Medieval burial

Cemeteries are important.  Just because someone is gone, leaving only their body behind, that doesn't mean that their loved ones consider the body something to be tossed away.  In the Middle Ages as now, people most commonly buried the dead, and the places where they were buried, the cemeteries, were special places.

Of course cemeteries as special places had a long history before the Middle Ages.  In classical Rome, the dead were buried outside of town, because the living didn't want them coming back as ghosts at night.  But the dead were still honored, often with monuments erected over their bodies or ashes.

This is a Roman memorial stone erected to honor a carpenter.  If you look closely, you can see that he is sitting at a bench with his tools.

Under the late Roman Empire, important people started being buried in stone sarcophagi (that is, a stone coffin), often elaborately carved.  As the Empire became Christianized, these images became Christian.

Early medieval saints had sarcophagi that were incorporated into the foundations of churches and continued to be revered over the centuries, as in the example below.  A lot of early medieval churches were built quite literally over the dead.

Sarcophagi are expensive, however, so even the wealthy eventually gave them up.  By the twelfth century people were buried in simple wooden coffins in church yards.  Unlike modern cemeteries, however, there were no grave markers with the dead person's name.  Indeed, because the church yard was fairly small and was used over many centuries, people were buried on top of other people once the old coffins had disintegrated.  Being close to the church was still important, and they were places of memory and ritual.  Being buried in a monastery's cemetery was an important side-benefit of making generous gifts to a monastery.

Starting in the thirteenth century, "gisants" were often erected over the graves of the wealthy and powerful, in a way going back to Roman-style monuments, in that the gisant was supposed to represent the dead person.  The image below is of the gisant erected over the body of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

By the early modern period, these gisants could become quite elaborate.  Cemeteries also were expanded by what were called litchfields, places to bury horrible sinners and unclaimed bodies, who might or might not deserve to be buried next to the church, since the churchyard was reserved for the faithful.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval life and death, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Death

Part of life in the Middle Ages is death in the Middle Ages.  Modern society essentially deals with death through denial.  "As long as I eat healthy and exercise, nothing bad will happen to me."  Most people die in the hospital, accompanied by last ditch efforts to give them a few more moments of life.

Humans haven't figured out yet what to do about death.  The medieval response, not being able to deny it as we do, was heart-breaking:  they embraced death.

This did not mean they wanted to die, because they didn't.  But they insisted, loudly and repeatedly, that death was good.  You could go to heaven, be reborn in an improved version of your own body, and be very happy.  The saints were dead, but that didn't keep them from being an active part of people's lives.

Alternately, of course, you could go to Hell.  Just as most modern Christians don't worry very much about Hell, most medieval people didn't either, unless they realized they had committed some major sin or were actually dying.  Priests tried to remind them, and the frequency and enthusiasm with which they were reminded suggests few were paying attention.

The requiem mass included the "Dies irae," a poem about God's wrath and begging for mercy.  It's a terrific poem, with a strong melody, composed by an unknown author, incorporated shamelessly into more recent Requiems such as Mozart's and Verdi's.

Dies irae, dies illa,
Favet saeclum in favilla,
Sicut David et Sibilla.

That's the first verse.  It basically can't be translated into English.  In translation it goes, "Day of wrath, on that day, Heaven and earth shall pass away, as David and the Sybil say."  See what I mean?  (The Sybil was a Greek prophetess who, a couple of centuries AD, was supposed to have predicted all the events of the New Testament.)

But in practice medieval Christianity asserted that the dead were not in Hell but were their friends.  This was very different from pagan Rome, which feared the dead and made sure to bury them outside the city walls, so they couldn't sneak in at night.  Above is an image of a sarcophagus, a stone coffin from the early Middle Ages.  Hand-carved from a single piece of stone, a sarcophagus probably cost as much as we'd pay for a Buick.  And it was not just the elite who wanted such a coffin.  Medieval churches were surrounded by them and often built literally over dozens of sarcophagi in their crypts.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014