Traffic in corpses: Further evidence from late-Georgian north-east England

The transport of bodies after death was, traditionally, a medieval right of parishioners to be buried in their own churchyard upon payment of a nominal fee. Corpses were often transported across the country sometimes at the behest of the testator, sometimes the churchwarden. As such, without performing a reconstitution, it is impossible to tell whether or not this refers to migration to and subsequent death within a given parish or post-mortem corpse transfer. Given the short-time period covered by the Barrington registers, the result of any such exercise would be partial at best. The reason given by the rector of Whitfield for the traffic of corpses was simply that it is still the custom with very many families who have been removed from it, to bring their dead to be interred in the church yard here. In newer rural parishes this practice appears.