There is nothing now to distinguish the prisoners’ cemetery from the surrounding fields; it is only by careful observation that the irregularities of the surface can be recognised as the mounds which mark the graves, these in the course of a hundred years having become very ill defined.
The occasional disturbance of the bones of the dead in agricultural operations, or by irreverent explorations of the graves by the village lads, alone keep alive in the minds of the rustic population the knowledge of this burial-place. The burial-places attached to other depots for prisoners of war have one after the other been distinguished by a monument erected to the memory of those who lie in them. Too long has the respect due to the memory of the brave men who fought and suffered for their country, and died at Norman Cross, been forgotten. Too long, alike by the nation whose foes these prisoners were and by the nation whose sons they were, has this God’s Acre, doubly sacred, because in it lie only patriots who died for their native land, been neglected and left without a mark to show that it is a sacred spot. Happily the animosity of a hundred years ago has been replaced by L’Entente Cordiale, and a movement originated by Mr. H. B. Sands, the late Secretary of the Association which has adopted that title, is even now in progress, the object of the movement being to acquire a portion of the ground, to fence it, and to erect upon it, close to the North Road, a monument with a suitable inscription to the memory of the foreign soldiers and sailors who, after years of captivity, died in the prison, and were buried in this neglected spot.
The information as to any provision for the spiritual welfare of the prisoners is very meagre. Marriages and births, calling for the sanctification of a church, there were none, but 1,770 deaths and burials there certainly were, as the certificates show.
Neither in the register nor on the certificate of those deaths, whether the prisoners were Roman Catholic or Protestant, does the name of priest or parson appear.
This applies only to the prisoners who died in confinement, not to the soldiers who guarded them. The Depot was in the parish of Yaxley, and in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, the parish church, the majority of the British soldiers who died while quartered at the barracks were buried, and their names are entered in the parish register and signed by the officiating minister.
The first entry connected with the Depot in the Yaxley Register is that of “John Smart, suffocated at the Barracks, February 12th, 1797.” He was probably a workman employed during the erection of the buildings, which were not occupied until two months later; after this date, and up to 1814, occur entries of soldiers’ burials at the rate of from twenty to thirty per annum.
The last funeral from the barracks was that of Captain Pressland on 21st March 1814. After fifteen years the soldiers’ graves were crowding the churchyard to such an extent, that in 1813 a plot of land adjoining the barrack-master’s house was purchased by the Government for a special burial-place for the barracks, and the ground was consecrated by the Bishop of Lincoln on 29th October in that year. The first soldier was buried in it on 4th November 1813, just seven months before the clearing of the barracks and the prisons was accomplished. This plot has been absorbed into the property on which stands the barrack-master’s house, now owned by J. A. Herbert, J.P. When and how the absorption took place is not known; it is now an orchard, and the few gravestones there were in it have disappeared. From the Register of Folksworth, about a mile from the barracks, it would appear that this village was a favourite place for the wives of the married soldiers quartered at Norman Cross to reside; several baptisms of the soldiers’ children, and one or two of the adult soldiers themselves, are there registered.
The prisoners’ cemetery and the barracks were in the mission of the Roman Catholic priest who lived at King’s Cliffe, but no register of deaths kept by him is known to exist, nor is there any record by a minister of religion of any burial service in this cemetery.
It must, I fear, be accepted that the men who were in captivity at Norman Cross during the seventeen years the prison was occupied received very little spiritual help, and in times of pressure many of those whose bones lie in the prisoners’ burial-place were, too probably, interred without religious rites of any kind, and scarcely ever with a single mourner at the grave side.
From the possibilities, nay probabilities of the burials during the epidemic of 1800–01, let us turn with a shudder and a sigh of regret for whatever blame attaches to our country for that tragic year in the history of Norman Cross.