Other archaeological methods have been used to record standing monuments in churchyards and other funerary objects. Social trends, and even changing belief structures, can be followed by the changes in these monuments and memorials and gravestones. While these changes can bee seen they are, and to a large extent remain, broadly Christian in nature. In Glasgow A conspicuous feature of the post-medieval churchyard was the creation of lairs or family burial plots. This practice may have originated in the medieval period, but became more conspicuous after the Reformation At the end of the medieval period there was a shift towards individual identity in the burial of the bulk of the population, the commemoration of whom became more visible. These stones from Cottenham demonstrate this, with ornate scrolls visible next to skulls. The layout of these in the churchyard illustrates the result of reordering churchyards, and the alignments of back to back monuments do not represent the true disposition of interments The general rules and expectations on burial during this period have always been subject to change as circumstances dictate. On occasion extreme measures were required and implemented. A good example of this being the plague pits used during the outbreak of bubonic plague in the UK. A good example of this is to be found in the records of St Bride Fleet Street, in the western suburbs of the city of London,. The records offer an example of how one parish coped during the plague of 1665. Total deaths in the parish in the year 1665 came to 2,111 (five and a half times normal), of which 1,427 were attributed to plague. Even thought the church authorities understood the importance of having somebody responsible for the grave yard during this period, someone 'to see the ground be well husbanded', as well as to ensure the organisation, management and payment of the gravemaker and the labourers employed to dig graves, no one could be found willing to undertake this Perhaps as a result of this failure, as well as of increasing mortality (heaviest between mid-August and mid-September, when recorded burials totalled 831, often over 30 per day), traditional burial practice began to break down. What Defoe calls 'burial in form'- the individual service and interment, in an individually marked grave - was in part at least replaced by mass burial in a common grave. The parish's first substantial common grave or pit was dug in late August. We do not know how this was used, but the probability is that it was filled up over a matter of days or weeks and then closed, and a new one opened |
The public cemetery, as distinct from the churchyard, as a proper place for burial, originated in the Victorian period. Under common law, every parishioner and inhabitant of a parish had a right to be buried in his or her parish churchyard or burial ground. There were few exceptions to this right of Christian burial. An Act of 1823 put an end to the practice of burying suicides in some public highway with a stake driven through them and directed that they be buried in the usual churchyard. And thus criminals and others were brought back into the Christian faith in death.
The comparatively small number of gravestones in a churchyard can belie the number of bodies buried there. The churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields was only 200 feet (60 metres) square yet, in the early 1840's, was estimated to contain the remains of between sixty and seventy thousand persons. Burial Grounds (as distinct from parish churchyards) were started by non-conformists in the 17th century; many more were established in the 18th century. The first public cemetery in London was established in 1827 in Kensal Green, Cremation, popular for thousands of years, was curtailed by the coming of Christianity. Not only does the Bible command that the dead be buried, but Christ's entombment was seen as essential to his resurrection - if his body had been destroyed he could not have risen up. A belief in the dead's eventual, bodily, resurrection on Judgment Day, with the body reunited with the soul (also called reassembly) is fundamental to the Christian belief structure from its early introduction in the UK. During the 19th century, however, cremation began to be considered as an alternative. The poet Shelley's remains were burned on a beach in Italy - not terribly successfully, however, as his heart remained intact and was sent back to his wife. Experimental cremations took place in several people's back gardens in the 1870s, in the same decade as the issue was debated in the medical journal The Lancet, and the British Cremation Society was formed. Cremation took a long time to catch on, however, probably because of this Christian belief in bodily resurrection. Once Christian faith began to wane in Britain, as a result of the two world wars, and as space in church grave yards and public cemeteries became more and more scarce, cremation became more popular; now 70% of the population chooses it. Cremations per year in Britain:
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