ABSTRACT
Writing to the Privy Council in 1582, Bishop William Overton of Coventry summed up the disciplinary Catch-22 in which he and other bishops found themselves when dealing with recalcitrant Catholics. The chief sanction of the ecclesiastical courts was excommunication, yet papists would ‘sit out the excommunications willingly’, and regarded them as a welcome means of evading the penalties of recusancy. For if they were banned from the church, how could they be punished for not coming?1 The irony is a familiar one to historians. Yet there is an important exception to the picture of recusant Catholics unperturbed by the spiritual sanctions of a Church whose validity they did not recognise, and one to which historians have paid surprisingly little attention: the burial of the dead.2 Baptisms, marriages and the Mass itself could all be celebrated in covert and domestic spaces, away from the structures and personnel of the heretical Church of England. But burial was another matter: custom, canon law, hygiene, and common humanity all demanded that the dead be decently disposed of in a place appointed for the purpose. As Christopher Haigh has recently noted, ‘everyone wanted Christian burial – and the Church of England had the graveyards’.3
