Burials in the churchyard

The churchyard is regarded as the last resting place of those who went before and has become the focal point of research for anyone anxious to trace ancestors from past centuries.

This plot of secluded land to the south of the Abbey Church, shaded by ancient chestnuts and lined with slate and granite tombstones, contains barely 300 graves yet those who died in Bourne in past centuries are numbered in their thousands and leaving us with the mystery of where they were all buried.

Graveyards were usually established at the same time as the building of the church which in this case is 1138, and were often used by those families who could not afford to be buried inside the place of worship itself. The nobility and those who were wealthy and important, usually landowners, were given crypts or space beneath the chancel and the nave and several ledger stones in the Abbey Church mark such graves, notably Alice Hyde (1685-1737), John Hurn (1688-1757) and Hargate Dove (1744-1810).

Most people from the middle or working classes were buried outside in the churchyard, usually divided by social status, and families of the deceased who could afford the work of a mason marked the grave with a headstone but most could not although sometimes a religious symbol made from wood was placed on the grave and as this quickly deteriorated in extreme weather conditions, the graves eventually became unmarked. There were also favourable locations according to who you were and as the entire churchyard was not always consecrated ground, a practice persisted until the 19th century whereby the virtuous were buried on the south side of the church which received the most sunshine while felons, outcasts and unbaptised infants were consigned to the perpetual shadow of the north side.

By the mid-19th century, burials ended in the churchyard at Bourne because, like many others around the country, it was deemed to be full. There was no more space and some plots had been used two, three and even four times for interments with bodies stacked one upon the other, a situation which resulted in the opening of the town cemetery in 1855.

There were several different types of graves then in use, the private grave on a specific plot of ground purchased by a person with the right to erect a headstone or other monument, a common grave filled by several unrelated persons who had died during a specific period but could only afford the basic burial, a public grave several tiers deep but filled up after each interment and a pauper’s grave paid for from public funds but actually an unofficial form of the common grave and usually containing several burials.

Other variations included an inscription grave which was a type of common grave but sometimes had a headstone serving several plots for unrelated deaths. We should remember however, that gravestones were a 17th century innovation while most date from the 18th century or later and so for the first 500 years of its life, the churchyard was filled with unmarked graves. But a close inspection of the parish registers reveals that the number of burials recorded over the centuries could never have been accommodated in the churchyard alone even adopting such extreme measures as the multiple use of grave spaces.

Overcrowding was evident well before records of burials began, even as early as the 14th century when the high number of deaths during major outbreaks of the Black Death reached unmanageable proportions. In 1349, for instance, when the bishops were called upon to licence new churchyards and extensions to the old, Bishop John Gwynell of Lincoln, while dedicating a new churchyard at Great Easton in Leicestershire to supplement that at the mother church at Bringhurst, told the people: “There increases among you, as in other places of our diocese, a mortality of men such as has not been seen or heard aforetime from the beginning of the world so that the old graveyard at your church [at Bringhurst] is not sufficient to receive the bodies of the dead.”

The earliest records of burials can be traced back to the mid-16th century. There were 45 burials in 1562 and this figure had risen to 64 in 1600 with subsequent years showing a slow but steady increase. The greatest number of burials in the 17th century was between 1633 and 1642 when there was a high rate of mortality in the town believed to have been caused by the plague which was constantly breaking out in England from the time of the Black Death to the Fire of London. A total of 662 burials are recorded for that ten year period, the highest annual figures being 100 in 1634 and 126 in 1638.

An estimate for the long term can be assessed from the total figure for the first half of the 17th century when 2,670 burials were recorded for the years from 1601-1650. Replicating this summary would mean that the churchyard had to cope with at least 5,000 burials for each of the subsequent centuries although the death rate was increasing with the rising population and so between 1562 and 1855 when the churchyard closed, at least 30,000 burials would have taken place although with unrecorded deaths prior to that, and in those years when no register was kept, this figure will be much higher. Cremation is not a factor because this practice was not introduced until 1902.

These figures are borne out by the National Burials Index (NBI) which records a total of 37,624 burials in Bourne between 1754 and 1995 although 8,287 of these were in the cemetery which opened in 1855 and so the total for the churchyard for that period will be 29,337. My own records go back a further two centuries to include those burials between 1562 and 1753 and so we are able to give a continuous total over five centuries of 50,000.

Extract from the Bourne burial register for 1651

A survey of the monumental inscriptions in the churchyard by the Lincolnshire Family History Society (Bourne branch) in 2010, revealed that there were 276 burials at the present time and the earliest date appears to be 1710. Using the figure of 300 graves as a yardstick therefore, this means that the churchyard must have been used 166 times over to provide space for the departed in the 900 years of its existence which is quite unlikely and so there must be another explanation, perhaps that mass graves were a far more frequent occurrence than is recorded in our church histories.

They are still used in time of war, plague and disaster and it is the simplest solution for any authority when faced with a large number of bodies needing burial. There are many instances of this during times of plague and epidemic, particularly during the Black Death period and with frequent influenza and cholera outbreaks, when alternative mass burial pits were dug well away from inhabited areas for fear of infection, perhaps even out in the countryside, and this will account for many discoveries of mass graves made when farming, building and other modernisation projects are undertaken.

John Bland of the LFHS thinks that even these figures may be an under estimation. “The death rate potentially could be higher”, he said. “Non-conformists and Catholics would have no place in the churchyard at times. Where would they have been buried? Would their deaths even be recorded?”

He accepts the theory that the present churchyard is simply too small for the population and has suggested that perhaps it was once much larger at some time in the past but the only evidence of this is the marooned tombstones on the south west side which indicate that those graves were replaced when the footpath was built but this would not mean the loss of many burial plots. The only other land available is to the east of the present churchyard but there is documentary proof that this was offered to the church in 1846 and refused and a major factor in the decision was undoubtedly the Burial Act of 1855 which resulted in the establishment of the cemetery in South Road, thus resolving the shortage of burial space in the future.

Many church historians offer an explanation to the mystery by pointing out that even in a small village of say, 250 inhabitants, several thousand people died and were buried each century and in the average country churchyard there are about 20,000 bodies under the soil. In some counties such as Norfolk, the ground has even risen by as much as three feet often giving the appearance that the church has sunk into the ground. This explanation is apparent with the churchyard in Bourne which has also risen above the level of the church for a height of more than 2 ft. although not quite so dramatically as others elsewhere in the country but then this is fen soil and the land is also liable to sink, thus reducing the impact.

The inadequacy of old records makes it impossible to trace the last resting place of everyone who died in Bourne but this changed with the opening of the town cemetery and all 10,000 burials that have taken place there have been recorded for posterity. Death is an inevitable eventuality with the annual numbers rising as the population increases and despite the frequency of cremation which accounts for more than half of the funerals today, even the cemetery in South Road is now running out of space and the town council is currently negotiating to buy more land for the future.

All burials today, however, are accurately recorded and anyone who has been interred in the past 150 years can easily be identified through reference to the burial register held by the town council. Seeking this information from the period prior to that, however, can prove to be a difficult even impossible task if we are to depend entirely on the parish registers or what may be gleaned from the grave spaces in the churchyard and it is unlikely that the secret of how many bodies have been buried there over the centuries will ever be revealed.

REVISED NOVEMBER 2013

See also

Finding space for burials in Bourne