Churchyard and Cemetery

Julie Rugg is a Senior Research Fellow and heads the Cemetery Research Group at the University of York

• IntroductionPART ONE1. Burial in 1850: national and local contexts2. ‘Dr Hoffman was good enough to consult me’: churchyard closures3. ‘A very modern act’: the Churchyard Consecration Act and churchyard extension4. ‘It was entirely a question for the parishioners’: burial board management5. ‘No differences are so deep as those which arise over the grave’: the religious politics of burial 6. ‘Casting into the great crucible of the present ferment all manner of time-honoured traditions’: new legislative contexts for twentieth-century burial PART TWO7. ‘It was a task which he would be greatly pleased to hand over to some other person or persons’: centralisation and cemeteries, 1894–19748. ‘Being desirous of avoiding a burial board’: the churchyard as cemetery9. ‘Unobservable or inconspicuous to the casual visitor’?: the changing churchyard landscape 10. ‘Thoroughly untidy’: changing burial culture, 1850–2007AppendicesBibliographyIndex

The book is 'well-conceived, meticulously undertaken, rich and highly nuanced''anyone bent on writing seriously about almost any aspect of burial ground provision in England and Wales from the 1850s onwards will ignore this book at their peril.'Stephen White, Ecclesiastical Law Journal:, 10 February 2015‘Rugg has an established research reputation in death studies regarding the history of ownership and management of burial space. Cemeteries, it would seem, are her passion. Churchyard and Cemetery: Tradition and Modernity in Rural North Yorkshire reinforces and expands her status as one of the foremost thinkers in this area. Rugg’s clear appetite for examining burial space defines the book. She engages the reader with a topic that might initially appear dry but is actually ripe with ‘the strength of the passions evoked by the issue of burial’ (p. xi) on the local and national stage.’Ruth Penfold-Mounce, Department of Sociology, University of York, Mortality