Frail memories: is the commemorated population representative of the buried population?

Abstract

It is often suggested that only a fairly small percentage of the buried population was commemorated on stones before the 19th century. However, there has been little empirical study of what proportion is represented on monuments for different periods. This work compares the number of individuals whose names appear on surviving monuments in historical burial grounds, and the number of individuals recorded in parish records. Although there was considerable variation between graveyards, the mean proportion of those registered as having been buried and who were also commemorated was 8·23%, the figure being much higher in rural areas and much lower in urban ones.

ABBREVIATIONS
ESRC	=	The Economic and Social Research Council

ABBREVIATIONS
ESRC	=	The Economic and Social Research Council

This study was supported by a research grant from the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, to whom we are very grateful. Many thanks also to the staff of the Leicestershire and Rutland Records Office for their help and patience, and to Martin Sterry who gave us advice on the presentation of our numerical data. We are also most grateful to the anonymous referee who provided very useful comments and suggestions for revising this paper. All photographs were taken by members of the group.

Notes

2 See for example, Deetz 1977; Deetz & Dethlefsen 1967.

3 For the former, see Parker Pearson’s important 1982 study of ideology and power; McGuire 1988, Cannon 1989 on status; and Finch 1991, 2000 on class identity. For the latter, Tarlow 1999; Mytum 2004, 2006; and Rainville 1999 on belief.

4 Much of this work is reviewed from a global perspective in Mytum 2004. Recent studies have focused on gender (Giguere 2007; Abel 2009), social belief (Mytum 2006), ethnicity (Stone 2009), local identity (Snell 2003), religion (Buckham 2003; Mytum 2009; Owen 2009) and consumption (Buckham 1999; Veit 2009).

5 Mytum 2004.

6 See, however, Rainville (1999, 563–4), who attempted a broad comparison between the number of people commemorated on stones in a cemetery in New Hampshire and the living population, as recorded in census accounts. Nelson & George (1982, 165), in their rather fancifully written account of early New England grave markers, speculate that only 5% of graves from colonial America had permanent markers, but they cite no source or basis for this estimate. Mytum (2002, 205–8) does compare the number of surviving memorials in some parishes in north Pembrokeshire, where a higher proportion of burials recorded are commemorated in surviving memorials — from around a fifth of all registered burials being commemorated in the 1830s, to around half in the last four decades of the 19th century. As rural parishes, Nevern and Newport — the parishes Mytum was able to study — probably saw relatively little destruction and removal of monuments in the 20th century, but other local factors might also be significant in explaining the difference between these graveyards and those of rural Leicestershire.

7 See, for example, Mytum 2004, 121–2.

8 This is particularly true of academics from other disciplines. Capelle & Smith (1998), for example, treat the commemorated population as a biological population amenable to biological analysis; sociologists Foster & Hummel (1995) do not consider anywhere in their graveyard analysis that the demographic description they arrive at is derived from gravestone inscriptions, and may not be the same as the buried population. Davey Smith et al. (1992) use obelisk height as a proxy for socio-economic status, but do not attempt to estimate the proportion of the population commemorated with such an ostentatious monument at all.

9 Mays 1998, 13–32.

10 The records used were the parish burial registers from Old Dalby (Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (ROLLR) DE5417, DE3439), Burrough on the Hill (ROLLR DE4214), Kibworth Beauchamp (ROLLR DE 2984), St Margaret’s (ROLLR 24D65/A1–6, 24D65/C1–5), St Nicholas (ROLLR 11D62/1–16) and St Mary de Castro (ROLLR 8D59, DE 1683).

11 Ramsay 2007.

12 e.g. Barley 1948; Herbert 1944.

13 For studies of monument erosion and geology, see Cooke et al. 1995; Dove 1992.

14 Radburn 2010: <http://www.old-dalby.org.uk> [accessed 3 January 2012].

15 Pevsner 1960, 204.

16 Pevsner 1960, 127.

17 Lee & McKinley 1964.

18 Lee & McKinley 1964.

19 Pevsner 1960, 118.

20 Cantor 2000, 71.

21 On the factors behind the creation of municipal cemeteries, see Rugg 1997, 1998; Laqueur 1993.

22 Owen 1884.

23 Owen 1884; Weeks 1949.

24 Weeks 1949, 8.

25 Weeks 1949, 17–20.

26 Weeks 1949, 32.

27 Wade-Matthews 1992, 1–3.

28 Wade-Matthews 1993, 1.

29 Wade-Matthews 1993, 2–3.

30 Wade-Matthews 1992, 1–3.

31 For considerations of the historical reliability of parish burial registers, see Razzell 1998; 2006; Woollard 2008. The latter study discovered that between a fifth and a quarter of individuals found through a study on probate records in Bedfordshire in the 17th and 18th centuries were not found on burial registers. This may be due to high numbers of Nonconformists, as well as erratic record keeping. The overall proportion is likely to be smaller in our sample since we have selected Anglican burial grounds with relatively consistent levels of recording.

32 See Ministry for Justice 2009 for the official line on health and safety in graveyards.

33 Tarlow 1999; Mytum & Evans 2003.

34 Brickley et al. 1999.

35 Dymond 1999.

36 Strange 2003, 154.

37 Chenoweth 2009.

38 Stock 1998.