LICH: Old English lic as a suffix for -like (likely). Used as a noun, a word for form, body, corpse: the substance of a thing. Also see the Anglo-Saxon hlinc whose nearest synonym is ridge, hence a word for a boundary, or a path cresting a ridge, and so a word for link.
From Babeny and Pizwell
west to Lydford 11½ miles
as the crow flies who needs
carry only his own death.
It seems not much,
by their ways a day and a half-day’s
travel got the corpse
to Lydford Church, setting
the dead down again.
Hardly a tree for shade,
none for coffinwood. In rain
the moor runs like a sieve,
the brooks flood, clay pulls
to the roll of the slope.
In what boots they went
is not said, nor their curses.
By 1260 these villages
let off that passage.
The rest, scattered farms, inns,
Merripits and Bellever
trudged on, the Forest dead
on the dead’s road converged
across Longaford, the Cowsic,
under Whittor and Whittaburrow.
King’s land, men struggled
away from their masters,
scratching for tin, thin
shared with the beasts
under one roof, chaff blown
in the Atlantic wind, survived
by the rain and fern.
And gone. Their hands
lifted the stone, sifted
the streams for metal. In winter
salted the dead down.
Not long back a traveller
lifted the bench lid on a corpse
floating in brine – the innkeeper
saved for spring burial.
Cut by enclosures, mines,
artillery ranges, theirs
is the dead’s print, pressing
of feet through the strange land.