Until the 11th century, only saints, royals and clergy were usually buried inside churches, with most people interred in minster and parish churchyards. However, during the 10th to 12th centuries, wealthy landowners began building private chapels which gradually led to the development of their own cemeteries. The fashion for wooden effigies, plastered with gesso and painted in imitation of stone, took hold amongst the highest ranking clergy, aristocrats and gentry in the late 13th and early 14th centuries only to be superseded by the more lustrous alabaster in the mid-14th century. However, it was the Black Death that caused a significant drop in all monument production during the 1350s and 1360s, while burials rapidly increased. Despite pressure from influential citizens, most cathedrals and abbeys continued to reserve certain spaces for ecclesiastical burials only, such as the chancel. By the mid-15th century the nobility and gentry had gained burial rights in the chancel too and were trying to encroach further on exclusive burial spaces. In contrast, burials of the lower classes were dispersed around guild chapels, nave aisles, near popular devotional images or minor altars in the nave and transepts. Before the 16th century, mortuary monuments were largely horizontal but then, vertical space was used on an unprecedented scale through wall memorials, upright effigies, busts and memorial windows. This relieved pressure on floor space from accrued tombs.
Then in 1666, and again in 1679, Parliament ordered that all bodies should be buried in a shroud of woollen cloth. Though chiefly intended to stimulate the English woollen industry, the measure remained on the statute book until it was repealed in 1814. The practice of digging graves to a depth of six feet goes back at least to the 16th century and is believed to be a precaution against plague. Until town cemeteries were set up in the mid-19th century, most burials still took place in parish churchyards where, for the vast majority of those who died, the body was wrapped in a shroud and graves were marked with a simple structure such as a small wooden cross or some stones.These basic grave markers were said to stop the dead from rising and if they were inscribed it would be with no more than the person’s name, age and the year that they died. After the Reformation the right to burials in churchyards was extended and the first markers were often flat. There are not many churches still standing in the Liverpool area that were around then but one of them is Prescot Parish Church. Many of the oldest graves have now sunk but in August 2015 a stone from 1677 was uncovered during the clearance of jungle ivy. Old maps in Liverpool give great prominence to the number of fine churches around the city, but as the city centre grew, residents moved out and many churches closed. The land they stood on became valuable, however they still contained the last resting places of thousands of people. Dr Duncan informed the Board of Health in 1849 that there were 39 burial grounds within the Liverpool borough and Sextons stated several were crowded or fully occupied with complaints being made of offensive emanations under certain circumstances. As an aside, suicides were traditionally buried at a crossroads, sometimes with a stake through their body. This barbaric practice was condemned in Parliament in 1822 after the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, committed suicide but was buried in Westminster Abbey. An Act passed in 1823 allowed suicides private burial in a churchyard, but only at night and without a Christian service. A review of the law resulted in a new Act in 1882 allowing burial in daylight hours. Parliament did not decriminalise suicide until 1961, despite the fact that it had been suggested in 1823.
With the city expanding, land was needed and bodies were exhumed and relocated. In l885, the Dock Road at St. George’s Gate was widened and bodies were removed from St. Nicholas Churchyard and reburied in Everton Cemetery. In l892, St. Peter’s Church in Church Street was demolished and forty thousand bodies were removed. The sorting office in Copperas Hill was on the site of St. Nicholas R.C., demolished in l973. The authorities were surprised to find a second graveyard under the surface and between one and two thousand bodies had to be cremated. Many gardens now occupy former cemeteries with one example being St. John’s Gardens to the rear of St George's Hall which was originally a graveyard from the old St. John’s Church, built in l784. The burial ground was closed in l865, having received 82,500 souls. The Church was demolished 4 years later along with the churchyard to make way for road expansion and bodies,
exceeding 2,000, were carefully removed to a new cemetery near St Martin-in-the-Fields in the Vauxhall area in Silvester Street.
In the autumn of 1973, work began on excavating a plot of open land next to the Roman Catholic Church of St Oswald in Old Swan, to the east of Liverpool town centre. Father McCartney, warned the foreman that there might be some unmarked graves at one end of the site, and so, before any more work could take place, the Home Secretary had to sign an exhumation order. Sure enough, an unmarked coffin was discovered, at a depth of around 15 feet (5 metres), soon followed by another one. The workmen respectfully laid these side-by-side, and as digging continued more coffins were dug up as the digging process speeded up. To the amazement of everyone on-site, and in an area of only around forty square yards, a total of 3,561 coffins were eventually laid out, in rows, on the building site. This seemed to indicate that the burials had taken place as a single operation, but Father McCartney was as surprised as the workmen were as there were no written records of the burials in the church archives. An urgent instruction came, directly from the Home Office, to enclose the entire site with a 10-feet-high secure fence, with a locked gate. The site manager was also instructed that this was to be regarded as a restricted area, and that no members of the public should be allowed on site as the exhumations were allowed to continue. Indeed the press found themselves the subject of a D-Notice from the Government, preventing them from publishing any stories or pictures about the 'Old Swan Mass Grave'. The Home Office ordered the immediate cremation of the coffins and their contents, followed by the interment of the remains in an unmarked site in nearby Anfield Cemetery. Many conspiracy theories followed as to how these bodies came to be there, but it is highly likely that they had been exhumed and moved from other graveyards.
see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2024/03/liverpools-dead-interesting-huyton.html
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