Failed burial was one of the deep wounds of the ruin centuries, and the recovered realm has made the keeping of its dead the one arrangement it will not compromise. A parish exists to bury. A name must be said. Ground must be blessed. And where none of that can be afforded, the dead are burned, which every priest condemns and nobody disputes is the surest prevention there is.
“Four in five of the graves I am called to are quiet graves that were made badly, and the remedy is an evening and a bell. I say so at every visitation. I am not believed, because nobody sends for me to be told that nothing is wrong.”
Whole, Named and Blessed
What a proper burial requires, and why each part matters
Burial is the rite a parish is endowed to perform: the body whole, in consecrated ground, under an office that exists, and with a name said over it, for every form of the burial office requires one and an unnamed burial is an office left unfinished. A rite said over ground that was never blessed is said over nothing. Consecration lasts through disuse and fallen roofs and ends only when a bishop formally takes it away.
Ground goes into bad order when many were buried quickly, or without rite, or by people who did not live to say where, or when it was broken into afterwards. An interdict forbids nothing; it simply withdraws a place from the rites, so its dead must be carried elsewhere and the place empties within a generation.
The Fire Without a Service
Burning: condemned by the Church, and the surest keeper of the dead
No service exists for a burning and a priest may not attend one. Yet burning is the surest way to keep the dead from walking, and the clergy who condemn it do not deny that. Where the chapter is strong the dead are buried; where it is thin, in the industrial towns, the marsh edges and the mining country, burning is ordinary and never reported, and priests often stand at a distance anyway. People say that burial is right and burning is safe. A burned body leaves no plot, no date and no entry, so that it has, in the record, never died, and the recovery houses keep the burnt as a category of their own. Burning prevents; it does not mend ground that has already gone.
Sarrum has burned all its dead since 4590 in three contracted furnaces whose heat pumps the Cinders water; a weigher’s book records eleven hundred and forty in a year, and no names. A grave elsewhere costs a Sarrum family about thirty shillings. The burning is free.
The Lamp and the Grave-Bell
Washing, watching and the bell that sees the dead into the ground
The household washes, watches, dresses, names and prays; someone sits with the body until it is buried and a lamp is kept, and the parish bell sounds in its set form. Iron, salt or a marked cloth may go at the threshold, and the Church objects only when such a thing becomes a bargain with a spirit. The grave-bell is rung once at the burial and never again.
Grave-watching is no rite and anyone may keep it; its purpose is that somebody can say afterwards what happened. London watches three nights at eighteen pence a night, though no grave there has been robbed in eleven years. A third of valley parishes watch three nights or nine, and if the grave fails the answer is fire. The march keeps six nights over anyone who died badly, in pairs, with a lamp and a bell between them. In London nobody is buried before the third day, nobody unless a nameable person saw them die, and nothing is taken from the river before the third tide.
When the Dead Will Not Lie
The five kinds of unquiet dead, and the remedy for each
There are five kinds. The unquiet grave, made badly or disturbed since, is four reports in five, and its remedy is the office said again and the grave-bell rung. The unnamed are answered only by the name. The walking dead come in the season after the thaw, slow and silent, going where they went in life; it is a condition of a body, not a creature. Repeating places want nothing, and nothing is known that answers them. And the raised body, which is a crime.
The signs are a room cold on one side, a dog that will not pass a gate, servants giving notice, a plot that will not hold grass, children who share a dream. Corpse eaters arrive a season before any of these. In the march they say the ground goes quiet before it goes wrong. A priest and bell cost eleven shillings; a suppressing order, eight to fifteen pounds.
Brothers of Lantern and Grave
The orders that go where the dead are troubled
The Black Lantern Brethren, about ninety strong, go to plague pits, to gaol chapels, and to roads on which the buried will not keep still; their roll lists four plague grounds, two prison chapels and eleven stretches of road, nine of them at boundaries. Since the Blackdown Stope, where twenty-seven men went in and six came out, an officer of theirs must attend any opening into unplanned ground.
The Brotherhood of the Lantern Grave, born of the Grey Necromancer War, keeps burial ledgers, recovers what has been taken from graves and stands against the necromantic trades with grave brothers, lantern sergeants, burial clerks and warpriests. It keeps no house in the north and is still the one body that will go north for a failed burial road.
Theft from the Grave
Necromancy in law, and the far commoner crime of corpse theft
Necromancy in law is raising a body or questioning one, and it is almost never proved, because a body that rose by itself looks exactly like one that was raised. What is common, and prosecuted with success as theft, is corpse-theft, bone-broking and the sale of parts. Cult trials convict only for persistent corruption of burial: doctrine gets a hearing, burial gets a conviction. Cambridge learned the price in the Cadaver Riots, four days and nine dead; its anatomy rooms now take only the executed, the unclaimed, donors and the Reed Cross recoveries, and bury every body consecrated.
Rivers, Shores and Fells
How the dead are kept from the Thames to the northern march
On the Thames the river dead lie a night under a sealed lamp in a stair chapel, are blessed by a waterman’s priest, and go to ground set aside for them. On the Kentish coast the drowned are laid above the tide and beneath the church, in plots neither consecrated nor unhallowed, with a stone on the chest. In the fens the water stands so high that the dead go to three burial islands, one of them never consecrated, with two hundred and nine stones and nothing said over any of them. In the march, a company never buries its own where they fall.
