Graveyard Boundary

Conservation of Historic Graveyards

Illustrating the relationship between animals and people, and the struggle to survive that many animals face day in day out, this book reveals how many types of animals are in danger of extinction as they are hunted for their skin, teeth and bones and how other species have become threatened because humans have destroyed their habitats. All sections of the animal world are represented, from butterflies, beetles and bugs to snakes and larger mammals - bears, big cats and elephants. The text explains what is currently being done to protect these endangered animals and how research is helping experts to understand what can be done to preserve them and their habitats in the future.

Raunds Furnells

On the south side of the river Nene in east Northamptonshire, a settlement was established at Raunds in the sixth century AD. Some 300 years later t he settlements was served by a small field church. Total and careful excavation ahead of twentieth-century building development found in both the church and adjoining cemetery exceptional features the study of which has contributed to the archaeology of the churches, of the liturgy, and the burial practices of the Anglo-Saxon period. The seeming simplicity of the church’s beginnings was deceptive. Before the first church building had been standing long, it proved too small: a chancel was added. Liturgical features were found which did not often survive elsewhere (a pot, used as a sacrarium, buried in front of the free-standing altar, and behind the altar, a clergy bench). The boundaries of a graveyard were established around the church. Many of the earliest burials were preserved, undisturbed by later inhumation. The congregation buried its dead in ordered zones, the earliest dominated by a plot, perhaps a ‘founder’s grave’, distinguished by an elaborately carved stone grave cover, possibly also be a standing cross. In the last years of the graveyard’s use, burials of young children took place in an ‘eaves-drip’ zone flanking the church walls. Much information was retrieved about the population who for two centuries used the church, about their physical health, and about their very varied burial practices. Although a larger church was later built on the site, it was soon abandoned, and subsequently adapted for secular use as part of a ‘manorial complex’. The site of the graveyard was forgotten. In context, the church and cemetery represent on phase in the development of the Raunds landscape between prehistory and the present day. This excavation provided the stimulus for detailed archaeological survey of the Raunds area, resulting in the establishment of the Raunds Area Project, managed jointly by the Northamptonshire Archaeology Unit and English Heritage. This volume is the Project’s first report.

Accounts and Papers of the House of Commons