Burial vault

“ The new vault was consecrated the 31st August, 1683. This accounts for the apparent want of an entrance to the centre of the crypt; as all visitors to the church are aware, you look through little apertures to the place where a few post-revolution burials have taken place. I commend all these particulars, which exemplify the horrors of burial above ground, with the rifling of tombs and coffins perpetrated by the officers of the Convention, to the opposers of cremation. ”

“ Everything was as I had left it, save that the tangle of brush-wood had become thicker, and weeds and brambles had sprung up, making it less visible than before, and probably rendering it more impassable. By a fortunate accident I had secured the key of the vault. I knew that for family burial-places of this kind there are always two keys—one left in charge of the keeper of the cemetery, the other possessed by the person or persons to whom the mausoleum belongs, and this other I managed to obtain. ”

“ And, even then, my mortal terrors would listen to no reason—would accept no consolation. | entered into a series of elaborate precautions, Among other things, I had the family vault so remodelled as to admit of being readily opened from within. The slightest pressure upon a long lever that extended far into the tomb would cause the iron portals to fly back. There were arrangements also for the free admission of air and light, and convenient receptacles for food and water, within immediate reach of the coffin intended for my reception. ”

“ This coffin was warmly and softly padded, and was provided with a lid, fashioned upon the principle of the vault door, with the addition of springs so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set it at liberty. Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb, a large bell, the rope of which, it was designed, should extend through a hole in the coffin, and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse. But, alas, what avails the vigilance against the Destiny of man? ”

“ Another stone stairs leads down to the vault, which is perfectly dark, save for one narrow slit at the very top, going into the garden. Here was once a shrine, whereof the altar and crucifix still remain. A row of niches runs all round, of which two have been built up, doubtless for burial purposes, and there are the dusty remains of several coffins, such as are used for nuns, beside two or three of lead and stone. 'Tis a dismal and dreadful place, and it seems horrible to think any living being should be confined there. ”

“ A list of the London churches and chapels which were provided with burial-vaults, but not with graveyards, will be found in Appendix C. It is not unlikely that many of these will have, in time, to be cleared out. In some cases the coffins or remains have already been collected and reinterred in cemeteries, the one at Woking having been especially favoured. They are very liable to become a nuisance, and are far more dangerous to the living than the human remains under the plots of ground open to the air. ”

“ Rent must be paid for these niches, and when friends fail to meet the bills the remains are taken out and placed in a heap with others formerly evicted. One may pay rent for these burial vaults as long as he wishes, but from five to ten years seemed to be the length of time relatives retained regard for the departed. The graveyard is over a hundred years old, but the dates appearing on the slabs of the vaults bear record only of deaths within five to ten years. All the burial places are not like Paco, however, as in a number of cemeteries the dead are placed underground. ”

“ The ordinary mode of disposing of the dead was by interment either in a stone vault or in a shallow grave. But occasionally other modes were adopted, such as embalming, putting the corpse in a canoe and setting it adrift on the sea, or exposing it on a stage erected in the forest, where it was left to decay, the bones being afterwards collected and buried. Upon the death of a chief his body was generally deposited in a family vault, the sides and bottom of which were lined with large slabs of sandstone or basalt, while another large slab of the same material formed the roof. ”

“ The tombs are almost universally made of brick, and whitewashed. They vary in size from 3 × 6 feet to 10 × 10 feet or 10 × 20 feet; there is a post in the centre, which is surrounded by shelves, on which the body—that is, the coffin—is deposited. There the dead rests for about a year, when it becomes necessary to use the tomb for another corpse; then the remains of the preceding occupant of the vault are rudely taken from the casket and dashed head over heels into a pit, where they are left to breed disease. ”

“ We have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed. Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance—now that is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted on an express waggon, but I am talking about your high toned, silver mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots—I mean folk like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such. ”

“ In these latter days when over crowded cemeteries and the levelling of graveyards in the midst of our metropolis have called forth the cry of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," by some new means, and some means quicker than the old; when even cremation has come within the bounds of possibility, surely the Parsee mode of burial will commend itself to many foreseeing minds. True that we do not like to think of the vultures hovering around the funeral procession for the last few miles, nor of others awaiting it, perched on, and greedily gazing down into, the tower ”

“ All that must now be thought of, is how to deceive the commander of the believers; and I am of opinion, that you should immediately cause a wooden image resembling a dead body to be carved. We will shroud it up in linen, and when shut up in a coffin, it shall be buried in some part of the palace; you shall then immediately cause a marble mausoleum to be built, in the form of a dome, over the burial place, and erect a tomb, which shall be covered with embroidered cloth, and set about with great candlesticks and large wax tapers. ”

“ If the guardians of consecrated sepulchres, in which people have paid an honest fee to be buried, are to dig them up and cart them off as in England, or make a show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead. ”

“ These are wooden planks cut in the shape of tombstones and roughly painted. Sometimes they bear also the image of a saint. They are erected—often in a row of thirty and more—on the roadside, in fields and meadows, near chapels and crucifixes, in the village streets—in short, everywhere; they are even nailed to houses and barns. They do not mark burial-places, as might be supposed. As soon as a person has died the corpse is put on a board, and there it lies in state until it is put into the coffin shortly before the funeral. ”

