Note 152 — OF THE PRESERVATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH.

In examining the history of Burial in remote ages, we shall find that both among the Jews and Heathens, the place of interment was usually without the city. Such was the case with the Athenians, the Smyrnæans, the Sicyonians, the Corinthians, and the Syracusans. The examples of Numa and Servius Tullus prove, that the Romans deposited their dead without the city before the introduction of the twelve tables, which prohibited burning as well as burial within its precincts. The Lacedæmonians afford an exception to this general custom; it had been a notion universally prevalent, that the touch of a dead body conveyed pollution; and Lycurgus, the legislator of Sparta, being anxious to remove the prejudice, introduced the custom of burial within the city. Among the primitive Christians, burying in cities and churches was not allowed for several centuries, and Theodosius, after the triumph and establishment of Christianity, renewed the prohibition upon the old and reasonable ground that graves within the city were detrimental to the health of the living, and it was ordered that any person who should disobey this law was to forfeit the third part of his patrimony; and that the undertaker who directed a funeral contrary to the prohibition was to be fined forty pounds in gold. The learned Bingham, in his Antiquities of the Church, has traced the gradual introduction the odious custom of burying in churches. It was from the idea of the protection which would be afforded by consecrated ground, baptized bells, and relics, that bodies were first interred in the vicinity of the church: to this superstition we may ascribe the origin of church-yards, which took place in the eighth century. The reason alleged by Gregory the Great for burying in churches, or in places adjoining to them, was that their relations and friends, remembering those whose sepulchres they beheld, might thereby be led to offer up prayers for them; and this reason was afterwards transferred into the body of the canon law. The practice thus introduced into the Romish church by Gregory, was brought over here by Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, about the year 750: and the practice of erecting vaults in chancels and under the altars was begun by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he had rebuilt the cathedral about 1075. Since this period many enactments have been made in different countries to abolish so foul a custom.