‘Mens bones were Plowd up in my Stone-hill Close, & upon enquiry of ye old inhabitants & search of ye register I found they were like to be some of ye Armitages, six of whom dyed of ye Sickness & were buryed there in the year 1631.’1
In 1684, as described above, the clergyman William Sampson reported that skeletal remains had been ploughed up in an unusual spot near his house in Clayworth, Nottinghamshire. His surprise at the discovery led him to make some enquiries about how the bones had ended up there. A mixture of local records and native knowledge drew the conclusion that they belonged to members of the ill-fated Armitage family, who had been buried in the field 50 years earlier.
There were a variety of reasons why some were not given a socalled normal burial in seventeenth-century England. In the case of the Armitages, infectious disease was to blame, specifically plague. Fears of contamination during outbreaks left parish officials with little choice but to insist that victims were disposed of away from the consecrated spaces of churches and churchyards. Makeshift graves in fields and gardens were sometimes the only viable option for a sick household, particularly in the countryside. In 1665, in Wilmslow, Cheshire, a woman recorded merely as E. Stonaw was buried in her garden because it was suspected that she had died of the plague, she having only come home the day before. Some years before, in 1647, Robert Lenthall of Great Hampden was forced to bury his daughter by a hedge after she succumbed to the disease while paying her parents a visit, having picked it up in London. ‘In ye Evening we buried her in ye meade called ye Kitchenmeade by ye hedgeside as you go downe into it on yor left hand, a little below ye pond’, Lenthall wrote afterwards. She was only 14 years old. In one astonishing episode a soon-to-be casualty of the plague premeditated his unconventional burial in Cheshire by digging the grave with his own hands, nearby to where he lived, and settling himself down in it to die. The exact circumstances of the incident were noted in the Malpas parish burial register in 1625:
‘Richarde Dawson…being sick of the plague and perceyving he must die at yt tyme, arose out of his bed, and made his grave, and causing his nefew, John Dawson, to cast some strawe into the grave, which was not farre from the house, and went and layed him down in the sayd grave, and caused clothes to be layd uppon, and soe dep’ted out of this world; this he did because he was a strong man and heavier than his said nefew and another wench were able to burye.’2
Dawson was trying to be helpful given the gravity of the situation, but his actions were nonetheless perplexing. To the modern looker-on his behaviour is very difficult to comprehend.
Plague burials occurred in unusual places in London too. During the shattering visitation of 1665 Samuel Pepys observed graves being dug on the banks of the River Thames. With some disdain, he also referred to the burial of more plague dead in the open fields around the capital. It was not so much anxiety over contagion that brought about interment in places other than churches or churchyards in plague-ridden London, but lack of space. So many Londoners died during epidemics that it was not always possible to get everybody buried within the confines of hallowed ground. Pepys’ was alarmed by the sight of so many fresh graves piled on top of each other in the churchyard of St Olave, Hart Street, in January 1666. One notorious way in which the authorities attempted to solve this unwelcome urban problem was to sanction the excavating of pits for mass burials. The need became most urgent upon the eruption of plague in the spring of 1665, which spread like wildfire and claimed lives even faster. In August plague pits had already been dug in the parishes of St Dunstan-in-the-West and St Bride’s; by the early months of 1666 it is probable that every major parish in the capital had followed suit. The pits conserved space and ensured that humble victims could continue to be buried in churchyards. While parishioners could take solace in this small mercy, the prospect of being pitched into a yawning chasm with hundreds of other fouled bodies might have been a difficult pill to swallow. It added insult to injury that those who were destined for the pits would probably be carried to them in a body collector’s cart, smothered by other stinking corpses and announced to the rest of the city through the harsh calls of the collector for other cadavers. So much for a decent funeral procession. Daniel Defoe developed a strange obsession with plague pits in his Journal of the Plague Year, published many years after the events of the Great Plague of London in 1722. The journal was probably based on a family diary, as Defoe was only a young boy at the time of the sickness. It most likely took artistic license and contained literary embellishments, but it is nevertheless a valuable and graphic account of the 1665 visitation. The narrator described the pit dug in the parish of Aldgate with awe and dread. When finished in early September, he reckoned it to be 40 feet long, 16 feet across, and 20 feet deep. The hole, in fact, extended down so far that excavators had run across water at the bottom, which stopped them from digging further. According to Defoe, 50 or 60 people might be put into one pit before it was closed up. As the death toll mounted, holes were made larger and this figure could rise to several hundred. In just two weeks the ‘dreadful Gulph’ at Aldgate had been filled with the bodies of over a thousand people. At this point, Defoe tells us, parish officials were required to cover it over, for there was an order in place decreeing that bodies were not to be buried within six feet of the surface of the churchyard. The journal’s narrator decided to visit the pit at night when bodies were brought to the site and ‘thrown’ in, even though strictly speaking outsiders were forbidden from coming anywhere near the pits because of the risk posed by infection. Defoe believed it became even more imperative to avoid these spots as the plague advanced. Such was the desperation of the times in the capital that diseased persons took to flinging themselves into trenches wrapped in nothing but blankets or rugs, telling anybody who came near them, with a typical air of delirium, that they wished to get the inevitable over with. An open, unwalled pit in the parish of Cripplegate was regarded as a popular destination for hyperactive victims looking for an easy burial. It must be remembered that London was by no means alone in resorting to burying the plague dead in one grave if circumstances became bad enough. Ten bodies were buried together in a hut as far out as Rutland in October 1665.
