A Brief History of Burial Grounds –4th July by Helen Frisby on Eventbrite
I dialled into a presentation by Dr Helen Frisby on Burial Grounds. This was hosted by The Folklore Society. Frisby gained her PhD on Victorian funeral customs and her research interests include the history of death, dying, bereavement and the occupational lore of gravediggers. She is currently a research associate at the University of Bristol.
The talk was based around English and Welsh burials rather than burials in Scotland.
We started looking at image of the Red Lady of Paviland which was discovered in Wales in 1823 and was initially though to be from Roman times hence the ‘Red Lady’ name. Later investigation determined that skeleton belonged to a male hunter-gatherer from the last Ice Age which make him 30,000-40,000 years old. The skeleton been stained in red ochre.
The next image was of a Roman headstone which I thought was better preserved than most that I have seen in graveyards which are far more recent that the Roman stone which as well as being well preserved seems to be of a high quality. This might be due to it being discovered lying face down so it not been exposed to the weather for much of its life. The stone dates from the second century CE.
We then spoke of Anglo-Saxon burials and the arrival of Christianity and of high caste burials such as Sutton Hoo. There are many regional variations on burials in this period.
An interesting image from a Book of Hours or common book of prayer which day from 13th to the 16th century. The page from book shows a burial of a body wrapped in cloth but with no coffin. The graveyard is scattered with disinterred bones. Bodies in this period were dug up after flesh rotted away and the bones moved to a charnel house. Religious figures stand by graveside and the tools of burial are shown which look the same as modern spades and shovels. I initially wondered about figures dressed in black as I thought black for mourning didn’t come about until the Victorian age. Dr Frisby told me that the black was actually the garb of the priests and that black as a colour for mourning was perhaps copied from what the priests were wearing. Interestingly there are no grave markers shown in the image. The page from Book of Hours also shows Yew trees which to this day are often found in graveyards. The Yew could be thought of as symbolic being linked with rebirth as well as death and destruction perhaps linked to the Yew being poisonous. It was linked with death by the Celtic people and this continued after the arrival of Christianity.
The charnel house epitomised by an image from Victorian London in 1842 which shows Enon Chapel. This had been opened in 1822. The chapel was built over a sewer but the space under the floor also served as a charnel house where bodies were crammed in by the thousand. Estimates that the preacher stored 12,000 bodies in a space 59 feet by 12. The conditions were so bad that members of the congregation would pass out during services. The charnell house discovered when sewer work being done in 1839. The bodies not removed and the sewer vaulted over and the space above used for dances with advert telling customers to “dance on the dead”.
The next image charted the rise of the undertaker with a business card from 1690 and an image of a coffin as we would recognise a coffin to look to this day. We also spoke of grave robbers or resurrectionists. We also spoke of paupers funerals and the shame around death and not being able to afford a headstone.
We then spoke of garden cemeteries build at the edge of towns and cities in 19th century and Peter Lachaise and John Claudius Loudon. I can imagine people visiting these places as respectable and upmarket places to visit. As these cemeteries filled up and were swallowed by expanding towns, the cemetery could not expand and the owner ran out of space for new burials and the graveyard would have fallen out of use.
More efficient ways to utilise the land and deal with the dead were being considered and in 1874, cremation appeared as an alternative to burial although questions as regards how legal this as a form of disposal of the dead remained until cremation formally recognised in 1902. By the 1960s cremation had become the majority method for disposal of the dead.
We spoke of grave adornments, of green burials and composting, that there is still demand for burial space and we spoke of modern spaces such as Much Hoolse near to Preston, Westall Park near to Redditch and Arnosvale which is a city centre space in Bristol advertised for burials, weddings, venue hire, events, Christmas markets, heritage, wildlife and education. It truly is a one stop shop for all of life’s major events.
I contacted Dr Frisby after the event to thank her and to ask for PDF file of the slides she used. I also explained my project and research to her, just from point of view of sharing an interest. She took the time to reply, which is always a nice feeling when busy people take time to reach out. She expressed interest in my work, “in particular, the history and politics of remembering and forgetting, which I agree are complex and often emotive”. One interesting comment she made was about the right and the desire to be forgotten after death in both the online and the offline world. I hadn’t thought of people who don’t wish to be remembered so this an intriguing thought I will ponder. She went on to say, “I also share your fascination with that threshold between life and death, and the various – often highly creative – ways in which people ritually navigate this”. She spoke of her work as a historian and that history provided “an important resource for meeting mortality.” She finished by inviting me to join the Association for the Study of Death and Society. The Society promotes the study of death in the arts, humanities, social and allied sciences. This interested me as it reminded me of the lecturer in Cork who invited me to join his MA course. Maybe in the field of Death Studies there is a small field with lots of shared ground and as I move into this space and seek contacts, I might come across people who are interested in my input?