In the dead of night sometime in the late 1700s, two masked Englishmen sneak into a
graveyard.
As thick cloud moves in front of an almost-full moon, they hop from headstone to headstone
on the way to their prize.
A Mrs. Crinklebottom has just passed away from a bad case of consumption, God bless
her soul, and her newly interred body is ready for the taking.
These couple of so-called “body snatchers” are aware that the corpse of dear Mrs. Crinklebottom
is worth a good bit of money if sold to the right people, so with empty stomachs they
have no qualms about resurrecting her.
Getting her out isn’t hard, either.
In no time at all, the two men are chuckling as they carry the cadaver through the dark
streets of London.
After hearing that we’re guessing you already have a good idea as to why graves might have
been dug six feet in depth.
Graverobbing was a job back in those days for some people.
It didn’t require much skill and could earn a person a good living.
You might now ask, why rob a grave?
Surely there isn’t a huge market for smelly corpses?
Well, there was back then.
Gravediggers, sometimes called “resurrectionists” or “resurrection-men” were actually doing
the work that the government kind of wanted done.
You see, the medical profession was advancing very fast, but there weren’t enough fresh
bodies around for a growing number of anatomists in the medical schools.
That’s one of the reasons why the government only made stealing corpses a misdemeanor crime.
The medical men of the time would usually get their bodies from people who’d been
sentenced to death and also dissection.
But the thing was, this kind of sentence was reserved for only the very worst crimes.
There just weren’t enough extreme crimes being committed, so the anatomists were always
short of bodies.
That’s why they paid for them on the black market and why the government turned a blind
eye to the trade.
Of course, Mrs. Crinklebottom’s devoted husband and family wouldn’t have been too
happy about their beloved going missing in the night.
Back then, in all parts of Britain, families were aware that their loved one might be stolen.
That’s why they’d sometimes guard over the grave for days, or pile big stones on
it, or even surround it with iron bars.
Still, those wily gravediggers were hard to stop.
Even if the grave was covered, they’d sometimes dig a hole close to it and then tunnel to
the coffin.
They’d then open the box and pull out the body, taking it back through the tunnel.
They could subsequently cover up their hole and the relatives of the deceased wouldn’t
know anything had happened.
A day or two later, a bunch of bespectacled men with white beards would be brandishing
scalpels as they stood over an almost-fresh corpse.
It really was a big business.
You might have heard of two Brits named Burke and Hare.
They hatched a plan one day while sitting in a tavern over a few ales.
Why wait for people to die, they thought?
Why not just kill someone and then tell the guys at the medical school they’d dug the
body up?
That’s exactly what they did, and the surgeons paid them hard cash for their victims.
It happened in the US, too.
Sometimes criminally-minded women would turn up at the poorhouses and shed rivers of tears
for the newly dead.
It was all an act, they just wanted the body to sell on.
The US was a bit behind Europe when it came to anatomical dissection, but it was catching
up, so it, too, had a body shortage problem.
So, corpses were snatched just like they were over the pond.
It was illegal, of course, but some people thought, well, it’s for the greater good.
When a famous physician named Charles Knowlton was arrested for performing a dissection on
a body that he had no business cutting up, he defended his actions by saying the work
he was doing could “increase the happiness, or diminish the misery, of mankind.”
He was probably right, but the public didn’t really see eye to eye with the man.
Remember there were a lot of people who really didn’t want their loved ones ending up on
the chopping block, never mind how good it might be for their future brethren.
Laws were eventually changed so that people could donate their bodies to science, but
before that happened, graverobbing was so serious that sometimes cemeteries had to be
guarded day and night.
That’s one reason why the graverobbers sometimes turned to places called a “Potter's field”,
which is where the poor and unclaimed were laid to rest, usually in unmarked graves.
Even they might be guarded, but the guys stealing for the physicians could easily get around
that with a small bribe.
There was also the fact that some bodies were seen as fair game, just because they had died
poor and were seen as having a low social standing.
African-American bodies were sometimes stolen over poor white bodies, which in 1787 led
a group of free blacks to petition the local council in New York state.
They wrote, “Under the cover of night, they dig up the bodies of the deceased, friends
and relatives of the petitioners, carry them away without respect to age or sex, mangle
their flesh out of wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.”
Slaves in the south were often dissected after death, as were criminals of any color who’d
been sentenced to death.
In all, graverobbing was a huge problem all over the US.
It was reported that yearly as many as 40,000 bodies were stolen for the purpose of advancing
medical science, and people weren’t happy about it.
Sure, you could pay a fair bit of cash and buy what one company called, “Burglar proof
grave vaults made of steel”, but not everyone was wealthy enough to do that.
One simple and cheap solution was to bury the body farther down.
That’s just one of the theories as to why bodies were buried that deep, although there
are more theories.
We thought you just needed to hear a little bit of the history of graverobbing.
Six feet is a lot of digging, so generally, people wouldn’t have put the effort in when,
say, three or four feet would have done the job.
That was the case in the 17th century in England.
But then in 1665 something awful besieged the city of London.
This was called the “Great Plague of London.”
