English parish churches, if they have been there for any
length of time as most of them have, tend to display a strange characteristic,
which is that they seem to be sinking into the ground. Quite often the lowest
course of stones appears to be a couple of feet below the level of the
surrounding churchyard.
However, this is not because the church builders did not set
the foundations properly, or that they regularly chose to build on soft ground
into which the structure would sink over time. The fact is that the surrounding
land has risen, and not that the church has sunk.
The reason for this is that churchyards are where people
from the surrounding village have been buried for century after century. It is
not all that long ago that the only legal way of disposing of a dead body was
to bury it (cremation was first legalised in the United Kingdom in 1902,
although the practice had started in the late 19th century). Burials
could only take place in consecrated ground, and that meant the village
churchyard.
However, churchyards were limited in area, which meant that
space for burials was at a premium. The same piece of ground would therefore be
re-dug for fresh burials several times over. Bones do not always decay
completely – it depends on the acidity of the soil – so many burials took place
on top of the bones of previous ones. Over time, layer upon layer of human
remains, as well as the action of repeated digging, pushed the land surface
higher and higher.
In a parish with a steady average population of 300 people,
one might expect around a thousand adults to die every century. However, with
child mortality being what it was in the past, there would have been many more
than that number of burials. In a churchyard that was first laid out in the 10th
or 11th century, the number of times that the gravediggers got to
work between then and now could have been as many as 20,000, possibly even more.
It is little wonder that many churchyards seem to be
swallowing their churches!
© John Welford
