From Communal Graves to Community Mausoleums:

A Short History of Urban Cemeteries

Text and photos by Rusty Clark

Revised 28 April 2009

                        

 

 

Introduction

 

(l) St. Tetha, Cornwall (r) Poundstock, Corwall

 

Overcrowded cemeteries have been the bane of urban civilizations since before the birth of Christ. To cope with the abundance of corpses generated by cities the size of ancient Athens and Rome, the Greeks and Romans incinerated their dead, and stored the remains in urns housed in columbaria. Christians, who considered cremation a pagan practice condemned by Constantine in the fourth century, preferred earth burial and established churchyards to hold the remains of the faithful. These burial grounds were filled to overflowing by the 19^th century. One small London churchyard, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, while only 200 feet square, was believed to hold between sixty and seventy thousand corpses.[1] In New England, a burial ground located on the town common in Worcester, Massachusetts, was considered an eyesore, the City Council voted in 1853 to lay the gravestones flat and bury the entire site under a foot of soil.[2] As public health and urban sanitation became a growing concern, new “garden” cemeteries were established outside the great cities of Paris and London. It wasn’t long before Boston, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York, responded to the overcrowding of existing city burial grounds, hygienic concerns, and high land prices, by developing their own “rural” cemeteries.[3]

           

Historic Pagan and Christian Burial Practices

 

 

(l) Lanteglos, Cornwall (r) Lundy, England

 

From the beginning of recorded history humans have cared for their dead. And while aspects of rites and practices have evolved, the most common choices for the disposition of the dead remain interment, above or below ground, and cremation. Neolithic tumuli, or earthen mounds, constructed with a central domed chamber and passageways leading to tombs, were built to house the bodies of tribal chieftains throughout the British Isles. The early Christians buried their dead in underground necropoli, or catacombs, along the roads leading to Rome, during the first three centuries ad By the early fifth century, the Roman Catholics began to reinter the remains of saints and martyrs in special structures called martyriums; these shrines containing holy relics were later converted to churches.[4] The faithful soon sought to be buried near the tombs of the martyrs; it was believed that masses said over one’s soul could hasten its progress toward heaven.[5] In fifth-century Roman Africa, at the Damous el-Karita Basilica in Carthage, thought to hold the remains of martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, the floor was composed of stone slabs laid over tombs of the devout. This practice soon spread to other Catholic countries, including Spain and Italy. “Priests and bishops, desiring to repose near the relics, found resting places beneath church floors, and before long kings and aristocrats sought the same privilege.” As the demand grew, the pope granted a request in 752 ad to allow the establishment of burial grounds adjacent to church buildings, and the first churchyards were consecrated.[6]

 

London Churchyards and the Black Death

 

 

(l, r) Plague Town of Eyam, England

 

For the next thousand years, Europeans buried their dead in these hallowed grounds. English common law entitled every member of a parish to be interred in the churchyard; those persons of noble blood and prosperous commoners were buried nearest the church walls, the poor were consigned to mass graves. These churchyards were soon packed with corpses, and were often covered over with soil to make room for more graves, repeatedly, until, as the 17^th century diarist John Evelyn noted, the walls surrounding them were overtopped with “earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodies one upon another . . . so as the Churches seem’d to be built in pits."[7] Another solution was the addition of charnel houses, which were built near the burial ground to house the bones removed from the ground when new graves were dug. Catacombs served the same purpose, to keep the remains secure until Judgment Day. Suggestions to move the burial grounds away from the churches to the outskirts of town were met by fierce opposition from the clergy, “not only for religious reasons but also--and perhaps primarily--because the church would lose revenue and influence if churchyard burial grounds were shut down.”[8]

 

The Black Death severely taxed the capacities of European churchyards, where the dead were “stacked like cordwood.” In 1665, the English Parliament, suspecting that burial practices and funeral customs were responsible for the spread of the plague, passed legislation prohibiting large funerals and required graves to be dug to a depth of six feet.[9] The same year, the first of London’s independent burial grounds was opened at Bone Hill, the site of a sixteenth century dumping ground for the city’s charnel houses. Bunhill Fields, or the Dissenter’ burial ground as it came to be known, provided a place where “free-thinkers could escape the fee-grabbing clergy and their costly consecrated terrain in favor of less expensive, secular real estate.”[10] It was during this period, following the Reformation, that some Protestant sects, led by the Scottish Congregationalists, began to reconsider the Roman Catholic belief that consecrated ground and prayers for the dead were essential to a soul’s passage into heaven, opening the way to private cemeteries not connected with any ecclesiastical authority.

 

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