Hosperian informs us that the ancients greatly opposed the innovation of burying in towns and churches, and on that account the councils of their bishops made several canons and decrees against intramural and church burials.
Whether the ancients burned or interred their dead, they never made choice of the place of divine worship, either to bury the body or deposit its ashes. For centuries after Christianity was established, they never presumed to make God’s temple the carnicle of the dead: on the contrary, when the ancient mode of burial without the city began to be neglected, burials in churches were opposed by authority. A law in the Theodosian Code has these words: “Let no one imagine that the churches of the Apostles and Martyrs were designed for burial-places for the dead.” The Emperor Charles the Great has this injunction, “Let no one bury any dead in the church.” Subsequently, Louis the Pious most strenuously opposed burying within the churches, requiring “that the constitutions, used and settled by the ancient Fathers, should be observed in the burial of the dead.”
So tenacious were the ancients of anything like desecration of their churches, that we are told by Baronius that one Borachas being persecuted by the Gentiles at Gaza, and having been left for dead, the Christians took him up and carried him into the church; the Gentiles and some of the authorities, on making inquiry for him, complained that the Christians had broken the liberty of their city, and had trespassed against their laws: for that they had brought a dead body into the city, which ought in no wise to be done; they supposing that Borachas was dead.
The being buried in or near a church, we are told, originated with the first Christian emperor, Constantine, who, although he did not desire to be buried within the church (a thing in his day unheard-of), was resolved that his remains should be deposited as near as possible to it, and they were accordingly inhumed in the porch of the great church at Constantinople. Subsequently, the practice increased, and persons of quality claimed a similar privilege; their inferiors again, although they claimed not the right of being buried within the porches, deemed it an honour to be buried as near thereto as possible; hence, another reason assigned for large courts and yards about churches.
“The melancholy ghosts of dead renown
With penitential aspect, as they pass’d,
All point at earth and smile at human pride.”
Some time after, Pope Gregory the Great brought into the churches, and set up in the most solemn manner, relics enshrined in cases of gold, which were sometimes placed upon, or over, but generally under the altar. This made persons flock towards them, and bury their dead there, in the hope that both might receive benefit from such veneration. Thus, that which was originally considered a profanation, ultimately, through the corruption of subsequent ages, became not only a means of satisfying ambitious pride, but also apparently of conferring the blessings of eternal happiness.
The custom of interring persons of rank in churches was first introduced into this country by Cuthbert, the tenth Archbishop of Canterbury, who in the year A.D. 798 procured the privilege from the Pope to have churchyards for interment: with reference to burying in churches, the custom did not arise earlier than the year 1076. In the reign of William the Conqueror, the council held at Winchester, under Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, by the ninth canon, opposed burial in churches; it soon after, however, became a custom, and vaults were built under the altars.
“It is horrid,” said the Austrian emperor, “that a place of worship—a temple of the Supreme Being—should be converted into a pest-house for living creatures.”