Visions of the plague dead being buried could haunt the mind long after the disease had slipped into the pages of history. Samuel Newton was still having nightmares about such burials in the 1690s. By this point a significant outbreak of plague had not been seen in England for 30 years. In 1695 he wrote, with a no doubt trembling hand:
‘Thursday night I dreamed, that I being in London, there came along Bishopsgate street almost the whole breadth of the street a great many persons haveing along with them a great many dead corps dyeing (as they said) of the plague in plaine coffins not of a black but of a sad couller and the covers not coped but flatt every corps not being borne on their shoulders, but borne below by 2 persons one at the head and the other at the feet who by the cord at each end not above a foot from the ground bore the corps along haveing noe hearscloath but the bare flatt coffin, these corps were borne along close one by another as many as tooke upp the full breadth of Bishopsgate and entred into and under to goe through that gate, and abundance of people followed the corpses to goe out through the gate which was throng’d and I my selfe being then to goe through that gate made some offer, but findeing by the croud it to be very hott and not easily to be passed and besides haveing a fear uppon mee and sadnas at that dismall sight, I turned downe not that street that leades to Moregate I being then on the other side of the way and soe turned downe that Lane by the gate that leades the way by London Wall to Algate and soe my dreame ceased leaving sadnes upon my spiritt…’3
Newton was clearly much affected by his experiences, to the point where he was unable to rid himself of them.
Concerning plague interments, even worse than a mass burial was no burial at all. On 22 August 1665, in the thick of disease, Pepys wrote in his diary:
‘I went away and walked to Greenwich, in my way seeing a coffin with a dead body therein, dead of the plague, lying in an open close belonging to Coome farme, which was carried out last night, and the parish have not appointed any body to bury it; but only set a watch there day and night, that nobody should go thither or come thence, which is a most cruel thing: this disease making us more cruel to one another than if we are doggs.’4
The same negligence was occasionally seen in England when it came to the disposal of the bodies of men who had died fighting in armed engagements. During the civil war, following a skirmish at Cirencester in 1643, the Eastcheap chronicler Nehemiah Wallington claimed that Parliamentary corpses had been left to rot above ground for at least four days in the town because nobody dared bury them sooner. It is possible that a number of rebels killed during the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685 were never found in the fields of corn where they had fallen.
Combatants who perished fighting in an encounter were invariably treated to indecorous burials if their bodies were left at the mercy of the opposing force. As with plague victims, pits were often favoured for the interment of the enemy’s dead, the difference being that whereas in times of epidemic disease the practice was viewed as an altogether necessary measure, during outbreaks of conflict mass burial could well be considered a deserved slight. The common soldier Adam Wheeler estimated that around 174 rebel corpses had been assembled in a heap to be buried in a pit near Weston, Somerset, in 1685. They had fought against their own sovereign at Sedgemoor, and therefore under no circumstances were they to be treated to a classic Christian burial. The victors would instead arrange for the traitors to be crammed together in a single grave, which alone would rob them of a fair amount of dignity, and they were also to be laid to rest in unconsecrated ground. The latter especially was a huge dishonour for sincere men who had expected all their lives to be decently committed to the earth within the comforting and sacred confines of a churchyard. Several days later local residents would complain that the rebels’ bodies had not been sufficiently covered on the moorland where they had been deposited, leaving an offensive stink in the air. To deal with the problem, and on the instructions of King James II himself, ploughmen and horses were sent to the site to construct a larger mound.
