the article the phrase used was, ‘Some 20,000 of them (burials) were probably buried in public/pauper or workhouse graves.’
The conflation of ‘public’ and ‘pauper’ caused me to blink.
This is factually incorrect I thought. As it was, I had already been preparing an article on this very subject and this gave me a delicate kick up the backside to get it done. Here it is.
Communal Coffin
Let’s dispense with this idea of a ‘communal coffin’ immediately. In the middle ages you would have been fairly wealthy to merit a coffin although recent archaeological work in Hull at the Blackfriargate site found the use of coffins quite common. Still that could have been untypical of the population at large. By the time of the Restoration in the 1660’s, and it is common knowledge that Charles II did his utmost to help the woollen industry by decreeing that all bodies should be buried in a shroud, it was beginning to be normal for people to be buried in a coffin.
There is still a communal coffin that resides at Easingwold but experts say this is probably of Tudor or maybe early Stuart make. There were no records of this coffin ever having being used in the parish records and it may simply have been kept as a historical artefact. Richardson cited, that it was seen as an oddity in 1820.
By the time of the opening of Hull General Cemetery everyone was buried in a coffin. It may have been poorly made, simply of unfinished boards, but no one had to suffer the indignity of simply a shroud burial. Even the people who died from the Cholera epidemic in 1849 in Hull were not subjected to that.
Workhouse coffins were a fact. Indeed Dickens remarked upon a workhouse funeral in Oliver Twist and, even though he was wanting to use his artistic licence to show how degrading the funeral was, for example the bearers having to trot to the grave side and the funeral dress that was lent to the relatives being taken back by the undertaker at the grave side, the body was still given a coffin. I hope that clarifies that particular issue.
One of the other common misconceptions that people jump to when investigating their family history is that they believe that if the burial record states the person being investigated was buried in a public grave then they were poor. Apart from the problem of assigning an absolute definition of the term ‘poor’, or even a relative one, and I’m not getting into that, there is little evidence to suggest that the choice made to be buried in a public grave was in any way something to deplore.
Uncle Tom and Antie Elsie
When investigating burial practice before the modern era we must be careful that we don’t take our modern values with us. One of those modern values is that a family will be buried together in the family grave. We would look askance if Uncle Tom was buried some years later after Aunt Elsie’s funeral in another part of the cemetery. How can that be? Surely there’s been some mistake? Well, yes, now there probably would be some administrative error. But in the past, it would have been the norm.
Let me explain that. Simply put family graves were the province of the rich and wealthy from the middle ages onwards. Of interest here is that prior to 1100 even the rich and famous were buried in public graves. Yes, they may well have been placed in vaults in an abbey or parish church but those vaults were, under the ledger stone, communal.
And of course, history can play tricks on even the best laid plans. For instance, there is no exact spot known of where the remains of King Richard I, or his father Henry II are buried. William the Conqueror’s grave was destroyed in the French Revolution leaving a leg bone and that is of dubious provenance.
Of course, the burial of a family member was still just as important to the people left as it is now. The desire to be buried within the same grave as a loved one is, and was, natural and to the best of their ability the church would attempt to meet that need, and their attempts to succeed would probably match how high up the social scale the advocate was.
Disposal
However, the disposal of the body, once sanctified and cleansed by the rites of the church, was, in the final analysis, a secondary thing in medieval times. The body was seen as the vessel of the soul, an entity much more important that the mere body. And it was this entity that occupied the thoughts, feelings and hopes of the living. For they too would meet such an end. This led to the cult and imagery of Memento Mori but that’s another story.
In the medieval period, especially after the Black Death, the notion of purgatory began to take precedence. This notion, put simply, was that upon death, the soul would be weighed. If no sin was found, something thought to be highly unlikely in most cases, then heaven beckoned. If the soul was sinful then it was cast down into eternal damnation. The vast majority of souls however would be found wanting, in that they were not pure nor were they entirely evil, and therefore they were placed into purgatory. This was believed to be a kind of limbo.
The theory was that a soul in purgatory however could be helped by intercessions from the living. So, a family could pay for prayers to be said, candles burnt and chants to be sung that would help the soul eventually reach heaven. In some senses during this period, until the Reformation, it could be said that the dead and the living were constantly in touch with each other.
Wills often stipulated that so many prayers etc, should be sung for the dead soul departed. Entire sections of buildings were erected and attached to churches to enable such ‘chants’ to be exercised. Thus, were born the chantries, one of which still exists attached to the south side of the Minster.
The church also profited from this, so encouraged this practice. Monks and friars to sing, candles to burn, all had to be paid for and the church reaped the benefit. This was one of the many issues that lead to the Reformation in Northern Europe including England.
The Reformation
With the Reformation, the idea of purgatory was stamped out. The essence of Protestant belief was that no amount of intercession on the part of the living could affect the departed soul’s brush with God. The only way for the soul to go to heaven was to do good in the present world whilst alive. The bond between the living and dead was broken.
Of course, after nearly a millennium of Christian teaching, it was always going to be difficult to change such embedded beliefs. Unsurprisingly the threat of death at the stake or worse can ‘encourage’ a change in viewpoint. And so, it did. The idea of praying for a soul to escape purgatory vanished quite quickly. The funeral now became the focal point of grief and sorrow. The protestant faith frowned upon lavish funerals. It felt that a simple burial was enough because the corpse was simply the refuse left behind.
