Off The Record
Alan Crosby shares a timeless lament prompted by 19th-century efforts to regulate burials
Alan Crosby on 19th-century efforts to regulate burials
What happens when (as is so often the case) we are incensed by the consequences of some action by the Government or our local council? We might rage and fulminate, email the local paper, fire off a tweet, kick the cat, or hurl a book at the TV. But few of us would immortalise our grievance in stone so that future generations would know how annoyed we were.
Beginning in 1850, in response to the ongoing national scandal of deplorable public health, high mortality rates and grossly inadequate sanitation, Parliament passed a series of Acts that sought to regulate how and where burials could take place. Churchyards in London had become horribly overcrowded with burials, especially in densely populated poorer areas. Corpses could be shifted before they had properly decayed, to make way for new burials; human bones might lie on the surface of the ground, gnawed by dogs and rats; and there was an all-too- obvious health hazard as well as nightmarish scenes of squalor. Something needed to be done.
‘Churchyards in London had become horribly overcrowded with burials’
The answer was the 1850 and 1852 Burial Acts effectively outlawing further burials inside churches or in city churchyards in London. These were thenceforth ‘closed’, and were to be tidied up and made fit and seemly. In the future, all burials (unless specifically licensed to the contrary) were to take place in large public cemeteries, generally located on the then outskirts of the city and suburbs of London. These include the ‘Magnificent Seven’ such as Highgate, Nunhead and Kensal Green.
Once the principle had been established that burials in churches and churchyards might be restricted or forbidden, it was widely adopted. Under the 1853 Burial Act the Privy Council could issue an order relating to any particular place forbidding burial in such locations. Most larger towns and many small ones swiftly sought such orders, establishing municipal cemeteries while closing churchyards for future burial.
In the summer I visited Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire with a group of my students. The miracle that this wonderful building survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries is still heartening almost 500 years later. But looking at the ground rather than at the soaring vaulting of the roof, our eye was caught by a seemingly typical black marble gravestone from the early 19th century, one which has a definitely atypical footnote to the inscription. It’s set in the floor of the nave, and commemorates the burial there of the Banaster family.
William (died April 1818 aged two months), Mary Ann (died March 1829 aged 14 years) and Sarah Frances (died July 1840 aged 20 years) were the three children of George and Elizabeth Banaster. Their mother followed them to that grave in February 1850 aged 70, while George’s own end came on 24 March 1858, when he was 83 years old.
However, at the beginning of February 1857 an order had been adopted, under the terms of the 1853 Act, forbidding further interments in the abbey or churchyard. As the carefully carved footnote on the gravestone laments: “His earnest wish to be laid in this Grave beside the remains of his beloved Wife and Children was frustrated by an act of the Government prohibiting interment within the walls of this Church.”
Rules were rules, and apparently no exceptions could be made. George was, as the gravestone also tells us, buried elsewhere: “His mortal remains lie in his Father’s vault in the Churchyard.” Because his father had a vault, rather than simply being interred in a coffin, George could be laid to rest with him. It’s a curious glimpse into the way the regulations operated. George’s case is probably not unique, but is surely quite exceptional because his executors decided to record the situation for posterity.