324 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to lie in consecrated earth, and, in fact, who should be allowed to be 

 interred at all. 



The deplorable superstition that could induce people to intrust 

 such a power to any but its civil government and civil courts is 

 amazing, and yet we find the sturdy English nation, under the gov- 

 ernment of William of Normandy, stripping their cherished Anglo- 

 Saxon courts of all power to protect the dead, and yielding them 

 up blindfold to priestly cognizance. As Sir William Blackstone well 

 says, it was a " fatal encroachment " on the ancient liberties of Eng- 

 land. Eight centuries have not sufficed to repair the mischief. An- 

 selm and Becket, in modern garb, live even yet. 



The deep-seated, fundamental idea of human burial lies in the 

 minojlincr our remains with the mother earth. The " dust to dust 1 

 earth to earth ! ashes to ashes ! " of the Church echoing, in deeper 

 solemnity, the " ter pulvere " of Horace, and hallowing the dying wish 

 of Cyrus finds a universal response in the holiest instincts of man in 

 every age. Here, then, was the tender spot for subtle power to touch. 

 Logically pursuing this idea, the ecclesiastical process of excommuni- 

 cation prohibited burial in the earth at all, whether consecrated or 

 not. The precise words oi the formula^ as used in the tenth century, 

 gave over the body of the contumacious offender for food to the fowls 

 of the air and beasts of the field : " Sint cadavera eorum, in escam 

 volatilibus coeli, et bestiis terree." In some instances the sentence 

 was more definite and specific, confining the corpse to the hollow 

 trunk of a tree, " in concavo trunco repositum." The essence of the 

 idea being to keep the body out of the earth and on the surface, it 

 was sometimes figuratively expressed, in monkish rhetoric, by " the 

 burial of an ass," or by a stronger and more characteristic image, 

 as " a dunghill : " " Sepultura asini sepeliantur, et in sterqidliniwin 

 super faciem terrae sint." The afilicted but sinful laity, to hide the 

 horror of the spectacle, were wont, at times, to cover the festering 

 dead with a pile of stones, thereby rearing a tumulus, or " hloc y " so 

 that the process came to be commonly known, in mediaeval Latin, as 

 " imhlocare corpus.'''' (Du Cange, Glossary, " Imblocare.") 



The same dominant idea of the unfitness of spiritual offenders to 

 pollute the earth can be distinctly traced throngh the judicial eccle- 

 siastical condemnations for several centuries. John Huss and Jerome 

 of Prague being at the stake for heresy, early in the fifteenth century, 

 under the ecclesiastical order of the Council of Constance, their ashes 

 were not allowed to mingle with the earth, but were cast into the 

 Rhine. 



The legal process of scattering the ashes of the heretic was evi- 

 dently a very significant and cherished feature in the ecclesiastical 

 code of procedure, and it was executed in the different portions of 

 Christendom with all attainable uniformity and precision. Within its 

 comprehensive range it embraced not only the ashes of the heretic 



