Churchyard and cemetery

Tradition and modernity in rural North Yorkshire

Julie Rugg

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780719097355
  9780719089206
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526103536
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores, for the first time, the turbulent social history of churchyards and cemeteries over the last 150 years. Using sites from across rural North Yorkshire, the text examines the workings of the Burial Acts and discloses the ways in which religious politics framed burial management. It presents an alternative history of burial which questions notions of tradition and modernity, and challenges long-standing assumptions about changing attitudes towards mortality in England.

This study diverges from the long-standing tendency to regard the churchyard as inherently 'traditional' and the cemetery as essentially 'modern'. Since 1850, both types of site have been subject to the influence of new expectations that burial space would guarantee family burial and the opportunity for formal commemoration. Although the population in central North Yorkshire declined, demand for burial space rose, meaning that many dozens of churchyards were extended, and forty new cemeteries were laid out.

This text is accessible to undergraduates and postgraduates, and will be an essential resource for historians, archaeologists and local government officials.

1

‘So precisely the invention of a critical period’:¹ theorising cemeteries

The secular, explicitly landscaped memorial park – that is, the cemetery, as opposed to the churchyard or other sacred or customary space – is so precisely the invention of a critical period in the history of our times (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) that thinking about its origins and meaning might allow us to understand what, if anything, is distinctively modern about death.²

Thus Thomas Laqueur defined the cemetery as a distinctive space: secular and landscaped, and with origins in a critical period. The cemetery’s emergence is deemed to be part of the history of progress, and a ‘triumph of modern hygiene’.³ Indeed, the cemetery stands as a quintessential statement of modern attitudes towards mortality. These contentions constitute useful devices to explore changing burial practices in England through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is certain that, in making his comments, Laqueur had in mind an image of cemeteries such as Kensal Green (1832) or Highgate (1839), both in London. But this study re-angles the lens to review a largely unexplored aspect of burial provision: a combined history of cemeteries and churchyards in rural areas. The research is based on the detailed study of 352 churchyards, cemeteries and burial grounds located in a central portion of what was the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the north of England.⁴ This spatial specificity constitutes a particularly useful way to explore change: concentration lends depth of narrative without necessarily compromising the ability to make wider generalisations, as evidenced in other studies. For example, Sarah Tarlow’s ‘archaeology of bereavement’ on emotion and burial derived its source material from a limited number of burial sites on the islands of Orkney.⁵ Perhaps more pertinently to this study, David Charles Sloane’s history of cemeteries in the United States focused on burials in the New York State to illustrate broader national trends in the United States.⁶

In addition, a concentration on rural areas prompts the reframing of key questions that have generally posited the cemetery in urban space. Hotz claimed that ‘in the greater part of rural England, public cemeteries were relatively unknown’.⁷ Nevertheless, it is notable that, between 1850 and 2007, 44 cemeteries were laid out in the Yorkshire case study area: indeed, soon after the passage of the first of the Burial Acts, cemeteries were established in the larger market towns of Northallerton (1856) and New Malton (1859) and in the village of Kirby Misperton (1861). Despite the fact that cemeteries were often established in rural areas, a principal conclusion of this book is that continuity may be a better descriptor of burial history, and evidence of profound dislocation is scanty. Indeed the book asks where ‘modern’ burial practice can be located, both in time and in place. It might be assumed that disjunction was created in the 1850s, when the introduction of the Burial Acts created a framework for the closure of churchyards and the opening of cemeteries, managed by secular authorities. In practice, however, the new kind of burial space that was created was not so radically different.

