Some of the oldest and most impressive monuments, from the pyramids at Giza to the passage grave at Newgrange in Ireland, are memorials for the dead. The humblest headstone in a country churchyard is part of a human impulse to immortalise those we have loved and lost which can be seen throughout time, all over the world.
A wander through any burial ground is a stroll through the past of that community, like stepping between the pages of an open-air history book. Each stone tells the story of an individual or family and can provide remarkable insight into their lives. Through the symbolism and epitaphs chosen for each of these stones we can learn not just names and dates, but trace professions, learn of local disasters, chart changes in life expectancy and infant mortality, or people’s characters and interests. No wonder they are so valued a resource for local and family history researchers.
Not every grave is marked with a memorial though, with archaeologists estimating that the average parish churchyard contains around 10,000 burials and urban cemeteries up to 1 million! When did we start using gravestones as memorials and why doesn’t every burial have one?
Between the widespread acceptance of Christianity in Britain and the Industrial Revolution, most people would be interred in their local parish churchyard. Inside the church itself were memorials for the local gentry (and the clergy), with the belief that graves closest to the altar were closest to God, and thus the most sought after. The memorials inside churches ranged from elaborate side chapels built with their own altars to house a chest tomb with elaborately carved statues to simple engraved slabs in the floor and everything in between, including brasses and memorial windows. Over time churches became crowded with memorials from different eras, representing the most important, wealthy families. Space beneath the floor for more coffins became just as limited.
These kinds of memorials were beyond the reach of ordinary parishioners – they couldn’t afford the high fees for burial inside the church, or commission a stonemason to create a memorial. They would be buried in the churchyard, their names added to the Parish register and be remembered as part of the collective dead on All Souls Day. The location of the grave would be known by their family and friends for as long as they were in living memory and so a permanent marker wasn’t needed. Memorials outside in the churchyard were not practical anyway, as the same piece of land served the community for many centuries, by a slow process of grave re-use.
The graves on the South and East sides of the church were most popular, offering a view of dawn on Judgement Day, with the North side associated with the burial of undesirables, like strangers to the community. Gradually, over the course of a generation or so, all the space would be used and then the process would start again. Any bones uncovered might be transferred to an ossuary or charnel pit, or simply reburied deeper than the level of the new grave. This reuse is why, over time, the soil level around churches grew higher than that surrounding them, often nearing the top of the walls.
From the 18th century onwards, this process was disrupted. Where space inside churches was scarce, wealthy families started to build a family vault or bricked grave, replicating their traditions inside the church and marked with similar memorials, inspired by chest tombs, wall plaques and ledger stones. This trend encouraged other members of the community to mark graves too. Many early gravestones are small and made from local stone. Sometimes the carvings are quite rudimentary, showing that local workers were turning their hand to gravestones. Marking graves made reuse more difficult, but this was not an immediate issue in small, often shrinking, rural parishes.
Urban areas, however, faced a problem as population increased rapidly. Growing towns and cities of the Industrial Revolution drew in many working families, leading to overcrowded and unsanitary conditions for the living and the dead. Instead of reusing a grave in a parish churchyard once every 40 or 50 years, they attempted reuse them after only 3–5 years, with predicable results – churchyards that offended the eyes, noses, morals and health of the congregation. Buying land to extend urban churchyards was difficult, usually resulting in small detached extensions some distance from the church, where they were built at all. In Paris, to end the problem, they closed all the churchyards and crypts in the city and opened new burial grounds outside the city limits, most famous of which is Pére Lachaise cemetery.
This new ‘garden cemetery’ model with a park landscape and beautiful memorials was widely copied across Europe and America. In Britain this started in 1830s, with private cemeteries owned by Joint Stock Companies. They made profits for their shareholders by selling graves and the right to erect a monument to the growing middle classes, desperate to escape the overcrowded churchyards. The professional funeral industry was also growing, with new memorial masons next to the cemeteries with catalogues of designs to choose from, to be customised with different symbols and inscriptions.
The Burial Acts in the mid19th century empowered local authorities to set up burial boards and build municipal cemeteries, so the role of the Church of England in providing burial was reduced in urban areas. Soon even those living in rural parishes could order a gravestone from a catalogue or a local stonemason imitating fashionable styles. More regional types of memorial such as the hogback stones seen in northern England and Scotland waned in popularity. The arrival of the railways made it easier to import other types of stone, such as granite from Cornwall and Aberdeen or Canara marble from Italy. Such stones were shaped at the quarry and only inscribed with the epitaph by the local mason.
The range of gravestone styles and colours seen in churchyards increased. Most memorials were still made from local stone, such as slate in Wales, but scattered here and there would be a pink granite obelisk or a marble cross. By the 20th century, importing materials from further afield became affordable and today popular polished ‘granites’ come from South Africa, India and China. The reducing cost of memorials made them accessible to more people too, until it became unusual for any grave to be left unmarked, which is in stark contrast to pre-industrial eras.
The symbolism of memorials became more varied over time. Early gravestones were very plain or decorated with ‘memento mori’ (remember you must die) symbols like skull and crossbones or winged hourglasses. These were first replaced in the 18th century by more romantic symbols, like winged cherub heads or weeping willows, broken columns and urns, inspired by Roman and Ancient Greek art. The 19th century had Egyptian, Gothic and Celtic revivals, all making their mark on gravestones. The Victorian language of the flowers was a popular source of motifs, like roses for love or ivy for loyalty. Sentimental designs like clasped hands accompanied by the words ‘we shall meet again’ were common. If you want to learn about symbolism in your local burial ground, Caring for God’s Acre have a handy symbolism guide available on our website at bit.ly/cfga-signs-symbols.
Over the coming years, thanks to Our Digital Ancestors project, we’ll know more about memorials in English churchyards than ever before, with approximately 10–12 million of them mapped and photographed, for us to explore their stories further.