Cavalier and Roundhead propagandists made it their mission to emphasise the cruel treatment of each side’s war dead during the English
Civil War. The endless and blatant exhibitions of one-upmanship in the 1640s make it tricky to separate fact from fiction, and even for contemporaries it would have been a tall order to work out exactly what the truth of a report was. Nehemiah Wallington was a serial Roundhead exaggerator, bent on tarnishing the reputation of the king’s supporters, but it would be ill-advised to dismiss his reports entirely. The capture of the town of Marlborough by Royalists in 1642 caused him to make a string of accusations against his foes:
‘The number of their slain and wounded men they kept from our sight and knowledge as much as they could, but they had slain, as is conceived, above two hundred men. Many they buried the next day in the Town, and many they buried in several places in the fields about the Town. Some they threw into a very deep well, three furlongs from the Town, and many they carried away in carts, some say four or five loads, and cast in a river in their way.’5
According to Wallington, fields, wells, and rivers were considered suitable locales for Parliamentary graves following the encounter. He would make a far bolder claim after the siege of Hopton Castle in 1644. The fortress was a Roundhead stronghold until Sir Michael Woodhouse and a 500-strong Cavalier army captured it in the spring of that year. Having fallen to the king’s men, Wallington maintained that the castle’s defenders had been buried alive by their captors. Matthew Carter, quartermaster general in the Royalist ranks, added paraffin to the flames in 1648 when he bragged about the supposed treatment of Fairfax’s late men at the siege of Colchester. ‘Many of their dead bodies were thrown into wells’, he wrote in an account of the event that reeked of propaganda, ‘some buried in ditches, others were carried off, and considerable numbers were left behind’.
As the English Civil War accelerated, killing military personnel in their thousands, we know with certainty that out of sheer convenience soldiers from both armies were sometimes buried in mass graves on battlefields. A frantic search was launched for the corpse of Sir Edmund Verney after it was discovered that he had died fighting at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. His son Ralph quickly established to his great dismay that, ‘there is noe possibillity of finding my Deare father’s Body’, with a servant in the Earl of Essex’s army informing him that it was likely Sir Edmund’s body had been ‘buried in the feilds’. A friend of the family’s, Lady Sussex, was greatly unsettled by the revelation. ‘My soro is beyonde all that can bee sade’, she commented, ‘but truly it trubles me much that his body was beriede amonst the multitude; I know itt coulde not have addede anythinge to him, only have sattisfiede his frindes to have hade a cristan beriall; but itt semes in war ther is no differince made’. She was right in thinking this. The practical disposal of the war dead frequently entailed the casting aside of normal, Christianly notions of interment, particularly where common graves were concerned. The Earl of Essex had shown a little more respect in 1643 following the First Battle of Newbury, when the picturesque parish of Enborne had quite literally been reduced to a bloody mess. He issued an order to the churchwardens requesting that they deal with the dead in whatever way they saw fit. Even then the Newbury causalities were buried in several impersonal tumuli, on a section of the battlefield known as Wash Common.
Religious beliefs were a major factor in determining whether an individual qualified for a standard burial in this period. Anybody who refused to acknowledge the established Church of England was at risk of an unconventional interment by default. Openly-practicing Catholics found themselves being recurrently shunned by members of the Church of England, many of whom believed that, as excommunicate persons, followers of the old faith should not be entitled to burials within the holy perimeters of Protestant churchyards and churches. In September 1684 John Richardson of Framwelgate was denied a church burial in Durham Cathedral because of his Catholic leanings. His grave had already been opened in the choir when the Bishop of Durham dramatically halted proceedings, ordering it to be covered over again. Richardson’s body was subsequently committed to the earth in his own garden. In 1690 Mrs Richardson chose to be buried beside her husband in their little slice of paradise.
