Ways of Dying in 1665

inbetweener, yeah we've done that thanks. It was established that she had never seen in. Doesn't detract from a very interesting discussion. I'd advise you to read it.

I was reading the other day about Victorian non-conformist groups, and those who believed in adult baptism were subject to all sorts of laws about where children could be buried and who could perform what service. The Suffolk and Norfolk churches site (google if if you don't know it, it's good for browsing - the site maker has visited very church in the area and described them, including lots of local story-type stuff) has a story about a child being buried and the C of E vicar locking the burial party out of his graveyard.

You'd have to have some terribly strong religious convictions wouldn't you? To go with adult baptism knowing if your child died they couldn't be buried properly. Apparently there was a right stink about it as C of E English people abroad were entitled to be buried in Catholic or Orthodox cemetaries, but the C of E didn't allow non-baptised children even if their parents were committed to adult baptism.

'Even to her own children, the Church has in special circumstances refused burial in the churchyard, not only to unbaptized children, suicides and lunatics (the latter being possibly possessed by a devil), but in particular to those, who, for one reason or another had been excommunicated; a whole parish was liable to excommunication for various periods for disregarding ecclesiastical law, during which time burials in consecrated ground were forbidden. In such circumstances it often happened that the body would be secretly buried in the night within the coveted spot, which if discovered, brought further penalties on the offender.'

from this randomly googled but probably not totally made up text

I haven't read all the replies, but isnt the OP quoting from a David Baddiel stand up sketch from the 80's ?

IIRC there was a chap who lived up the road from where I grew up who was one of the first to insist on cremation for his son, who he had eccentrically named Jesus Christ. He was a thorough maverick. Anyone know his name - he lived in Llantrisant in the nineteenth century? He is credited with helping change attitudes towards cremation

Beta - child unbaptised perhaps?

Cremation is still taboo for some strict Christians. My cousin was a nun and she wasn't allowed to opt for cremation (C of E).

MoreBeta I would love to know about that child's grave - how poignant.

Julia - it's awful isn't it?

the ones that get me are the ones where a large family of children have survived infancy and are then carried off by disease within a space of a few months.

You'd think they would have tried a different name after a while wouldn't you?

The infant mortality thing is correct. I live near St James, Cooling which is the one Pip meets Magwitch in Great Expectations 17 (?) little baby graves from 2 generations of same family. I've been in other graveyards with eg Robert aged 2 died 1860, Robert aged 1 died 1862, Robert aged 3 died 1866 and so on, which must have been unimaginable for the poor parents.

burial vs cremation must come into this as well - cremation much more hygienic but was taboo for a long time in Christianity (and still is in some countries - a Greek student told me it was illegal in Greece until fairly recently).

And how sensible it was of the Hindus and Muslims to either bury or cremate their dead within 6 hours or so.

I can't believe this conversation has got even more morbid

That thing about burying within the church and so on is really interesting. I used to live in a village right next to the church. The old village, before the plague, had been situated a few hundred yards away from where it is now.

After the plague the village was rebuilt away from the old plague village but the plague victims were buried within the church that did not move and everyone still visited it.

Even more oddly, one grave of a child was put right at the back of my house, literally just outside our living room but outside the church yard. I always wondered why that was. Perhaps a child born out of wedlock?

I hadn't thought of wakes, but yes, I bet that didn't help.

I find it just so sad, because it's such a natural human reaction to want to keep the dead close, but it used to be a total taboo before Christianity. And actually the Romans have taboos against failing to bury a dead body, which I have seen explained as a good practice for containing disease. Medieval people really go for death masks and chopping up dead people to bury a heart here and a head here ... actually it makes me wonder how much the later prohibitions on dissection were quite helpful to individuals (if not to the progress of medicine).

I was about to comment on your monster essay too! It's so crashingly obvious when you think about it isn't it? How many diseases have prospered because of customs like that, and things like wakes?

ariel I cross-posted writing my monster essay (sorry!), but I love A Parcel of patterns! It's so beautifully written, you can really hear her voice.