This introduction begins by reviewing the bundle of theories attached to the creation of cemeteries in the period from around the mid-eighteenth century: first, cemeteries are hegemonic space, and reflect the dominance of professional discourses and social elites; and, second, the introduction of cemeteries comprised a break from traditional practices. Both these developments mean that, third, cemeteries reflect and facilitate the expression of distinctively modern attitudes to mortality. As will be seen, these perspectives at times offer a more cogent commentary on historiography; they are based on artificial paradigms of ‘cemetery’ and ‘churchyard’, so constituting a false dichotomy; and they fail to understand the chronology and national specificity of change. Furthermore, there has also been a tendency to give prominence to elite commentary. This includes discussion of exceptional or iconic sites such as Père Lachaise (1804) in Paris or Abney Park (1840), Brompton (1840) or West Norwood (1837) Cemeteries in London: the ‘ordinary’ or ‘typical’ site is generally over-looked. The writing of pioneering individuals – for example, Edwin Chadwick or John Claudius Loudon – is often given greater attention than analysis of actual burial practices and how they changed over time. Use of a fuller range of sources allows the creation of richer and more nuanced narratives of burial space, where the local and vernacular might have a central place. Most crucially, these theories generally fail to appreciate the significance of the fact that most cemeteries were at least part if not wholly consecrated. This action placed the consecrated section under the control of the Church of England, creating what was essentially an extension of the existing parish churchyard.

Theorising cemeteries

Hegemonic space

The view that cemeteries constituted a species of hegemonic space constitutes perhaps the most pervasive theory relating to nineteenth-century cemeteries in particular. Historians, archaeologists and sociologists argue that cemeteries demonstrate both scientific and social hegemony. For many writers, cemeteries constitute a reflection of the ascendancy of scientific discourses that re-modelled the urban environment in an attempt to eradicate disease. The belief that emanations or miasmas from decomposing bodies could have a detrimental impact on public health was discussed as a scientific fact by the end of the eighteenth century: indeed, the highly influential French Encyclopédie, printed in seventeen volumes between 1751 and 1772, contained an entry by D’Alembert that underlined the dangers of these ‘deadly emanations’.⁸ Measures to curtail intramural interment – burial in churches and within the city walls, close to dwellings – were introduced in a number of European countries.⁹ For example, in France in 1776 a Royal Declaration proposed the closure of inner-city churchyards and subsequent creation of new burial spaces controlled by the municipal authorities on the outskirts of the city. Similarly, Gustavus III of Sweden issued regulations against church burial in 1783 and encouraged extramural burials, again against a backdrop of public health improvement.¹⁰

In England, there had been sporadic publication on the dangers of intramural interment in the eighteenth century. For example, Sir John Vanbrugh had advocated use of ‘cimitarys provided in the Skirts of towne’ in 1711, as part of plans to rebuild London.¹¹ In 1726, Thomas Lewis, a London clergyman, contributed No Charnel Houses: Being an Enquiry into the Profaneness, Indecency and Pernicious Consequences on the Living of Burying the Dead in Churches and Churchyards.¹² There was at that time no legislative response. From the 1830s, a much wider audience for burial reform was created by the publication of the remarkably popular Gatherings from Graveyards (1839) by the London doctor George Alfred Walker. This book, regarded as an authoritative medical text and cited widely, gave extended and graphic case studies of deaths caused by graveyard miasmas. Further evidence was provided in Edwin Chadwick’s report of 1843, A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Enquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns. These texts, together with John Claudius Loudon’s On the Laying Out, Planting and Management of Cemeteries (1843), presented a rationale for the scientific appropriation of burial space and a blueprint for its management. Thus the emergence of the cemetery has been interpreted as the victory of modern hygiene over popular custom. Indeed, the development can be viewed in accordance with the theories of the French philosopher Michel Foucauld, who believed that a primary objective for the State in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was the appropriation of the individuated, unbounded body.¹³