Catholic persecution had been much more rigorous earlier on in the century. When it was hatched in 1605, the Gunpowder Plot encouraged fresh waves of antipathy towards the Church of Rome and its heretical English champions, resulting in the widespread rejection of Catholic cadavers for several years afterwards. According to the Royalist William Blundell, writing in 1655, Protestant resistance was especially bad in Lancashire during his grandfather’s time:
‘In ye yeare 1611 a bitter storm of persecution extended its fury in these parts to ye bodyies of deceased Catholicks. The Churches in all places denyed them burial; som were laid in ye fields, som in gardens, and others in high-wayes, as it chanced. One of thes (as I have heard it credibly reported) being interred in a common lane, had her corps pull’d out by ye hoggs, and used accordingly.’6
Blundell’s grandfather, also William, hit back at the actions of local Protestant clergy by providing Catholics with their own burial ground in Little Crosby, known as ‘the Harkirk’. Here those of the old faith could be interred decently and with respect, and most importantly within a religious setting. The ground itself was already considered consecrated when Blundell set it aside for the purpose. The Lancashire landowner would be hauled before the court of Star Chamber and fined £2,000 for this illegal undertaking, but it probably mattered very little to him. He had created a space where his own brethren could be put to rest without fear of harassment, and that was priceless. The first burial took place at the Harkirk in April 1611. William declared beforehand:
‘I, William Blundell of Litle Crosbie, within the Countie of Lancaster, Esquire, a weeke or a fowertnighte before Christenmas laste paste, havinge hearde that Catholicke Recusants were prohibited to bee buried at theire Parishe Church, bethought mee (myself through God’s grace beinge also a Catholique) where were best to make readie in this my village of Litle Crosbie a place fitt to burie suche Catholiques either of myne owne howse or of the Neighbourhoode as should depte this lyfe duringe the tyme of these trobles. And so I caused a litle peece of grownde to bee enclosed within myne owne demaine land in a place called of ould tyme… the Harkirke.’7
William Mathewson, a tenant of Blundell’s and an ardent Catholic, was the first person to be brought to the Harkirk for burial, the parson of Sefton having turned away the funeral party when they arrived expectantly at the church gates with his corpse in 1611. Amazingly, the ground was still being used in 1700. The priest Thomas Eccleston was buried at the Harkirk with due decency in this year, after spending more than 40 years ‘assisting poore Christians in ye parishes of Halsall and Aughton’.
The saying goes that God loves a trier, and there were certainly several valiant attempts to bury overt Catholics properly within the grounds of a parish church over the course of the century. Some efforts paid off. Burying the dead man or woman in secret in the night was a safe bet, as in the example of Rose Lunford of North Elmham in Norfolk, who, being a ‘recustant papist’, was successfully buried in North Elmham churchyard under the cover of darkness in 1642. Stripping the occasion of its religious appurtenances might persuade the minister himself to allow the burial to proceed, if he was feeling generous. In 1602 the recusant Thomas Cletheray of ‘the North blockhouse’ was ‘put into his grave in drypoll churchyard…without the minister and without the order of buriall, according to lawe’. The papist Jaine Claurance was buried in the chancel of the church of St Martin Coney Street in York without any obvious opposition at all in 1670. This was a sign of the changing times perhaps. Brute strength was resorted to in 1605 to get Alice Wellington of Allenmoor, near Hereford, into her grave in the churchyard there. Her body was refused entry by the curate of Allenmoor on the grounds that she was a papist, sparking a popular disturbance that became so vicious that the Bishops of Hereford and Llandaff were forced to flee the scene. Civil officers were beaten off by Wellington’s friends in their unswerving quest to see Alice buried properly, and in the end they were able to put her into the ground in the churchyard by force. Other attempts to bury Catholics, however, ended in resolute failure. Either the burial was thwarted before it could occur, which is what happened with the unlucky Mr Richardson, or graves were dug up and the body ousted when the truth had been revealed. We hop across the border at this point to Denbighshire in Wales. Lieutenant Williams got away with being buried in Llangollen churchyard for 10 days in 1681 before the penny dropped that there was a Catholic man lying amongst the dead. His body was removed immediately and deposited in Williams’ garden by friends. You might say that the man who exhumed the corpse came off worse than the corpse itself on this occasion. There was no coffin to be found when the hole had been dug, just Williams’ putrefying body, fused with the damp earth around it. The state of it was so bad that the sexton fell sick afterwards.
