burial

Lord Avebury, the Liberal Democrat peer who died on Valentine’s day was noted for the eccentricity of some of his views. He was a conventional supporter of assisted suicide but his expressed preferences for his disposal raised eyebrows.

He was the only person to have his body rejected by Battersea Dogs Home. A keen environmentalist, he was determined to keep his deathprint to a minimum so he offered his corpse to be eaten by strays. The Sun calculated that he’d fill 168 1lb tins of dogfood. Battersea turned him down. They said his ageing corpse wouldn’t be sufficiently nourishing.

His last request concerning his disposal was that he might be buried without a coffin, thus enabling his remains to return to the earth as rapidly as possible and push up a tree.

You know what happened next? Yes, he was told that this is illegal.

One night in the early 1700s,  Henry Trigg was making his way home when he heard a disturbance in the churchyard. Looking closer, he saw, to his horror of course, grave-robbers making off with a freshly-buried corpse. 

He continued on his way, resolving never to let the same thing happen to him. (He isn’t reported to have tried to stop the outrage.) 

Having made a decent stash as a grocer he offered his fortune to any of his relatives who agreed to one condition: that his body be “decently laid … upon a floor in the roof.” 

In 1724 he died. His brother did as he asked, popped him, coffined, up in the rafters of the roof of his barn, and pocketed the cash. 

There he lay.

In 1774 the barn became part of the Old Castle Inn. He slumbered on. In 1831 a new landlord checked up on him and found him safe and sound. In 1906 East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society had a peek and found him still in residence. 

During the First World War, soldiers stationed in the town picked bits of him out. 

In 1999 the new owner, NatWest bank, had him decently buried. 

His coffin remains there to this day. No. 37 High Street, Stevenage.  

Posted by Richard Rawlinson 

I’m extending the Easter holiday with a visit to a village in Bordeaux, where my friends’ house overlooks the graveyard of a Medieval church. With death oft going unseen and unspoken in our secular times, a graveyard is a reminder of our mortality, prompting us to contemplate the inevitable final day, contextualising it and ritualising it. For centuries, corpses wrapped in shrouds have been delivered to this graveyard on biers carried by family and friends, consigning their dead to the eternal care and protection of the Church. 

It’s got me thinking about options for resting places. Big cemeteries such as Pere Lachaise in Paris or London’s Highgate are akin to museums in which to visit the famous dead. Village graveyards can offer scenic beauty and tranquility. Metaphorically speaking, would you prefer to be in stimulating urban company or resting in rural peace? 

Reason tells us it shouldn’t matter either way: when we’re six feet under we’ve either ceased to exist or our souls live on outside the body. But, whether religious or not, it often does matter to us where we rest, and not just for the convenience of visitors to our grave.  

I like the idea of being in a churchyard because it’s within a community of the living, not a remote place just for the dead. And yet I don’t have a strong preference for being buried alongside family and friends. Love ‘em dearly but I don’t envisage souls as being grounded to any specific place. 

Martin Amis said: ‘The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.’ I’m no recluse, like socialising and certainly don’t compare myself to Amis (I’m a humble hack, not a novelist) but I also feel alive when reflecting in solitude, albeit on all the interactions experienced when in company. I hope death is something like that: an aloneness that isn’t lonely as we’re all as one; a time of being, not doing, unmarred by the inconsistency and unpredictability of active life; a peaceful state of love that needs no external stimuli. 

All things considered, I’d like my funeral to be in my urban cathedral but my grave to be in a village graveyard. English soil, naturally.   

Footnote: a study by social psychologists at Florida State University attempted to quantify how visiting a cemetery, or living next door to one, affects behaviour. Actors engaged with those they found walking in graveyards, or in the streets around them, and sought their help with a practical dilemma. They then repeated the exercise away from the burial ground. They reported that the first group was 40 per cent more likely to offer assistance than the second. 

I haven’t asked for assistance here in Bordeaux (limited French + surly locals = flawed study). Repatriate me.

A number of popular sayings derive from death and funerals. 

One such is the saying ‘Everyone wants a piece of him’. 

This is a surprisingly ancient saying dating back 800 years. Here’s how it happened. 

When Richard I (Lionheart) died, his entrails were interred in the central French town of Chalus, where he died in a skirmish with a rebellious baron; his body reposes at the Fontevraud Abbey, beside his father Henry II and later his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine; and his heart, wrapped in linen, pickled for posterity and placed in a lead box, was sent on to the Cathedral of Rouen. 

When one of the king’s senior barons enquired whether this was really necessary, he was told that Richard was so celebrated and widely loved that ‘everyone wants a piece of him’. 

The practice endured into the early part of the twentieth century. The body of Thomas Hardy was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard in his beloved Casterbridge. You may have heard the story that a cat spotted his heart awaiting casketising on a table, and ate it. No truth in that at all. 

And no call these days for dismemberment of the eminent dead, it seems. 

Next: ‘the final nail in the coffin.’ 

NOTE TO EMBALMERS: You may be interested to read the just-published scientific analysis of the substances used to embalm King Richard I’s heart here.