The cemetery evidenced the expression of scientific hegemony, and also – perhaps even more so – facilitated the demonstration of an idealised social order in which bourgeois conceptions of civility defined distinctive funerary behaviours. In their discussion of Bradford’s Undercliffe Cemetery (1854), Rawnsley and Reynolds argued that rapid population growth in the city had created social uncertainty: spatial patterning in the cemetery then became a visual representation of the emerging hierarchy.¹⁴ This argument was furthered in 1982 by the archaeologist Parker Pearson, who contended that funerary memorials equated to a ritual communication that expressed not ‘reality’ but an idealised conception of social order. The funeral was a means by which ‘deceased individuals may be manipulated for the purpose of status aggrandisement’.¹⁵ More recent research has reiterated the existence of spatial divisions within cemeteries as expressive of class demarcation. For example, a study comparing the garden cemetery in the UK and in Australia concluded that the garden cemetery ‘was a place to inscribe class (especially middle class) literally on and in the ground, to demarcate, to sort and to assert worthiness and importance’.¹⁶ Furthermore, it has been argued that, as the cemetery celebrated the ascendancy of bourgeois ideals, it disempowered poorer communities. Cemeteries were located at a distance from communities, so adding to funeral expense through the time and cost of travel, whilst offering the poor little more than undifferentiated burial in unmarked mass graves. According to Herman, the cemetery alienated the working classes from their ‘familial and communitarian roots, separating them from the history of their “species-being”’.¹⁷

Plate 1.1 Pateley Bridge Cemetery. In the 1870s, ‘select’ interments were available for £9 8s, and fourth-class graves for 16s 6d.

Modern space

Another theory embedded within a number of studies on cemetery development is that cemeteries constitute an innately modern phenomenon. Two interconnected themes can be distinguished within this discourse. Herman pinpointed ‘discontinuity’ as being the most salient element of modernity expressed by cemetery establishment.¹⁸ For Giddens, modernity comprised a ‘deconstruction of the metanarratives of religious tradition’.¹⁹ The centuries-long hold of the Church on the final resting place had been broken. The cemetery permitted the appropriation of burial space by municipal authorities, and its relocation away from the ‘sacred and immortal heart’ of the community.²⁰ The discontinuity appears to be stark: churchyard space inhabited a spiritual realm; cemetery space was clearly secular. Indeed, for Laqueur, the cemetery was not only not spiritual, it operated in consciously capitalist terms, since, in the first half of the nineteenth century in the UK, the majority of cemeteries were established by cemetery companies.²¹ A second theme within discussion of the modernity of cemeteries relates to attitudes towards the corpse. In the ‘premodern’ period, the dead were ‘omnipresent’ and the corpse decomposed – stinking and messy – in the churchyard at the centre of the settlement and in full view.²² Cemeteries reflected the desire to sequester the corpse, and with it all reminders of mortality. For example, Ragon commented in 1983:

The dead are no longer feared but we continue to shut them away in coffins, which have been nailed down or (even more securely) screwed down, and which are then enclosed in sealed, concreted burial vaults, under very heavy stone. And all this further enclosed in a cemetery surrounded by high walls, the gates of which are kept locked. What a mass of precautions to take against an inanimate corpse.²³

Thus changing burial practice charts a shift from the communal experience of mortality underpinned by a Christian gemeinschaft and burial of all alike in the parish churchyard, to an individualised approach with each corpse, interred amongst strangers, placed in ‘his little box for his little personal decomposition’.²⁴

Problems with existing theory

There are a number of problems with the existing theoretical frameworks, as much of this text will demonstrate. Here, it is worth highlighting some major objections.

Historiographic preoccupations

First, it is worth remembering, as Munslow suggests, that ‘the history that we write is … an engagement with our own age’.²⁵ To a large degree, the close association between cemetery establishment and the deployment of the ‘dominant ideology’ thesis reflects both the left-leaning zeitgeist of much of academia in the 197...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of plates, figures, maps and tables
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 ‘So precisely the invention of a critical period’: theorising cemeteries
• Part 1 The churchyard in the cemetery, 1850–1894
• Part 2 The cemetery in the churchyard, 1894–2007
• Conclusion
• Appendix One: Glossary
• Appendix Two: Grave types: diagrams
• Appendix Three: Sources for researching local burial history
• Appendix Four: Sites included in the study
• Select Bibliography
• Index