BURIAL IN UNCONSECRATED PLACES.
(Vol. vi. passim.)
So many interesting notices have been made by your correspondents on the subject of peculiar interments,—skipping about from one part of the country to another, and dropping down from the south into Lincolnshire, as if in search of farther instances,—that I am induced to add to the number of records, by stating the fact as to the late Mr. Dent, of Winterton, whose body, at his particular request, was deposited after his death in his own garden, on the south of the house in Winterton, where he not only lived but died.
Friend Jonathan, as he was familiarly called, was a man of shrewd understanding, and possessing strong common sense; yet, like others, he had his failings, and amongst them the amor nummi was not the least obtrusive. As a very wealthy man he was looked up to by a little aspiring community of Quakers in the neighbourhood; and his own dress, when in a better suit, exhibited an appearance of his connexion with that fraternity.
The Quakers had a small burial-ground at Thealby, in the parish of Burton-upon-Stother, which I some years ago had the curiosity to inspect, but such a forlorn lost place for such a sober and serious purpose I never in my life before looked upon; it is posited at a little distance from the public road entering Thealby from Winterton, where no doubt at one time stood a lot of cottages and crofts, surrounded by common stone walls, made from the flat stone of the neighbourhood. But so small and so neglected was this burial place, that I could compare it to nothing better than an old parish pinfold; it had been so little attended to when I visited it, that the whole area was under a most luxuriant crop of flourishing nettles, six or seven feet high. And as to graves, or the purport of its occupation, we could see nothing; and yet its position was such that with ordinary attention it might have been even a picturesque spot, having three or four large trees overlooking it.
Upon an after inquiry I was told that a funeral had lately taken place here, at which Friend Jonathan was the presiding attendant. But in preparation for this ceremony they had found so much difficulty in stubbing up the strong nettles, and digging the roots to form a decent grave; and it was after all so difficult to find comfortable standing-room about the grave, that I have ever since concluded that Mr. Dent must have been disgusted with it, as, upon depositing their lost friend in the earth, he, as spokesman, thought it unnecessary to make any observations, and he recommended that they should at once cover the body up; and so it was done.
That Mr. Dent had any antipathy to the church I do not know, but that he had a great dislike to paying unnecessary fees I have a good recollection of. Before his death he requested that his body should be deposited in his own garden; and his request was attended to by his nephew.
After the old gentleman's death, the present Mr. Dent, with a praiseworthy attention, repaired and restored in the Elizabethan style the old dilapidated dwelling-house and homestead where his uncle lived. And I one day paid a visit to the grave, which is an unpretending ridge on a well-mown grass-plat, and which, with the house and ground, appeared to be properly attended to; and so, I presume, it continues to be.
Wm. T. Hesleden.
J. H. M., in bringing forward Baskerville as an example of this unusual occurrence, says, that "he directed he should be buried under a windmill near his garden." In a volume of Epitaphs, printed at Ipswich in 1806, once the property of Archdeacon Nares, and containing several MS. notes by him, Baskerville's is given, with a note by the editor, in which he is stated to have been "inurned according to his own desire in a conical building near his late widow's house." The epitaph, written by Baskerville himself, commences with these lines—
"Stranger,
Beneath this cone, in unconsecrated ground,
A friend to the liberties of mankind directed
His body to be inurned."
The expression in each case, respecting the place of his interment, seems scarcely strong enough for us to conclude it was a windmill. Perhaps J. H. M. will kindly favour me with the authority for his statement. Nares has made the following note on the epitaph at the bottom of the page:
"I heard John Wilkes, after praising Baskerville, add, 'But he was a terrible infidel; he used to shock me!'"
R. W. Elliot.
Clifton.