“ In order to accomplish this herculean task it was the common practice to burn the older coffins in the minister’s house, under his copper and in his fireplaces. Between the coffins and the floor of the chapel there was nothing but the boards. In time the effluvium in the chapel became intolerable, and no one attended the services, but the vaults were still used for interments, so that “more money was made from the dead than from the living”—a state of affairs which existed in many of the private burial-places of the metropolis. ”

“ Cemetery is derived from κοιμάω, to sleep, because the primitive Christians spoke of death as a sleep, from which men are to awake at the general resurrection. The first Christian sepulchres were crypts or catacombs. The custom of burying in churches was not practised for the first 300 years of the Christian era; and severe laws were passed against burying even in cities. The first step towards the practice of burying in churches, was the transferring of the relics of martyrs thither: next, sovereigns and princes were allowed burial in the porch: in the sixth century churchyards came into use. ”

“ If the men intended going to a certain grave at night, late in the afternoon a woman, in deep mourning, would walk round the part of the cemetery in which the grave was situated, and contrive to detach the wires from the guns. Loose stones were placed on the walls of the grave-yard, so as to make scaling the walls almost an impossibility; this [Pg 76] was useless when the custodian had a house with a window looking into the burial-place. ”

“ Cremation seems in many cases to have been preferred to burial in a tomb. The funeral pile was constructed at some distance from the town, on a specially reserved area in the middle of the marshes. The body, wrapped up in coarse matting, was placed upon a heap of reeds and rushes saturated with bitumen: a brick wall, coated with moist clay, was built around this to circumscribe the action of the flames, and, the customary prayers having been recited, the pile was set on fire, masses of fresh material, together with the funerary furniture and usual viaticum, being added to the pyre. ”

“ Fifteen times the cannon have awakened the numerous echoes of the cemetery, shaken the wreaths of jet and immortelles, the light ex-votos hanging at the corners of burial lots, and while a reddish cloud floats upward and revolves amid the odor of powder across the city of the dead, mingling gradually with the smoke from the factories of the plebeian quarter, the countless multitude also disperses, scattering through the sloping streets, the long stairways gleaming white among the verdure, with a confused murmur as of waves beating against the rocks. ”

“ The gravedigger turns over the loose earth with his spade, and strikes a coffin here and there. The vault is too full. He moves on to another bricked square, pushes his spade in, and says there is just room. He digs a little hole and lays the coffin flush with the top of the brickwork. Then he throws a few spadefuls of earth over it from a mound close by, and the ceremony is finished. There are thousands of these bricked squares in the cemetery, and each contains a score of coffins. There is no stone over the top, only the loose brown earth. ”

“ People in 1999 were loyal to the sacred memory of departed ones, and on Memorial days the interior of the mausoleums and doors of the vaults were garlanded with flowers, presenting a most beautiful appearance. The old graves of the nineteenth and preceding centuries were still cared for by loving hands.
These were decorated as in the good old days of 1899 and were not in anywise neglected. Many families in the twentieth century took up the remains of their ancestors and caused them to be cremated in order that their ashes might rest in the same vault. ”

“ In another way, a funeral pile, made of wood and in the form of an altar, was built up outside the city and near the family burial place. The eyes of the corpse were opened and it was wrapped in a shroud and laid upon the pile. The nearest relative impressed a last kiss upon the lips of the deceased and then with a burning torch and head averted set fire to the pile, the others present raising a conclamatio. While the pile was burning there was thrown upon it incense, perfumes, clothing, ornaments, weapons, and other things, as last presents to the deceased. ”

“ The same religious symbolism which led to the adoption of a definite form of sepulchre, typifying the element earth, would evidently account for the adoption for burial purposes, of large clay vessels into which the remains of the dead were placed. In some localities these clay burial urns were, as we know, made large enough to contain the dead body itself. The difficulty of manufacturing these would naturally have led to the general adoption of cremation, simply as a means of reducing the remains so that they could repose in the sacred image of the earth. ”

“ Friends and relatives often placed objects on the newly-made grave, such as a flower or an oyster-shell, so that they might be able to tell if the earth had been disturbed. These objects were generally carefully noted by the resurrection-men, and were put back in their exact places after the body had been removed and the grave re-filled.
In some burial-grounds, houses were built in which the bodies could be kept until they were putrid, and therefore useless to the resurrection-men. Such a house is still standing in the burial-ground at Crail. ”

“ The sepulchral remains of the Anglo-Saxons are of two general classes—barrows and cemeteries—and in these the modes of burial have been both by inhumation and by cremation.
The grave-mounds, or barrows, are, as a rule, of much less altitude, and of smaller dimensions, generally, than those of either of the preceding periods. In some districts they are found in extensive groups, frequently occupying elevated sites; at other times they are solitary, and frequently the elevation above the surrounding surface is so slight as to be scarcely perceptible except to the most practised eye. ”