Death, A Case of Governing the Natural

After a vacation to the archive, I am back with some thoughts on death and its governance. Why is it governed? What does this governance look like? All thoughts I have late in the evening after a day at the archive...

Since I started thinking about what I wanted my thesis to be on, I have spent a considerable amount of time surrounded by death. I have visited the crematorium, studied documents, spent long hours in the archives, and had my own personal experiences of death that have furthered my questioning. Yet, I am struck continually by the structure of death—its rules, regulations, and requirements. 

Death is the most natural thing. We are all born and we all die. Life is, to an extent, free from strict rules of who can do what and when and where and why, and yet death appears to be the very opposite. 

Death itself is not governable — most people cannot choose when, where, or how they will die. Yet everything around death is subject to rules. So, for the sake of this post we have to accept that death itself cannot be controlled (legally in this country). However, the removal of the deceased is governed. By ‘removal’, I mean the formal, regulated process of taking a body from the place of death to its site of decomposition or burial.

So, in the context of ‘governing the natural’, I am referring to the process surrounding the disposal of the deceased’s body. In light of this, it can be argued that whilst death itself is a normal and fundamental part of life, it is governed in such a tight structure that the deceased is not retained as an individual entity, and instead as part of the wider system of death governed by the state. 

The Archive 

Huntingdon Burial Board was established under the “Burials Beyond the Metropolis Act” 16 & 17 Vict. 134 to oversee the burial processes in the Huntingdon parishes of St Johns, All Saints, St Mary’s and St Benedict’s Churches. In this section I will discuss the archival material of the Huntingdon Burial Board to illustrate how governing the natural process of death played out in Huntingdon.

A poster from March 1856 outlines the provisions of the above act to be overseen by the board. On the poster, 30 regulations are laid out and signed by the Clerk Charles Margetts. Only two regulations appear to have faced changes since the production of the poster. These are marked by two blue crosses to the side of regulations 15 and 23. Regulation 15 states that “No more than one body shall be buried in any grave.” Whilst regulation 23 states, “Family plots of ground may be purchased.” This poster clearly had influence - it has been marked by future readers, used as a source of information and a base for future decisions too. The continuation of the board’s existence into the 20th century supports this view that it was used as a foundational document for future decisions. However, it is also the case that in the early 20th century, the importance of the board was reassessed and brought into question through the presence of a March 1915 letter questioning this in the archive. 

The board shaped how the dead and their mourners interacted with the town at the time of the board's creation and in the years following. Namely, in the first regulation, the poster outlines that there is to be a divided space for both the consecrated and unconsecrated burials to take place. This carves up the landscape for use amongst those defined as the consecrated and those the Church deemed ‘less worthy’ burials. In addition, we can see the governing of the practices of death, as no funeral “will be permitted to enter the Ground until all fees and charges have been paid.” (Regulation 4) Grief could only play out in the public space of the cemetery once all associated fees had been paid. This makes death a process governed by authorities, enabled by their permission to proceed.

Why do such rules exist? 

To understand why death became so tightly governed, we need to understand how rule-making has long shaped society. Think back to the early forms of laws of everyday government, such as the Justinian Codex (6th century), Magna Carta (1215), or forms of enforcing rules like the Hundred’s System of the Anglo-Saxons. These were rules for life, rules for death were a later development (or were they?). Ancient Egyptian society did have some laws surrounding death, but these were limited to the few and not the many. Death has often been overseen, but the codification of death as a process began in the 19th century and applied to all. While the dead had long been subject to religious rites and communal expectations, the 19th century marked a shift in how death was administered. With new legislation, burial became not only a spiritual matter, but a civic one — ordered, paid for, and policed by boards, clerks, and local authorities. Yet, why? In this section, I shall highlight the context of the 19th century and why it led to so many laws surrounding death. 

Population growth was one such reason for burial reform. With the Industrial Revolution came the growth of towns and cities, with mass movement for the purpose of employment. However, the movement of people to areas that were still growing led to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Burials require space, and overcrowding led to unsafe burial practices. As such, fears of disease spreading from the bodies to the environment—such as in the water—developed. 

Furthermore, there was a need for a central body to oversee processes relating to death. Church parishes had long overseen the processes surrounding burial - preparing plots, ensuring logs were kept, and that burials went ahead. With a larger population, there was a need for greater organisation regarding these tasks. The state needed to ensure that processes were followed, and as part of this, created new burial boards to oversee this. The move from Church to State cemented the governing of death through greater legal codes, such as the Burial Act of 1852. This closed overcrowded burial grounds, and led to the inclusion of non-Anglicans with the Burial Laws Amendment Act of 1880. Death became governable through the state, a necessity for the growing population, and to prevent disease. 

Yet, one may also argue that the growth of the idea of a respectable death led to death becoming increasingly governed. Proper funerals — coffins, literature, and ceremony surrounding the event — became a necessity. Families needed to be seen to be doing death the ‘proper’ way in order to conform to the social order. One way this was achieved was through the governing of death through these rules and regulations, such as the Huntingdon Burial Board Poster of 1856. 

Death has often been viewed as performative - see the examples of burials of Anglo-Saxon elite, or the burial of the Frankish king Childeric, staged to bolster his son Clovis' succession. However, the pageantry of Victorian society when it came to death seems to wish to include all of society. Anyone who has ever read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol will know that death is a major theme in the novella. In it we see Tiny Tim’s health decline and the suggestion that he will die. Yet, death is treated as a financial burden for families in this period. The idea of the afterlife is so important to Victorian society, and by extension the perfection of death grew. 

Conclusions 

Death became increasingly governed in the late 19th century. From growing populations, risks of disease and a need to centrally oversee practices, death became an extension of the state. It created a sense of transactional behaviour in which death was only permitted to be expressed within the conditions set forward for it to exist. Life and death remain complexly connected across time. Whilst death may be thought of as natural, what continues to surround it is anything but. The state, family and the archive all work to shape what death means and how it is performed. Many of the practices that began in the 19th century have continued to this day, with burial regulations becoming even tighter in recent years (headstones need to be approved before purchase and being laid). These boundaries between the governed and the gone continue to shift and are never fully settled.

Further Reading:

If this has made you curious about how Victorians died — or grieved — proper historians have written more:

• Julie Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914, (2005) 

• Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, (1996) 

You might want to go look at this archival material:

• Cambridgeshire County Council Archives, (at Huntingdon Archives), Huntingdon Burial Board regulations poster 5778/1/3
• Cambridgeshire County Council Archives, (at Huntingdon Archives), (Other papers), BB/H/34