Lattices for the dead

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In old English and Scottish cemeteries, you can see interesting burials - various gravestones and monuments, enclosed in iron cages. Such constructions are called mort safes - literally "safety of the dead".

This protection is not without reason. Of course, it was not made in order to protect yourself from the uprising of the living dead, as someone might think. For zombies in the UK, they used other means, more of a religious rather than an applied nature. The grates on the graves were placed with a completely prosaic purpose - to protect the graves from thieves. Indeed, in the 19th century, a dead human body was a very popular and profitable commodity.

Buried - guard

The abduction of corpses in the early 19th century in England became a real disaster. The grieving relatives and friends of the deceased, instead of completely surrendering to the grief for the deceased, were forced to closely watch the grave for the first time after the funeral. After all, the chance of losing the deceased was very great. As soon as the natural processes of decay gained strength and the corpse ceased to have a "marketable appearance", cemetery shifts were terminated.

Often, the abduction was discovered too late - when a tombstone fell down into an empty grave. Cunning thieves made lateral digs, which sometimes reached 20-30 meters in length, and pulled out the body right from under the noses of vigilant relatives.

Funeral homes and relatives of the deceased went to all sorts of tricks so that the contents of the grave did not go to the cunning grave diggers. They began to use iron coffins with ingenious locks, cemeteries were guarded by special squads. But most of all they helped to save the burials of the mortsaifs. The heavy construction of iron and stone was built in such a way that stealing a body from a lucrative business turned into a complex engineering task.

Rest for the dead

What is a grave with a mortsafe? A hole was dug, about two meters deep, into which the coffin was placed. A heavy stone or concrete slab was placed on top of it, in which holes were drilled. They were filled with iron bars of the lattice. Then earth was poured into the grave, and another slab was erected on the lattice remaining on the surface.

As a result, reaching the body from above became a daunting task. Go quietly dig out and pull aside two plates connected with iron, and even so that no one can see! And the weight of the structure did not make it possible to pull out the coffin with the body in the event of a tunnel from the side or from below, threatening to flatten the tomb robber.

Most often, such protection was used more than once - mortsafe, a very expensive design, could not be disposable. Only wealthy people allowed themselves a safe funeral. As soon as the deceased became "stale", the mortsafe was dug up by the cemetery workers themselves and used for the next funeral.

Demand creates supply

Where did such a high demand for such a specific, and even perishable goods such as dead bodies come from? As usual, scientists are to blame for everything. In this case, doctors.

Until 1832, no license was required to open his anatomical school in England. The trouble, however, was that teaching aids were in dire shortage. The fact is that, due to religious reasons, only the bodies of executed criminals were given for autopsy. After all, dissection was considered a terrible posthumous fate, to which there were no volunteers. And in the case of the death penalty, an autopsy was mandatory.

Do you know that…

At the grave of the Prussian king Frederick the Great in Potsdam, you can always see potato tubers. They are thrown by the Germans in gratitude for the fact that in the 18th century Frederick forced the peasants to grow it.

For a while, the bodies were enough, but then a new attack - in 1815, the "Bloody Code" was canceled, which ordered the execution of criminals under a huge number of articles. As a result, the number of executions decreased significantly, and the anatomical schools, of which a great many were opened, were left without teaching aids. Students went to study in Holland, Italy or France, where autopsies of beggars and homeless were allowed at the legislative level. Indeed, without anatomical knowledge, the path to all medical institutions was closed to future doctors, which required from their employees a thorough knowledge of anatomy.

Here came the stellar part of the grave diggers, who are ironically called the resurrectors by the people. If before the abolition of the "Bloody Code" abductions of the dead happened from time to time and did not have a wide public outcry, then after the change in the laws, the trade in bodies took on an almost industrial scale.

The fact is that, according to the law, bodies or their parts were not someone's property, and, except for the anger of the deceased's loved ones, the thieves were not in danger. This business was in a legal gray zone, and if caught, the thieves did not face severe punishment. The dead quickly became a hot commodity, and they were successfully traded throughout the 18th and part of the 19th century. The belated amendments to the criminal law with a penalty in the form of a fine and a prison term did not frighten anyone. The clink of coins drowned out the fear. In the 1820s, body kidnapping became a veritable national disaster. They were discussed and condemned in the press, coffee houses and even in parliament.

Along with the grave diggers, the doctors also got it. In the eyes of the people, the anatomists themselves have become people who, out of their own self-interest, compel the courts to pass death sentences. Riots at the places of executions, from where the doctors took the "legitimate" bodies due to them, became commonplace.

Dead in the law

The situation reached a boiling point after the high-profile case of two William - Burke and Hare. These smart "businessmen" did not want to mess around in cemeteries and solved the problem of supplying material for anatomists in the simplest way - they killed people on the streets and took fresh bodies to doctors.

The parliament responded to this series of bloody crimes by creating a special committee, the fruits of which were a report on the importance and benefits of anatomy, as well as a recommendation to provide physicians with the bodies of dead beggars for research.

However, no one was in a hurry to implement this useful advice. The discussions continued for three years. Then, like a bolt from the blue, the news of the capture of a gang of London "burkers", who considered the "kill-sell" method, the simplest and most effective, spread across the capital. Fearing that the people would find another couple of dozen murderers with a commercial streak, parliament began work on the Anatomical Act. As a result, after a long debate in 1832, the Anatomical Act was adopted, eliminating the imputation of criminals to autopsy of their corpses after execution and allowing medical schools to use corpses for anatomical and medical purposes.

The tomb-digger's craft immediately ceased to be profitable and disappeared by itself. Only newspaper archives in libraries will remind you of the past epidemic of kidnappings and the few mort safes remaining in the old cemeteries, which, under their own weight, sink deeper into the ground from year to year.