Notes and Queries, Number 200, August 27, 1853: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Geneologists, etc.Various
History
Notes and Queries, Number 200, August 27, 1853: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Geneologists, etc.
Various
Questions and answers -- Periodicals
The Quakers had a small burial-ground at Thealby, in the parish of
Burton-upon-Stother, which I some years ago had the curiosity to inspect,
but such a forlorn lost place for such a sober and serious purpose I
never in my life before looked upon; it is posited at a little distance
from the public road entering Thealby from Winterton, where no doubt at
one time stood a lot of cottages and crofts, surrounded by common stone
walls, made from the flat stone of the neighbourhood. But so small and
so neglected was this burial place, that I could compare it to nothing
better than an old parish pinfold; it had been so little attended to
when I visited it, that the whole area was under a most luxuriant crop
of flourishing nettles, six or seven feet high. And as to graves, or the
purport of its occupation, we could see nothing; and yet its position was
such that with ordinary attention it might have been even a picturesque
spot, having three or four large trees overlooking it.
Upon an after inquiry I was told that a funeral had lately taken
place here, at which Friend Jonathan was the presiding attendant. But
in preparation for this ceremony they had found so much difficulty
in stubbing up the strong nettles, and digging the roots to form a
decent grave; and it was after all so difficult to find comfortable
standing-room about the grave, that I have ever {203} since concluded
that Mr. Dent must have been disgusted with it, as, upon depositing their
lost friend in the earth, he, as spokesman, thought it unnecessary to
make any observations, and he recommended that they should at once cover
the body up; and so it was done.
That Mr. Dent had any antipathy to the church I do not know, but that he
had a great dislike to paying unnecessary fees I have a good recollection
of. Before his death he requested that his body should be deposited in
his own garden; and his request was attended to by his nephew.
After the old gentleman's death, the present Mr. Dent, with a
praiseworthy attention, repaired and restored in the Elizabethan style
the old dilapidated dwelling-house and homestead where his uncle lived.
And I one day paid a visit to the grave, which is an unpretending ridge
on a well-mown grass-plat, and which, with the house and ground, appeared
to be properly attended to; and so, I presume, it continues to be.
WM. T. HESLEDEN.
J. H. M., in bringing forward Baskerville as an example of this unusual
occurrence, says, that "he directed he should be buried under a
_windmill_ near his garden." In a volume of Epitaphs, printed at Ipswich
in 1806, once the property of Archdeacon Nares, and containing several
MS. notes by him, Baskerville's is given, with a note by the editor, in
which he is stated to have been "inurned according to his own desire in a
_conical building_ near his late widow's house." The epitaph, written by
Baskerville himself, commences with these lines--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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