The thing about Jewish law being much more on the ball about disease - Paul Binski's book 'Medieval Death' is very good on this. He's writing about the cultural perceptions rather than the gory practicalities but it is very interesting.

Basically, he says that societies like the Romans (and the Jews I guess) knew to bury their dead well away from the living, and to treat death as having a 'miasma' (the word means pollution both in a literal and spiritual sense) that surrounded it.

Christianity OTOH insisted that death was just a process, that the death could be touched by Jesus, and that a 'good' death was a saintly attribute. Dead bodies became relics or holy signs. And architecturally, places of worship changed, as did town planning. Whereas you used to have the dead buried outside the boundary, over the late Antique and early Medieval period it became customary to have graveyards inside towns and, eventually, burials and tombs not just outside but inside churches. So you get crypts and memorial tombs in the church building.

So people would be living and worshiping right by badly-sealed tombs and not-very-well-dug graves - both things that we know happen fairly often as people complain about the smell and about 'church candles'/ 'will-o-the-wisps', which are the spooky flames you get igniting over graves when the land is waterlogged and methane gas is being given off and igniting. And if you bury people inside churches/in graveyards near a church, there will only be so much space so you will have to keep digging up the graves and piling older bones into crypts to make room. It's a really easy way to get very ill.

It is sad because people thought their attitude to death was so humane, and it's part of a heritage of memorialising and grieving for the death that's a huge part of most of our lives, but it probably also killed a lot of people.

Saggar, Eyam! That's the place I was trying to think of earlier in the thread. I read a book many times when I was young called A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh. It's told in the first person by a young woman who lived in Eyam through the outbreak and it's absolutely fascinating. If you're interested in the plague and the seventeeth century in general I urge you to read it. Scarlett, that includes you! Ignore the fact that it's supposed to be a kids' book. Here it is

'before' passing on the disease! doh!

another problem that people faced after the dissolution was lepers and the fact that without the monks they lost the leper colonies and were turfed out to wander the country, of course they died fairly quickly but not after passing on the disease - at the time of the dissolution, the monastries were the only form of social care avaliable, monks ran the only hospitals and also had the best knowledge of diseases and medical knowledge (although that was obviously pretty scant by modern standards) - a great deal of knowledge was given to the monks by muslims that had travelled to england during the time of the crusades, this was nearly all lost so that Henry VIII could get his wicked way with that madam Anne!

It didn't help that, for a long time Galen's ideas about anatomy (concluded from dissecting animals, not humans) were gospel.

I think they were making waves, and really studying human anatomy in Alexandria, but then that stopped when it was destroyed, putting the development of modern medicine back quite a way

I'm loving the MN Horrible Histories

There's a village near me which was devastated by plague in 1665. The villagers chose to isolate themselves and most of them died. It's quite a sobering place to visit. Eyam

Snow and the Broad St pump always fascinated me.I think that when he was trying to find the cause of the outbreak,he couldn't work out why a family miles away in a 'healthier' area had succumbed.It turned out that although they had moved away,they missed the taste of the water from their old pump and so had been returning to get their water from there.

The Painted Veil was serialised on Woman's Hour a week or two back,and I missed the last two episodes.I'll have to track down the book I think.

Here ye go

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen/radio/episode/b01b9b7s/

YY, too many people in too close proximity with no proper way of dealing with effluent - very very bad situation. Mind you, the Victorian sewage systems are struggling to deal with the increased load they have - my grandparents lived in the bottom 2 floors of a Georgian town house, the bottom floor being the mews and therefore below street level. My grandmother's kitchen had a "back scullery" which was a step below the rest of the floor, and had a drain cover in it. At least 3 times in the last 20 years when there has been extremely heavy rain, that drain has backed up and sewage has flooded into their back kitchen. Once, it came over the kitchen step and all through the bottom floor - thankfully that was after both grandparents had died and while no one was living in that half of the house. Shocking - but the water board said it's because of the extra pressure on the system, overloading it. They offered to put some kind of valve in, but my grandparents would have had to pay for it and it was loadsamoney, so they didn't bother.