But human nature being what it is, the family began to want ‘extras’ at the funeral to demonstrate their grief. So began the undertaking business. The first adverts for undertakers are usually cited as beginning after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and they are definitely quite numerous by 1680.
In this way the disposal of the body became, perhaps, more important than the soul, as the family left on earth could not influence the soul’s date with destiny, but they sure could influence how the corpse was disposed of! And if it made Mr & Mrs Jones next door sit up, well, all to the good.
However, this ostentatious display, and I’m again really talking here of the wealthy and the newly emerging merchant class, was just that. To be seen and marvelled at. Once the body was in the ground, well, the observers couldn’t marvel at that, so it was ignored. The very wealthy of course could take the next step and devise lavish family mausoleums but often these were in their own grounds. However, this is not to miss the beginning of memorialisation that started to take hold at the very top of the apex of society around this time.
By the beginning of the 18th century, memorials began to become more common, although still restricted to the top 2 or 3 % of the population. Often, they became flooring for the inside of churches whilst the body commemorated shared a communal vault space in the crypt below the church or chapel.
The Charnel House
For the common people, they still retained their inalienable right to be buried in their parish church yard. Of course, space in them was always at a premium. Which leads us nicely to the concept of the charnel house. Charnel houses were common throughout the medieval period and perhaps even earlier in more populated areas. Sometimes known as ossuaries, they were, in essence, where the overspill of the cemetery around the church was removed to. Their use enabled the church yard to continue without having to continually expand.
It was the role of the sexton, when another burial was to take place, to seek a space to bury this body. And he did this by using a large rod, possibly metal but more usually oak, and thrust it into the soil until he located …. nothing.
Knowing that a burial would have taken place there in the past, he knew that the coffin had decayed and thus the body would have had time to become disarticulated. He then dug down to the required depth, probably no more than 3 feet, and removed the bones of the body and took them to the charnel house and eventually to storage in the crypt of the church. By this method the church yard could continue to function.
Let’s just take a minute to examine what we have here. This method obviously helped the community. The people still had their inalienable right of burial in the parish. The community was fully aware of the removal of bones from the graveyard, and indeed knew that they could have been of a distant relative or ancestor yet this ‘sacrilege’ was not only tolerated but accepted as a necessary part of the functioning of the church yard.
It is obvious that this community did not place more reverence than was necessary on a pile of bones. This practice was common until the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the 1740/50’s when church yards in urban areas began to break down under the massive increase in population that began in this period.
Memorialisation
Another factor that began to fracture this system was the rise of memorialisation. If a stone was placed upon a grave then it was felt, probably quite rightly by the buyers of the stone, that Uncle Tom should continue to stay in the grave if the stone above the grave said he was there. Remember we are still talking of something like 10 to 15% of the population at most and probably less.
Unfortunately, with the increase in population and the increase of memorialisation the system that had allowed the church yard to function began to collapse. With this radical change began the advent of the cemetery, divorced from the church yard. Examples in Hull and Sculcoates of this are Castle Street for Holy Trinity, Trippet Street for St Mary’s and Sculcoates South Side for St Mary’s, Sculcoates. This innovation eventually led to the establishment of Hull General Cemetery and the municipal cemeteries in the city.
Christianity
From the beginning of Christianity until the 20th century, the vast amount of people who died were buried in graves that were essentially public ones. The entire churchyards of the Minster and St Mary’s would have been public graves until their closure to further burials in 1855. Yes, there may well have been memorials erected to family members, but owing to the confined space, the space beneath may well have had interlopers.
That the Hull General Cemetery Company sold both public and private graves upon its opening is quite clearly stated in its pricing. And that approximately half of the ones sold were public shouldn’t surprise us as this was the norm. Yes, it was a cheaper option for the distressed family than the purchase of a family plot, and this factor cannot be ignored and such a factor is still relevant in choosing a funeral and grave today.
However, it was still a decorous burial as opposed to the much cheaper, but more grotesque, option of a burial in the churchyards that were still open, or in Castle and Trippet Street’s burial grounds that were just as over filled and noxious.
That people chose the option of a public grave in Hull General Cemetery therefore shows that they were not so much counting the pennies but actively choosing another better option for their loved ones.
Below are two examples of family grave headstones. One is from Hull General Cemetery and one is from Nunhead Cemetery in London.
They are examples of their kind. They advertise that they are family graves by having it inscribed upon the stone. It is and was a status symbol, and as the grave costs more than the average grave, the owners wanted to make people aware of that fact. In much the same way that someone would leave their ‘super-duper’ phone lying around or leave their Porsche keys ‘casually’ on the coffee table these days. It was meant to make you stare and be jealous and maybe aspire.
The decline of the public grave was essentially a 20th century phenomenon, and even there, economics had a trump card to play.
1970s
I worked in cemeteries in the 1970’s and I was often intrigued by the concept of ‘perpetuity’ when applied to graves. It was explained to me that these people had bought a grave but that only applied for 85 years and after that, if the council wanted to, further bodies could be buried in it if there was space. These further bodies would not necessarily have been related to the other occupants.
So, the ‘public’ grave continued but under another name and probably, in time, will make a comeback, as land for burials becomes more difficult for local authorities to utilise. Now, about the ‘pauper’s’ grave. Well that’s a whole other story. Maybe when I’m next clearing stuff out I might remember to tell that one.
