The Evolution of Cemeteries, Part Two: A Mini-Essay

     Because of their popularity and the limited confines of the land, Ariès explains, churches needed to establish a burial system that perpetually supplanted older corpses with newer bodies. What emerged, the historian reveals, was an intricate arrangement of stacked stone sarcophagi and dirt graves which could be filled and emptied, with the remains of past parishioners relegated to either the garrets – land overgrown with grass whose pasturage was regularly disputed between the church and the community – and the charnels – the church’s galleries which, by the fourteenth century, became intricately decorated with bones and skulls.[1] While social standing influenced the final resting place of an individual’s remains (poorer parishioners, for instance, were often relegated to the garrets), it also determined the initial location of internments. The choir, the chapel, and before statues of the Virgin Mary were the most sought-after locations, but frequently reserved for the more financially generous of churchgoers; however, given the limited space of most cemeteries, even the most charitable of Christians were not guaranteed their chosen places of rest.[2] Due to this factor, members of the congregation made general requests (near the elm tree or somewhere between the church and the cross, for example), graves were not marked, and records of burial were kept haphazardly by clergy in ledgers whose entries were often as unspecific as the requests themselves.[3] This process existed uninterrupted in the majority of Europe until the seventeenth century when, at the end of the ancien régime, the upper classes abandoned the communal nature of the graveyard and, desiring to preserve familial unity, built chapels and family vaults to help contain lineages, both physically and metaphorically.[4]

Works Referenced

Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. 1977. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2000.

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[1] Ariès, 56-61.
[2] Ariès, 78-82.
[3] Ariès, 78-82.
[4] Ariès, 288-293.