Crail. Mortuary house in Churchyard.

Description Crail. Mortuary house in Churchyard.

Date c. 1890

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 739203

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of F 1954

Scope and Content Parish Deadhouse, Crail Parish Churchyard, Crail, Fife The old tree-lined churchyard of Crail Parish Church contains an important collection of mural monuments dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, and an early 19th-century parish deadhouse built as a form of protection against body-snatchers. The Scottish photographer, Erskine Beveridge, photographed the deadhouse on a visit to the churchyard c.1890. This deadhouse or mortuary, built by public subscription in 1826, is a square ashlar vault with a crenellated parapet that stands a short distance from the 'back-stile' (right), a pedestrian entrance in the north wall of the churchyard. It served as a store-house for corpses for up to six weeks in summer and three months in winter before burial. The inscription above the door reads 'Erected for securing the dead' with the date in Latin, 'ANN DOM MDCCCXXVI'. In the early 19th century body-snatching was a highly lucrative trade, with large sums of money being paid for the delivery of fresh corpses to university anatomy departments for dissection by medical students. (Legally procured corpses were restricted to bodies of criminals who had been hanged.) Corpses had to be fresh, and the object of the deadhouse was to allow the bodies to decay sufficiently before burial to have absolutely no monetary value. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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