Protestantism ushered in a new generation of religious dissenters in seventeenth-century England. Nonconformists (as they were principally known after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660) were Protestants who chose to break away from the established Church of England and embrace an alternative set of godly ideas and practices, usually in line with up-and-coming Protestant sects, such as those of the Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers. Dissenting groups were widely condemned by the Church of England following the Act of Uniformity of 1662, leading to many guilty ministers being sidelined from public life. As a result, the interment of nonconformists was not always straightforward. In fact it very rarely was. We have a particularly good record of the Quaker situation in the second half of the century, where members were routinely barred from partaking in the burial practices that most took for granted. The atmosphere of suspicion surrounding them was typified in 1653 on the burial of Richard Cockerell of Hackness in Yorkshire, after which it was observed by a parish record keeper that there ‘was many of them they call Quaker’ in attendance. Heated religious debate purportedly broke out at the graveside that day. The corpse of the wife of John Elams of Halifax, who had died in childbirth, was refused access to the local churchyard in 1678 because she had identified as a Quaker while alive. It is not clear from Oliver Heywood’s account where the body was instead taken, but we know that in the same year and place Mr Henry Wadsworth, ‘a great Quaker’, was buried in his garden at the age of 66. Parish registers across the country suggest that Quaker burial grounds became a common feature of towns in the late 1600s, being successors to the Harkirk in their own right. An entry in the 1676 register for the parish of St Michael le Belfry in York disclosed that Catherine Todd, daughter of a Mr John Todd, was ‘buryed in the quakers burying place’. In 1697 in London it was likewise recorded that Hannah Parker, servant to the watchmaker Daniel Quare, was ‘carried to the Quakers ground in Cripplegate to be buried’.
To take one’s own life in seventeenth-century England was considered fundamentally contrary to the laws of God. Those who had the audacity to commit suicide in this period were therefore treated harshly by the Church, which manifested in their bodies being prohibited from enjoying a consecrated burial. Traditionally suicides were buried at crossroads on the outermost reaches of a village or town, as far away from the physical heart of the community as possible. The body of Katharine Smith of West Hallam in Derbyshire was taken to be interred ‘in ye crosse ways near ye wind mill’ in 1698, after coroners ruled that she had killed herself. In 1692, coroners reached the same conclusion in Marsden, Yorkshire, after a woman had been found with her throat cut there. It was ordered that she be buried ‘at a lane end in Lingarths’. Sometimes a suicide was buried close to where he or she had committed their unspeakable crime. In Derby in 1620 a prisoner who had jumped to his death from a bridge rather than face the dreadfulness of a gaol cell was interred ‘on the highway side close at the foote of the bridge’. Detained persons who took their own lives while in custody might be buried in the gaol grounds as punishment for their actions; alternatively, if they had already been condemned to die, the detainee’s corpse might be taken to the site of the foiled execution and interred there. The latter occurred when the would-be assassin of Oliver Cromwell, Miles Sindercombe, poisoned himself before his scheduled hanging in 1657, to the utter fury of his prosecutors. The scene was set and the gallows erected at Tower Hill on the day of Sindercombe’s planned execution in February. All that was missing was the criminal to be hanged, and he would continue to be absent, for when the guard came to Sindercombe’s chamber to bring him to the scaffold he found him dead in his bed. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon in his History of the Rebellion thought he knew what had happened. Hyde recalled that Miles had been paid a farewell visit at the Tower the previous night by his sister, alleging that he was seen by guards then present rubbing his nose with his hand in a most peculiar manner as the siblings spoke together at the bedside. Once she had departed, Sindercombe allegedly removed his clothes, tucked himself under the sheets, and declared, ‘this is the last bed I should ever go into’. During the night he sneezed once, but apart from that he remained unnervingly still for somebody who was about to be put to death for the failed assassination of the great Lord Protector. Following the discovery of his body physicians were called in to open up Sindercombe’s head. Clarendon wrote:
‘They found he had snuffed up through his nostrils some very well prepared poison, that in an instant curdled all his blood in that region, which presently suffocated him.’8
The insinuation was that Miles’ sister had provided her brother with a lethal substance that would spare him from the horror of the gallows the next day. In the eyes of the Church and the law this was obnoxious behaviour on the part of both Sindercombes. Clarendon continued that Miles’ body was ‘drawn by a horse to the gallows where he should have hanged, and buried under it, with a strake driven through him, as is usual in the case of self-murders’.
