Corpses of time

With Halloween almost upon us, Fife Council archaeologist Douglas Speirs speaks to Michael Alexander about the history of grave robbing in Fife and Tayside

Sneaking into the 15th Century East Neuk of Fife churchyard under cover of darkness, the grave robbers dug down into the lair of local ship owner and farmer Stephen Williamson until the crunch of bone confirmed they had reached the former magistrate’s mortal remains.

A spade was used to dig down five feet, where Mr Williamson’s skeletal remnants from 1816, and those of his wife Mary Grieve, who died in 1828, were then cut through and fragments of bone dumped in soil on the surface.

The callous, gruesome vandalism might sound like a vile act from the days of notorious 19th Century murderers Burke and Hare.

However, the macabre desecration, which brought hurt and distress to descendants and the community, actually took place in March 2015 when the grave was vandalised in Kilrenny Church yard near Anstruther.

“If they thought they were going to find valuables in there, they would have been disappointed,” a member of the deceased’s family told The Courier, when eight descendants from across the world gathered with 17 East Neuk residents a few weeks later to re-bury the bones in a specially-made small casket.

The Rev Arthur Christie, minister for Anstruther, Cellardyke and Kilrenny, who gave a Celtic blessing at a service to “bring peace and healing”, said at the time he was “at a loss” as to why someone would do this.

“We’ve all seen vandalism of some description over the years but we’ve never experienced desecration of a grave,” he said, adding that the coffins had long since decayed and only the bones remained after centuries of peace.

Thankfully, such grossly disrespectful acts of destruction to ancient graves are rare.

However, bizarre as the incident was, there was a time when grave robbing and body snatching was more commonplace across Scotland as medical science fuelled demand for fresh corpses.

Fife Council archaeologist Douglas Speirs said that while early surgeon-barbers, apothecaries and university anatomists dabbled in human dissection from an early date, the study of anatomy in Scotland as a branch of medical science dates only from the closing years of the 17th Century.

“While it’s true that a charter granted in 1505 to the Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers in Edinburgh stipulated that every candidate for admission should ‘know the anatomea, nature and complexioum of every member of manis body’, it was not until 1694 that an agreed and legal mechanism for the limited provision of bodies for dissection was reached between Edinburgh’s burgh council and the town’s Incorporation of Surgeons and Barbers,” he told The Courier.

“The subjects thus made available were extremely limited in number and were restricted mainly to the ranks of unclaimed executed criminals – usually only murderers – unclaimed suicides

Contemporary newspapers report with surprising indifference large holes in cemeteries and smashed-up coffins...