Past & Present

PAST & PRESENT NUMBER 179 MAY 2003 CONTENTS page REVENGE, ASSYRIAN STYLE: by Marc Van De Mieroop ............ 3 WRITTEN ENGLISH: THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE 1370–1400: by Jeremy Catto ........................................................... 24 ABSOLUTISM, FEUDALISM AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE FRANCE OF LOUIS XIV: by David Parker .................................... 60 GRAVESTONES, BELONGING AND LOCAL ATTACHMENT IN ENGLAND 1700–2000: by K. D. M. Snell ...................................... 97 THE NEW ROSS WORKHOUSE RIOT OF 1887: NATIONALISM, CLASS AND THE IRISH POOR LAWS: by Virginia Crossman .......... 135 BHAKTI AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE: by Vijay Pinch ................... 159 THE CAUSES OF UKRAINIAN–POLISH ETHNIC CLEANSING 1943: by Timothy Snyder ....................................................... 197 NOTES ............................................................................... 235 Published by Oxford University Press for the Past and Present Society GRAVESTONES, BELONGING AND LOCAL ATTACHMENT IN ENGLAND 1700–2000* I Anyone who looks at gravestones in church or chapel burial grounds will observe a very frequent feature. It was once extremely common to add to the name of the deceased further details about where they were ‘of’ or ‘from’. Very frequently the phrase used was ‘of this parish’. One typical inscription reads: ‘Here lieth the Body of joan the wife of walter Williams of Baddon in the Parish of Bridestow’, to take an example dated 1774 from Lydford in west Dartmoor. Other inscriptions may take the form: ‘In Memory of [name], of this parish’, or ‘of the parish of . .’ The wording can vary in a number of ways. Some- times one Wnds the person, or their husband or parents, being ascribed to a certain place rather than ‘this parish’, a place that may be a small settlement or even a house address, through to a large city. Assuming that the memorials have not suffered much erosion (which is often the case where limestone or sandstone monuments predominate), one will Wnd such mention of place following many deceased people’s names in most areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In some regions, such as many parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, it is less striking, even though the imported Barnack stone, or the sandstone from north- east England that was often used along the north Norfolk coast, lent itself to Wne carving of cherubs, symbols and lettering.1 * I am most grateful to David Parry for recording Ryal and Hexham Abbey burial grounds for me, to Christine Vialls for recording the Kibworth Harcourt Congregational burial ground, and to Bob Bushaway, Robert Colls, Ian Dyck, David Hey, Joanna Innes, Charles Phythian-Adams, Dave Postles, Barry Reay, Ruth Richardson, Julie Rugg, Julie-Marie Strange, Sarah Tarlow, Margery Tranter and Tom Williamson for their helpful comments. 1 Researchers on gravestones will know how variable types of stone are in their durability, and how prone to erosion Cotswold limestone, Bath and Portland stone, north-eastern sandstone and many other types are, especially when compared with the varieties of granite, slate and imported marble. Dioceses often controlled which stone was allowed, sometimes insisting on local stone. In Leicestershire and the (cont. on p. 98) © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003 98 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 179 Statements of belonging may often have been superXuous in a region like this with high levels of parochial endogamy.2 However, in many other regions — such as Leicestershire and its adjoining counties, Cumbria, Yorkshire or north Devon — these statements are very prevalent indeed. There are even some parishes, such as Hartland on the north-west Devon coast, where this recording of place is on a majority of gravestones before the twentieth century. As one moves into that century such recording became less frequent in all regions of England. Indeed, from about the end of the First World War it ends as a widespread phenomenon. This is a completely untouched historical topic, both as a commemorative practice and as something subject to remarkable change, and its exploration may reveal much about how ideas of ‘belonging’ were manifested in the past.3 It relates closely to what the Suffolk writer Adrian Bell described as ‘the lessening of the power of the spirit of place’.4 The idea of attachment — to place, family, employment, institutions, community and neighbourhood — is very often discussed in public debate now- adays; and there is a strong presumption that it has declined (n. 1 cont.) surrounding counties, where much of my research has been conducted, slates from the Swithland and Groby quarries provided some of the most outstanding materials ever used for gravestone memorials, and the intensely Wne rococo designs and calligraphy of the eighteenth-century carvers survive today in almost pristine clarity. However, it is not my impression that the prevailing stones used for memorials have much inXuenced the regional likelihood of place associations being mentioned on gravestones, although certainly they have affected the subsequent readability of such inscriptions. 