The city might have been bustling and one of the centers of the world, but it was also
overcrowded and filthy in parts.
This London plague killed around 100,000 people, which worked out at about a quarter of the
entire population.
That’s why the authorities came up with a bunch of ways to try and prevent the spread
of the plague.
Believe it or not, they imposed a lockdown, but only on houses where it was thought people
were sick with the deadly disease.
When we say lockdown, it was more like being locked in.
If people were suspected of carrying the plague their house was basically locked up from the
outside on the order of the Justices of the Peace in Middlesex.
Many of the public, mostly the poor public, didn’t much like this and they rioted in
the streets and opened up locked down houses.
This is what a well-known minister said in regard to how the public felt at the time:
“Fear quickly begins to creep upon peoples hearts; great thoughts and discourse there
is in Town about the Plague.”
The rich of London got out of there, but most people were stuck, and as we said, many of
them died.
So, one of the things those people came up with to prevent the spread was to make sure
the dead bodies were well and truly buried.
A pamphlet was passed around at the time, with the title, “Orders Conceived and Published
by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London Concerning the Infection of the
Plague.”
There were quite a lot of orders indeed.
One of them was that “Watchmen” were to stand outside houses of the infected day and
night to ensure no one went inside.
“Searchers” were hired to seek out infected persons, and they were followed by “Chirurgeons.”
That’s an old word for a surgeon.
Social distancing measures were also put in place, with “Dinners at Taverns, Alehouses”
to be stopped.
There were a lot more orders, but for the purpose of today’s show we’ll go straight
to the part headed, “Burial of the dead.”
Basically, people were ordered not to go anywhere near the corpse or even the grave of someone
who’d died from plague.
But the order also said this, “All the Graves shall be at least six-foot deep.”
So, possibly it was disease and that very order where the six feet thing originated.
Still, it wasn’t exactly a strict science.
Often the victims of the plague were thrown into deep pits with lots of other people.
Word on the street is that another reason why six foot was the measurement of choice
was because if the grave was any more shallow the body might accidentally be relieved of
its resting place by a rather powerful plow.
On top of that, with a shallow grave there was a chance of an animal getting to the corpse.
But that still doesn’t really explain six feet.
Why not 5.2 feet?
Surely even a Jack Russell Terrier in its prime could not get down that low.
Let’s imagine that people did in fact want to bury bodies quite deep because of disease
or plows or even animals with strong claws.
The question then might be, just how low can you go?
Some people have suggested that back in the day someone came up with the idea that six
feet was about a deep as you could dig without the digging becoming dangerous.
They said any deeper than that and the walls might cave in.
On top of this, what about the poor gravedigger in the days before machines did the digging?
Not only would his job have been very dangerous had he dug down, say, seven feet, but if he
pushed it to ten feet he would have been asking for trouble.
For that reason, graves were dug to a similar depth as the person’s height.
That way, he was likely not in danger and the hole was deep enough to prevent things
from happening that we’ve discussed.
He could likely even get out of the hole without the use of a ladder.
Then there was the “rule of thumb” which as you know means making a rough estimate
without any kind of precision involved.
It’s kind of doing what seems right.
In the case of graves, the rule of thumb might have been to bury the person down according
to their height.
Maybe a safe grave was as deep as it was long.
In the case of a man’s average height back in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was something
like 165 cm (5 ft 5 in), in England at least.
A six-foot-ish grave might have made sense if you believe in the rule of thumb theory.
The saying is an old one and was likely used in the past, but these days gravediggers anywhere
in the world are not told to dig a grave exactly six feet.
In the US, there is no rule about six feet, with a grave being dug only as deep as the
local authority says it should be.
That depth will often be 30 to 36 inches above the coffin, which would work out at closer
to four feet or just a bit over in total.
It’s the same in the UK, with most graves being dug so that three feet of space is above
the coffin once it’s down there.
Coffins of course are not all the same size.
For some particularly obese people, a coffin can be super-sized.
That might also require a deeper grave.
It also depends on how people are buried.
For instance, in Pennsylvania, if there’s a concrete vault it is written that the “distance
from parts of the top of the outer case containing the casket may not be less than 1.5 feet (18
inches) from the natural surface of the ground.”
In New York, if there’s a concrete vault, it should be at least two feet from the surface
and if there is no vault then the distance should be three feet from the surface.
We actually found an academic paper titled, “Burial Practices in Southern Appalachia”,
which told us things like back in the day when someone was buried in those parts the
family would often throw into the grave, “jewelry, eyeglasses, tobacco, pipes, guns, knives,
toys, Bibles, and alcoholic beverages.”
The paper also said that those graves should be six feet deep, which was to prevent burrowing
animals from getting close to the coffin.
That was in the past, though.
These days the folks from Appalachia likely don’t go six feet under.
Then you have the fact that sometimes coffins are stacked on top of each other, so in some
cases, the grave will be way deeper than six feet.
All in all, it’s unlikely when you pass, you’ll be resting deep down in the ground,
but will be closer to pushing up daisies.
Now you need to watch, “Best Evidence of Life After Death.”
Or, have a look at...