Skip to main content

Carry him off in a patent coffin: body snatching in the eighteenth century




Occasionally Dan turned the pages of his newspaper. Someone was advertising a new design of coffin, secure enough to keep out body snatchers. Good luck with that, he thought.

The Butcher’s Block: A Dan Foster Mystery

I recently spent an afternoon in Frenchay, near Bristol, visiting the Frenchay Unitarian Chapel. The Chapel dates from the seventeenth century and has several interesting features. These include a door said to have been specially designed to allow women wearing crinolines under their skirts to enter the building, and a weathervane which is thought to commemorate the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1759.  

Frenchay Unitarian Chapel
I’d gone in search of something more prosaic: the Body Snatchers' Stone. In the forthcoming Dan Foster Mystery, The Butcher’s Block, Dan is drawn into the grisly world of body snatching, which quickly leads him into a much bigger and more dangerous criminal conspiracy. Body snatching was a common crime in the eighteenth century, as the demand for human bodies for medical training increased. Teaching hospitals and private medical schools were prepared to pay for cadavers for dissection by their students, and no questions asked about where the bodies came from.

The bodies were disinterred from graveyards, especially the graves of poor people who could not afford good-quality coffins and might in addition be buried in shallow mass graves. These were often left open until they were full, making them easy for grave robbers to access. Workhouses were another source of corpses. There were even cases where body snatchers broke into houses and took a body before it had been buried. Grave-robbing gangs might have an elaborate system of spies who kept their ears open for news of a recent death, or hung around graveyards to watch funerals. They might bribe sextons and night watchmen to gain access to the graves. The corpses of poor patients who died in hospital might also end up on the dissection slab, whether or not they had willed it or their relatives consented to it.

The Graveyard, Frenchay Unitarian Chapel
Body snatching was a crime that filled most people with horror. In Bristol in 1761 a collier’s son was dissected in the Infirmary. When his father opened the coffin and discovered that his son’s head was missing he went to the surgeon’s home and threatened him until the head was restored. In Carlisle friends of a man who had been hanged and dissected shot one of the doctors involved. In Cambridge in 1830 two arrested body snatchers were attacked by a furious mob while being escorted to prison.

Those who could afford it took steps to protect their corpses. Patent coffins, such as the ones Dan reads about, were available to those who had the money. They might be lined with lead and boast a system of locks and bars designed to baffle the would-be grave robber, or have no external hinges or screws. Some were wrapped in chains or iron bands, or consisted of double or triple shells around a lead interior.

Cheaper ploys included covering the body in quick lime to hasten decay and render it unusable. Many graveyards hired night watchmen to guard the burial grounds. In The Butcher’s Block Dan sees such a watchman dozing in his sentry box at a church in Southwark.

The mort safe was a Scottish invention. It consisted of an iron cage which was placed around the freshly occupied grave and left for several weeks. By then the corpse would have decayed beyond the point at which it was useful to the surgeons, and the cage would be removed and hired out to another grave. Another popular method in Scotland was to lock corpses in stone burial vaults and bury them after some weeks had passed. Elsewhere, cruder methods included placing mantraps in graveyards. One man even put a mine in his daughter’s grave.

 
Is this the Body Snatchers' Stone?
 Another deterrent was a body snatcher’s stone, a great stone slab which was winched into place on top of a fresh grave and left for several weeks. The Body Snatchers' Stone in Frenchay is such a device. I had read a description of it: a pennant stone slab with no markings, so I went to see if could find it. I did find a stone slab marked only with lines that did not look as if they had ever been lettering. Is this the Body Snatchers’ Stone? If not, where is it? If anyone can tell me, I’d love to hear from you! 

 
Close up of the stone
Incidentally, the title of this piece is taken from Southey’s poem The Surgeon’s Warning. A surgeon who has dissected many stolen cadavers begs his friends to make sure that when he is buried, grave robbers cannot steal his corpse for the same treatment. He directs that he is to be interred in a patent coffin lined with lead and soldered shut, and he leaves money to pay for night watchmen who will be paid an extra reward if they shoot a “resurrection man”, as grave robbers were known. Read the poem to find out if his elaborate precautions save him from the poetic justice he so richly deserves!

The next Dan Foster Mystery, The Butcher’s Block, will be published in June (paperback and ebook).

And look out for the Dan Foster ebook novella, The Fatal Coin, which will be published in May. 

Source: British Library Free Images on Flickr




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dickens and Chickens

On 17 April 1860, in fields near Farnborough, Charles Dickens joined an audience amongst whom were the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, as well as a number of MPs and clergymen, to watch the American John Carmel Heenan and England’s Tom Sayers (the Brighton Titch) beat one another blind and bloody in a bare-knuckle fight that lasted nearly two and a half hours. The fight ended in a draw when Aldershot police stormed the ring, forcing the fighters and their illustrious spectators to flee the scene. It was the brutality of this match that signalled an end to the bare-knuckle era and prompted the development of the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules. Dickens’s interest in pugilism was of long standing. In 1848 Dombey and Son , which had been published in serial form over the preceding two years, came out in book form. One of many of his novels that draws on the world of the prize fighter, it introduces the unforgettable Mr Toots, a would-be man about town, an

The Bristol Boys: The Bare Knuckle Champions and The Hatchet Inn

The Hatchet Inn on Frogmore Street in Bristol is all that remains of a row of seventeenth-century timbered houses dating back to 1606 – making it one of the city’s oldest pubs. It was substantially altered in the 1960s, and these days it stands on a traffic island. But at one time it boasted extensive grounds – and amongst the facilities on offer was a bare-knuckle boxing ring. Plaque at The Hatchet Inn, Bristol The pub’s connection with Bristol’s boxing heroes is commemorated in a plaque illustrating five of Bristol’s champions – one of whom, Hen Pearce, features in Bloodie Bones: A Dan Foster Mystery. Hen Pearce (Detail) Bristol born Hen Pearce, The Game Chicken (1777 – 1809), a former butcher’s boy, became champion of England in 1805. He was a hero inside and outside the ring. In 1807 he climbed onto the roof of a building in Thomas Street, Bristol to rescue a servant girl from a fire. Always a popular figure, this courageous act inspired many eulogies in pr

Spotlight On...Begbrook House, Frenchay, Bristol

On 11 November 1913, the head gardener at Begbrook House in Frenchay near Bristol discovered that the   building was on fire. The house stood in its own wooded grounds, and was said to have twenty rooms and a fine old staircase. Within a few hours the house was gutted. The fire caused £3,000 worth of damage. A copy of the WSPU newspaper, The Suffragette , was left at the site with the message, “Birrell is coming. Rachel Pease is still being tortured”.  Begbrook House Picture: Frenchay Village Museum Augustine Birrell was the Liberal MP for Bristol North, and a cabinet minister. He was frequently targetted by militants in Bristol. Suffragettes interrupted his meetings and two women once accosted him at Temple Meads Railway Station with their demand for the vote.    Begbrook House belonged to Hugh Thomas Coles, a wealthy banker. Hugh Coles was the son of   William Gale Cole of Clifton, who was also a banker, and was born in Clifton in 1856. Lik