The Puritans, however, are to be thanked for stopping the then common practice of holding wakes and fairs in the churchyards—a practice traceable no doubt to the celebration of Saints' Days in the churches, and for that reason suppressed as remnants of Popery in 1627-31.
It need not be said that the Burial Service and the Prayer Book came back with the Restoration, but the discontinuance of fairs in churchyards seems to have been permanent. Many instances, however, have occurred in later years of desecration by pasturing cattle in the churchyards,[7] and offences of this nature have been so recent that the practice cannot be said with confidence to have even now entirely ceased. But we return to the gravestones.
From one cause or another it is pretty certain that for every old gravestone now to be seen twenty or more have disappeared.
In Gough's "Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain" many instances are given of the wanton and wholesale destruction of church and churchyard memorials, even late in the eighteenth century. In some cases the church officers, as already stated, gave public notice prior to removal of gravestones, in order that persons claiming an interest in the remains might repair and restore them; but more frequently the stones were cleared away and destroyed, or put somewhere out of sight without observation. Sometimes this was the act of the Rector; at other times individuals, exercising rights of ownership, have done the disgraceful work, and occasionally the whole of the parishioners have been implicated. Gough says that the inhabitants of Letheringham in Suffolk, being under the necessity of putting their church into decent order, chose to rebuild it, and sold the whole fabric, monuments and all, to the building contractor, who beat the stones to powder, and sold as much at three shillings a pound for terrace (?) as came to eighty guineas. A portion of the fragments was rescued by the Rev. Mr. Clubbe, and erected in form of a pyramid in the vicarage garden of Brandeston, in the same county, with this inscription:
Indignant Reader!
These monumental remains are not, as thou
mayest suppose, the
Ruins of Time,
But were destroyed in an
Irruption of the Goths
So late in the Christian era as 1789.
Credite Posteri!
CHAPTER VIII.
REFORM AMONG THE GRAVESTONES.
That the state of the old churchyards in this country, down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a public scandal and disgrace, is a remark which applies especially to London, where burial-grounds, packed full of human remains, were still made available for interments on a large scale until 1850 or later. The fact was the more discreditable in contrast with the known example of Paris, which had, as early as 1765, closed all the city graveyards, and established cemeteries beyond the suburbs. One of the laws passed at the same time by the Parliament of Paris directed that the graves in the cemeteries should not be marked with stones, and that all epitaphs and inscriptions should be placed on the walls, a regulation which appears to have been greatly honoured in the breach. In 1776 Louis XVI., recognizing the benefit which Paris had derived from the city decree, prohibited graveyards in all the cities and towns of France, and rendered unlawful interments in churches and chapels; and in 1790 the National Assembly passed an Act commanding that all the old burial-grounds, even in the villages, should be closed, and others provided at a distance from habitations.[8] Other States of Europe took pattern by these enlightened proceedings, and America was not slow in making laws upon the subject; but Great Britain, and its worst offender, London, went on in the old way, without let or hindrance, until 1850, For fifteen years prior to that date there had been in progress an agitation against the existing order of things, led by Dr. G.A. Walker, a Drury Lane surgeon, living in a very nest of churchyard fevers, who wrote a book and several pamphlets, delivered public lectures, and raised a discussion in the public press. The London City Corporation petitioned Parliament in 1842 for the abolition of burials within the City, and a Select Committee of the House of Commons was at once entrusted with an enquiry on the subject.
The following were the official figures shewing the burials in the London district[9] from 1741 to 1837, and it was asserted that many surreptitious interments were unrecorded: