Bringing out the dead in Sutton Veny

Wiltshire’s Last Mortsafe

I’m sitting here in a café in Crockerton on a very autumnal late afternoon with a well-deserved cup of tea and a chunk of Dorset apple cake, which is my substitute for both breakfast and lunch today. I’m waiting for my teenage son to finish on the local mountain bike trail, hoping he won’t have yet another ‘accident’ involving smashing his face and teeth up.

If you have or have had children of your own, as they get older, you suddenly realise that they don’t really need you much anymore, but you are still pretty useful running a glorified taxi service. I don’t mind really – I’m happy to ferry my kids to their outdoor activities and, if I get organised, I will always find something to do while I’m waiting. Today, I figured I would drop off my son and then head to a very local village I have been wanting to explore for a while. Why? Well, it has the ruins of an old 12th-century church with, most excitingly for this geek, the last remaining mortsafe in Wiltshire. It’s exactly the sort of thing that deserves a rightful spot here on the blog.

So, where have I been? Sutton Veny in the southwest of Wiltshire, a couple of miles from Warminster. It’s a pretty little village with lots of interesting old properties. I had to try not to get distracted from my main mission – to find the mortsafe. Needless to say, I did get distracted because I am nosy but then I saw a towering spire in the sky and pulled hastily over. This must be the church, thought I, although it looked to be in pretty good condition with no sign of a ruin. I hopped out of the Weirdmobile and went for a wander around the graveyard. By the way, I have a good fact for you about graveyards; I only just found this out after 48 years of travelling around the sun. Graveyards are the land attached to a church where the dead are buried. If the piece of land is not connected to a church, it is called a cemetery. So, there you go – now you (and I) know the difference!

I am trying to concentrate here in the café and it was going well until my eye caught the couple who had just arrived at the table in front of me. People are curious, aren’t they?! I am watching them right now, complaining about the table, repositioning the chairs and shuffling about a bit, and yet there are many other options they could have, in fact, chosen from. The lady is cross because there is a crumb on the table, but it looked pretty clean to me, and now the man is kicking a stray sultana from under the table across the café and past empty tables only to nudge it under the dresser where the knives and forks are kept.

Anyway, back to Sutton Veny. Having wandered around the graveyard of the church, I struggled to find the mortsafe or any sign of ruins. Maybe someone had removed the mortsafe and decided to put it in a museum or something? I did find the Commonwealth graves, though, and spent a few minutes reading them. The poor young men buried there were mostly from Australia. Here they lay, the victims of two brutal and pointless wars, miles from their homes down under. It is so sad that they lost their lives so young, at the hands of the humans in charge, who are just hellbent on gaining power and money, no matter the cost.

Having heard voices coming from the church interior, I decided it might be best to ask where I could find the mortsafe. The couple inside were volunteers and they looked at me quizzically before we all realised that I was probably at the wrong church. This was St Johns’ the Evangelist’s Church, a far more modern building that was built in 1866, and not the 12th-century church of St Leonard’s that I was actually looking for. Never mind, it’s still a cool building!

The kindly couple gave me directions on where I needed to go and I then headed off to find ‘the right church’! It wasn’t tricky to find and is tucked away at the end of a lane. And what a find it was – it’s everything I hoped a half-ruined church would be on a grey and damp November afternoon. Atmospheric, ethereal and completely deserted!

This is a cruciform church which was originally built in the 12th century before undergoing a couple of sets of revisions in the 13th and 16th centuries. It had a major restoration in 1831, but the low-lying damp ground caused the foundations to be very unstable. In 1866, the building was abandoned when everyone moved to St John’s. Over the next 100 years, it deteriorated, but thankfully, in 1971, the Churches Conservation Trust stepped in when the building was vested into their care.

As I walked up to the ruins, camera in hand, I literally ran straight into the mortsafe. There it was, to the right of the ruins. Maybe you know what a mortsafe is, but maybe you don’t, so let me explain. *The couple at the table next door are now having a bit of a tiff about whether to wrap up the other half of the toasted teacake and take it home. They don’t look like they are having a good time.*

Mortsafes first came into action in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were made from heavyweight iron or a similar metal and sometimes were made with stone, making them even more immovable. They were designed to protect the graves of the freshly buried. Placed over the grave, they are almost like cages, and they’d be far too tricky to move to enable criminals to dig up a body.

Obviously, like me, you are probably thinking that was because the folks of years gone by were worried about the dead returning to haunt them in the form of zombies or vampires, but no, they were more concerned about the living. ‘Body snatchers’ as they became known, discovered a nice little money-maker, digging up and selling freshly buried bodies to surgeons and medical schools. Medical science was going full-throttle and medical students couldn’t get their hands on dead bodies fast enough. There was an ‘ask-no-questions’ policy when it came to where the recently deceased had come from.

I don’t need to tell you how distressing it would be to lose a loved one only to find their body dug up and removed just days after their burial. Body snatching became such an issue that someone was forced to invent the mortsafe.

A wealthy family could rent a mortsafe from the church for the duration it took for the body to become too decayed to be useful. Placed over the grave, they are almost like cages and they’d be far too tricky to move before digging up a body. Time would have been of the essence too when digging up a corpse, so the mortsafe put the body snatchers off.

The poor would be forced to ‘keep watch’ at night at their loved one’s graves instead for a few weeks, as the rental of a mortsafe would be beyond their means.

By the time the Anatomy Act 1832 came along the need for freshly dug-up bodies wasn’t quite as crucial as the act allowed for other bodies to be freely available without the need for corpse thievery. Mortsafes became redundant and lots of them were broken up; others remain in churchyards, just like the one at St Leonard’s.

The Ruins of St Leonard’s Church

St Leonard’s was rescued from becoming a pile of stone in 1972 when it was aintained by the Churches Conservation Trust I’m pleased to say. They are doing a great job of looking after it and this is a lovely little place to visit. Part of the old church still stands and you can pop inside for a look around. I guess this might make me what is known as a ‘church botherer’ as I do like to have a nose around an empty church when the opportunity arises.

I wasn’t really expecting to come across anything else relating to dead bodies inside but to my surprise, I found something! And I learnt something new.

Inside the remaining chancel, you will find a bier. This is a wooden wagon with a timber frame over the top of it. This bier was used to convey the dead of Sutton Veny to their final resting place in the graveyard of St. John the Baptist Church. The chancel was used as a mortuary chapel for a while, which adds a new layer of creepy to the building.

In a way the bier, built in the 1890s, and staying in use until 1968 (which is quite late really), was a successor to our modern-day funeral directors’  private ambulances. I will admit, I have never really thought about how the dead were transported around before we had motor vehicles!

I spent a bit of time in the chancel reading things left out by the Churches Conservation Trust and enjoying the peace of the empty place. The whole site was very peaceful actually and I recommend a visit if you like ‘church bothering.’

After wandering back to the Weirdmobile, I found I had some spare time left while waiting for my son and that’s how I ended up earwigging on the customers on the table behind me and writing this blog. The light was starting to fade and I suspected I should drive back to the bike trail now. It was a successful search for more weirdness (and a bit of history) this afternoon. I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog.

*As I left the garden centre, I saw the dissatisfied customers and they were chatting to one of the staff members, smiling away and telling them how lovely everything was and how much they enjoyed their teacakes!*

        

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