2 K. D. M. Snell, ‘English Rural Societies and Geographical Marital Endogamy, 1700–1837’, Econ. Hist. Rev., lv (2002), 281–4. 3 I can Wnd nothing in any of the extensive British or American historiography on death, memorials and gravestones that mentions the subject of place association on gravestones. This discussion will therefore be relatively and unusually free of historiographical references. On gravestone analysis, among a large literature, see Frederick Burgess, English Churchyard Memorials (1963; London, 1979 edn); Brian Bailey, Churchyards of England and Wales (1987; Leicester, 1994 edn); Margaret Cox (ed.), Grave Concerns: Death and Burial in England, 1700 to 1850 (York, 1998); Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality (Oxford, 1999); Hilary Lees, English Churchyard Memorials (Stroud, 2000); Harold Mytum, Recording and Analysing Graveyards (York, 2000). On the legal framework, notably the many Victorian Burial Acts, see T. Baker, The Laws Relating to Burials, with Notes, Forms, & Practical Instructions, 4th edn (London, 1873). For further reading, see the excellent bibliographies in the books by Tarlow and Cox. On the theme of ‘belonging’, see, in particular, Anthony P. Cohen (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester, 1982). 4 Adrian Bell, By-Road (London, 1937), 206. GRAVESTONES, BELONGING AND LOCAL ATTACHMENT 99 over time. Rootlessness and a sense of ‘non-identity’, of having no established place in a community, are repeatedly linked to social disintegration, crime, and an erosion of national, family and regional loyalties. Arguments for power to be devolved down to smaller units often have such concerns in mind. Multi- national capital, we are told, is mobile, cynical, inimical to locality and local attachment, and destructive of local differ- ence, habitat and wildlife, even when using local images and memories to sell products. Large corporations pay lip-service to local pride; yet local people are used and discarded when a cheaper ‘labour force’ is found elsewhere. As ‘globalization’ proceeds, perhaps we no longer see anything closely or well, in the style of Gilbert White, John Clare or Adrian Bell; while the past was often myopic in its local focus, it now seems as though whole societies are moving in the opposite direction, their presbyopic refraction often leaving them oblivious to what is immediately before their eyes. For the kinds of knowledge induced by modern travel are Xeeting, transitory and superWcial, shallow in memory and association, blurred in recall. Delocal- ization and advances in the technology of speed induce a sense of place that is poorly discerning and often indifferent, re- ducing local loyalties and mutual obligations, and inXuencing ideas of identity and selfhood. Localities lose their meanings and differences.5 Given the rate of global change and mobility, the insecurity of work and (for many) the transience of residence and acquaintance, it is crucial for historians to stand back and take stock of what we are losing, and of how our ancestors’ experiences compared with our own. In the quietude of churchyards and burial grounds, it may be that gravestones have something to tell us in this regard — before even more of them are cleared by councils and business interests. The recording of personal details on gravestones entailed careful choice and deliberation among the gravestone-leaving 5 On broader issues concerning globalization, among a very large literature, see Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (eds.), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization (Oxford, 1995); Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (1995; London, 2000 edn); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (London, 1997); Kevin R. Cox (ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (New York, 1997); Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge, 1998); Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (Basingstoke, 2000). 100 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 179 classes. It could also add to the cost charged by monumental masons, who were (and still are) often paid by the incised letter.6 On a long-enduring monument of personal and family pride, one would not wish to enter details of little consequence, and there was

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