The history of the gravedigger is long and venerable. The role, entirely a male one, is first mentioned in literature from the plague. Subsequently, Shakespeare and Victorian writers featured the role but little beyond that. My experience of a gravedigger at Shrewsbury Cemetery in the 1960’s had a great influence upon me. This man could neither read nor write but had a certain nobility. Today, we would see this as his exposure to nature, his understanding of soils, water and the birds and creatures about him. He knew that graves had to be prepared on a strict schedule and began digging, mostly alone, and rarely stopped. He was like an automaton, constant and regular. However, we might ask how the gravedigger role developed? To do this, we need to review how we dealt with death in the past.
Through the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in Britain, the dead were not buried. Most bodies were exposed to animals on the ground. Certainly, by the late Neolithic, bodies were placed on platforms which were restricted to birds. Somebody must have been caring for these although it might just have been a family duty. That would be to prepare the body, get it onto a platform and tie it down. By 3,000 BC, some of the elite were cremated and their ashes placed under the bluestones at Stonehenge. We might imagine that the tribal shaman was responsible for these ceremonies.
The first evidence of earth burial took place at Amesbury around this same period. It appears that the man we now call the Amesbury Archer died at that location whilst visiting Stonehenge. However, his burial was in a grave a mile away from Stonehenge at what we now call Amesbury. It is probable that the stone circle could be seen from the actual grave site. He was one of the incoming Beaker people and they brought the burial culture with them from Europe. Everything suggests that the family or compatriots knew the rituals and carried them out. They dug a grave in the chalk in an oval shape and held back the walls with timber. The archer’s body was laid out with a mass of grave goods, including the first gold ever seen in Britain. The grave goods, including food, suggest that the beaker people believed in an afterlife. However, they died out or were assimilated and little information about them exists.
The Romans later invaded and they utilised burial, but the gravedigging was probably done by slaves. The Anglo-Saxon period followed and they utilised burial. They adopted Christianity and, over time, began to inter the dead in churchyards. This is to be the heyday of the male gravedigger, an occupation that will last at least 1,000 years. The job changed in response to social changes over many years. At first, with few people dying, graves were clearly not numbered. They were shallow and ensured the body lay on a West East position. The head had to point to Jerusalem.
As time passed, the churchyard was placed around the church. It became a formally consecrated area and the graves were numbered. The gravedigger was often the sexton, the carer for sacred artifacts. No permanent memorials were placed in these earlier times. The body was seen as waste because the spirit had gone to heaven. Clearly, the gravedigger was the one person who knew where the graves were and who was in them. He also had to move the spare soil from each burial and place it over old burials. He was aware that he could then inter later burials in this tipped soil. Consequently, the churchyard was repeatedly re-used, with burials over burials.
It is evident in some churchyards that they removed the old bones and placed them in an ossuary. Unlike in Europe, this was rarely a specific building but rather a pit, covered over by boards. These pits, full of bones, are sometimes found. What is evident is that in the 1700’s stone memorials began to appear. It may be that wood crosses and the like were used prior to that but they will soon have rotted away. Why memorials appeared is not clear. The implication is that after the plagues, religious confidence was reduced, that the body became more important. Previously, the rich had always interred the body under the church floor, covered by an inscribed slab. The new merchant and professional classes could also afford to mark the grave. However, stone memorials were expensive and the majority of burials were not marked. Furthermore, a desire to place subsequent family burials in the same grave arose. For the gravedigger, the family name and location became significant but often stayed in his head. Consequently, I experienced churchyards where, following the death of an aged gravedigger, further burials in family graves were only allowed if the grave was marked by an identifiable memorial. As the sexton at Shrewsbury Cemetery in 1963, I had to locate and re-erect hundreds of sunken sandstone grave markers, and plot them on a map. That enabled us to locate graves which were otherwise unidentifiable.
The gravedigger I mention was an ailing man. Indeed, many gravediggers were worn out by the heavy work. Some had been trapped or had fallen in graves. Often, the graves were full of water, and they had to dig in wet weather because the funeral was imminent. Very little shoring was used and no doubt some gravediggers died in collapsed graves. This was more of a danger in Victorian times because poverty saw the introduction of pauper graves. These could be 7 meters deep, the gravedigger in the bottom and the ‘top man’ above, winding up buckets of soil using a windlass.
The very moment I experienced the aging gravedigger, his job was profoundly changed. Tractors with a backhoe excavator had arrived. Now, 65 years later, purpose designed grave digging machines have taken over. The role of the conventional gravedigger, like his clients, is now dead and buried.
Article by Ken West
The Stonehenge Pensioner
