DISSATISFACTION with the upkeep and layout of the churchyard and the inconvenience in getting there were not “exceptional” circumstances that would justify permitting the exhumation of remains from the churchyard, the Consistory Court of the diocese of Coventry has ruled.
Patricia Margaret Long applied for a faculty for the exhumation of the cremated remains of her late husband, Frederick John Long, which had been laid to rest in an urn in the churchyard of St Laurence’s, Ansley, in June 2015. She wished to have them reburied in the cemetery at Hartshill.
She said that she could no longer make the journey on foot to visit her husband’s place of interment without assistance. She also expressed dissatisfaction with the upkeep of the churchyard, and said that she was far from satisfied with the response from an unidentified person when she offered to pay the gardener extra to take care of the plot.
She said that the other memorial stones within the plot where her husband was interred were so closely spaced that she had difficulty laying flowers on his grave, and that there was no walkway or suitable access from the church pathways, so that she had to walk across the grass to reach her husband’s grave.
She said that if there were interment at Hartshill cemetery she could attend her husband’s place of interment “alone and privately”.
The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Glyn Ross Samuel, said that the principles to be applied to a body after a Christian burial were set out by the Court of Arches in the Blagdon Cemetery case in 2002. The presumption was that the burial of human remains in consecrated ground was permanent.
The Court of Arches had said that the general concept of permanence was reflected in the fact that it was a criminal offence to disturb a dead body without lawful permission. Moreover, the fact that there was no ownership of a dead body according to English law, or under the European Human Rights Convention, reflected a culture in which the norm was that the remains of a dead person should not be disturbed once they had undergone the initial act of interment.
That did not mean that an exhumation could never occur. The Court of Arches said that there had to be some “exceptional” circumstance before that norm of permanent burial was set aside, and that “a change of mind as to the place of burial . . . should not be treated as an acceptable ground for authorising exhumation.”
“[The] ‘portability of remains’ should be discouraged,” the Chancellor said, and “the message [needed] to go out that exhumation should not be granted simply because it would be more convenient for the family of the deceased if the buried remains . . . were moved to a different location.”
The Chancellor agreed with the views of other consistory courts and the Court of Arches that, if the advancing years, deteriorating health, and change of place of residence of relatives were to be accepted as reasons for permitting exhumation, it would make unacceptable inroads into the principle of the permanence of Christian burial, and should be firmly resisted.
The reasons presented by Mrs Long did not persuade him, the Chancellor ruled, that there were exceptional reasons that would justify overturning the presumption of permanence of burial. A faculty for exhumation was, therefore, refused.