Medieval Charnel Houses: Resurrecting Lost Medieval Rites

Figures & data

Fig. 1. The Carnary at Norwich Cathedral (Norfolk), founded 1316, from the south

© Ben Keating, CC BY-SA 2.0

Fig. 2. Ruins of the charnel house, Bury St Edmunds Abbey (Suffolk), looking north-east. Later memorials have been set into the walls

© Michael Dibb, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Fig. 3. East view of the charnel house and chapel of St John in King’s Lynn (Norfolk), by the Revd E. Edwards

From W. Taylor, The Antiquities of King’s Lynn, Norfolk (London 1844)

Fig. 4. Depiction of a wooden lean-to charnel store against the west wall of a church in Switzerland, from the Luzernerchronik of 1513 written by Diebold Schilling the Younger (fol. 666v), https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/kol/S0023-2/666

Korporation Luzern, CC BY NC

Fig. 5. Late-13th-century crypt in St Mary’s parish church, Beverley (Yorkshire). Subsequently altered, this was previously the charnel house associated with the mercers’ guild

© Ian Atkins

Fig. 6. Early-20th-century photograph of Holy Trinity, Rothwell (Northamptonshire), showing the arrangement of human remains in the charnel house prior to restacking in 1911

Reproduced with permission of Rothwell Heritage Centre

Fig. 7. Cutaway illustration of the charnel house at Holy Trinity, Rothwell (Northamptonshire), showing the relationship with both extant and conjectured features of the medieval chapel located directly above in the south aisle

Drawn by Allan Adams

Fig. 8. Print of the interior of the north transept of St Mary, Witney (Oxfordshire), after an engraving by Joseph Skelton, c. 1823. This depicts the relieving arches for short light-shafts which illuminated the crypt below

From J. Skelton, Skelton’s Engraved Illustrations of the Principal Antiquities of Oxfordshire, from Original Drawings By F. Mackenzie accompanied with Descriptive and Historical Notices (Oxford 1823)

Fig. 9. Crypt beneath the north transept of St Nicholas’ church, Newcastle upon Tyne (Tyne and Wear) by W. H. Knowles. A piscina is visible in the south wall, and the crypt is lit by a splayed window in the east wall

From J. R. Boyle, Vestiges of Old Newcastle and Gateshead (London 1890)

Table 1 SELECTED CHARNEL HOUSES KNOWN ONLY FROM ANTIQUARIAN RECORDS.

Name of church (in alphabetical order of place)	Type	Date when charnel first reported	Location of charnel house	Other architectural features noted in room housing charnel	Other comments
All Saints, Narborough (Leicestershire)^45	Parish church	1855	Below the eastern part of the Lady Chapel in the south aisle	Accessed via a winding staircase from the south-west corner of the Lady Chapel; the crypt had ‘two sloping and grated openings in the east wall’	The ‘floor is covered with human sculls and bones’
Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert, Durham (Co. Durham)^46	Cathedral	1593 record of a ‘Charnel-house, to cast Mens Bones in’; rediscovered in 1833	In the churchyard	An arched roof containing two apertures; 4 m in length by 2.3 m in breadth, depth uncertain	Discovered during grave digging, and ‘The bones lay in two large heaps, one under each perforation, in the strangest confusion’
St Editha, Tamworth (Staffordshire)^47	Collegiate parish church	1845	Beneath the south aisle	Four bays and two windows in the south wall; originally accessed from externally near the porch	‘The bones are stacked up in very regular order’; crypt emptied to make way for the installation of heating equipment in 1869
St Edmund King and Martyr, Dartford (Kent)^48	Parish church	1851	In the churchyard		Observers were ‘totally at a loss … to describe the amazing deposit of bones’ in an ossuary
St Leonard’s, Hythe (Kent)^49	Parish church	1678	Building to the north of the church; the human remains (estimated as representing c. 4000 individuals) are now stacked in the ambulatory beneath the chancel	The building seen in the late 17th century was ‘full of dead Mens Bones, piled up together orderly, so great a Quantity as I never saw elsewhere in one Place’	The bones were restacked into the ambulatory in the 19th century, in what was originally an open passageway
St Mary and St Eanswythe, Folkestone (Kent)^50	Parish church	1659	Beneath the south aisle, beneath a chancel belonging to the Baker family		Funds for building the south aisle were left in a will of 1464
St Mary, Upchurch (Kent)^51	Parish church	1799	Beneath the north chancel	The crypt was accessed from above by a circular staircase
St Mary Woolnoth, London^52	Parish church	Stow reports that ‘Sir Hugh Brice … built in this church a chappel called the Charnel’ in 1485	Within the church
St Nicholas, Newcastle upon Tyne (Tyne & Wear)^53	Parish church (now Cathedral)	1824	Below the north transept	Piscina in south wall and a deep drain cut in the floor, with a roof arched with stone	‘nearly full of rubbish and human bones’
St Peter and St Wilfrid, Ripon (Yorkshire)^54	Minster (now Cathedral)	1838	In the lowest floor of a three-story complex which also comprises a ladyloft, chapterhouse and vestry, in an apsidal building adjacent to the south choir aisle and east wall of the south transept	The crypt has two rooms divided by a masonry wall and five openings in the south wall. The roof was originally groin vaults, with rib vaulting added later. Accessed by staircase along western wall	Human remains were restacked in 1843 by the sexton and removed and buried in the churchyard in 1865
St Thomas of Acre, London^55	Hospital	According to John Stow in 1598 ‘There was a charnel and a chappell over it, of St Nicholas and St Stephen’			The chapel of St Nicholas and St Stephen is first mentioned in 1453