There existed a growing appreciation in early modern England that people might not always be of sound mind, or even fully conscious, when they committed suicide, and thus were not wholly responsible for their actions. Miles Sindercombe knew what he was doing in 1657, but perhaps the Dane Martin Roseenstand in 1674 did not. In Oxford on Candlemas Day he was found hanged and naked in a privy house near the town’s theatre, to which he had retreated in the early hours of the morning, never to be seen alive again. The jury considering the case were inclined to believe that he had hanged himself in his sleep, but other analysts were more sceptical. Much of the available evidence indicated that Roseenstand had been completely compos mentis when he had stripped naked, scurried down to the privy house with a candle to light his way, looped a cravat about his neck twice, and tied the noose to a rafter in the ceiling. The knee-jerk response of Roseenstand’s brother upon finding the corpse was incriminating for a start. He had immediately taken the body down from the beam where it hanged and covered over his sibling’s ‘privities’ with a coat, claiming to the authorities when questioned that Martin had expired while sitting on the toilet, probably from an abscess. This tall tale was in any case invalidated on inspection of the cadaver by a surgeon, who located bruising around Roseenstand’s neck. Even more damning, though, was Martin’s choice of reading material on the night of his death, which related to scriptural men who had half-hanged themselves to see what it would feel like. Whereas the jury argued that the subject matter more than likely led to lively dreams, inciting an innocent case of sleep-hanging, cynics such as Anthony Wood proposed that Roseenstand had been inspired to follow the example of his biblical predecessors while perfectly awake and lucid. The trouble was that it had gone wrong. Whether the man had consciously or unconsciously hanged himself, the uncertainty of the act meant that he was granted a strippeddown burial in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen, ‘close under the wall next to the stile or passage opposite to the Katherine Wheele gate’.
Some executed felons were ordered to be buried where they had been hanged or decapitated in seventeenth-century England, if, of course, they were not chosen to be dissected. This functioned as an extension of the criminal’s punishment, an undertaking intended to humiliate, as well as acting as a deterrent to other prospective lawbreakers. We have already seen this procedure in action when it came to the unorthodox interment of Miles Sindercombe. According to the vicar John Rous, the remains of the Jesuit Arthur Gohogan, hanged for uttering treasonous words against Charles I, were dealt with in the same fashion in the 1630s:
‘His quarters and heade being brought to Newgate, there came a letter to bury them, before they were hanged up, so that there was some doubt made where; but at length Mr. Atturny was sent to the King to knowe, and by his advice (for they bury none of us among them, &c.) the carkase was buried under the very place at Tiburne where he was hanged.’9
This was not a rule set in stone, however, and leniency towards the bodies of felons was shown on many occasions. Being a distinguished member of society helped. The Catholic courtier Edmund Coleman’s body, in bits by the time it had undergone the savage ritual of hanging, drawing, and quartering, was distributed amongst his friends for burial in 1678. Coleman had been accused of being involved in the Popish Plot of the late 1670s. The courtesy bestowed on the esquire reached down to the meaner sort too. The son of a barber, Robert White, sentenced to die for stealing a clock and some clothes, was cut down from the noose after an hour and a half of hanging in 1692 and allowed to be taken to his mother’s house in Oxford. White’s popularity caused him to be carried to a nearby church so that as many people as possible could view his body. Attempts to revive him were made, but they were to prove fruitless. A few days later he was given a very respectable burial indeed, in which his coffin was supported by several young men and covered in a sheet held up by ‘maides in white’, and followed by more maids, women, and children. Best of all, even as a convicted felon he was permitted to be buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Oxford. The emphasis on the colour white at Robert’s funeral was probably used to symbolise his innocence, as well as his youth.
In shadier episodes it was the criminal themselves who could be responsible for the orchestration and carrying out of an unorthodox burial in seventeenth-century England. Murderers might go to extreme lengths to cover up their crimes and escape the gallows, which involved depositing victims wherever was most inconspicuous or out of the way. In 1634 the Cheshire vicar Edward Burghall reported that a woman had killed her own daughter then, with the help of her son, buried the girl in a pit. Most examples from the century unfortunately centre on parents wishing to conceal the fact that they had murdered their bastard child or children. In 1662, Henry Newcome related from Manchester:
‘After supp: I went to Mr Lightbowne’s: & there wee heard of the sad wickednes that is comitted of the man that hath now a 2nd bastard by his servant. The childe is found buryed in the garden.’10
One could almost call a mother from Flintshire in Wales creative in her desperate bid to bury her bastard infant under a heap of stones in a churchyard in 1682. The child didn’t stay buried for long, and the mother was eventually executed.
Although most irregular burials could be explained away as a necessary preventative measure in times of disease, the product of religious or state retribution, or otherwise, there remained certain eccentric interments that were difficult to justify. In 1670 Anthony Wood remarked on the strange burial of the Countess of Marlborough, mother of the Earl of Marlborough who had died at sea during the Four Days’ Battle in 1666. She was laid to rest in her garden under a turnip plot, between two boards, merely because she did not want one particular individual knowing that she was dead.