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Baby Found In The Grave Of 17th Century Bishop

Xanatic*

Xanatic*

Antediluvian
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I'm in a really good place right now.
This is right in my neighbourhood. I might swing by, see if they will let you look at the corpse.


For almost 350 years Bishop Peder Winstrup lay quietly in his coffin in the crypt of the magnificent cathedral at Lund in Sweden, concealing a secret: the body of a tiny baby, tucked in under his feet.

The little corpse, believed to be of a baby born several months prematurely, was revealed for the first time when scientists scanned the coffin and the mummified body of Peder Winstrup, believed to be one of the best preserved 17th-century bodies in Europe.

“One of the main discoveries when we conducted the CT scanning was that Mr Winstrup is not alone in the coffin,” Per Karsten, director of the historical museum at Lund University, said. “Actually, he has a companion, a small child, a five- to six-months-old foetus of a human child, and it has been deliberately concealed under his feet at the bottom of the coffin – so maybe there is a connection.”




http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/21/scan-mummified-body-swedish-bishop-reveals-baby
 
In the UK it was hard to get a respectable Christian burial for a baby born prematurely - perhaps stillborn and unbaptised. You were looking at the northside of the church with suicides and murderers....

My guess is that this is a family member who came too soon and was tucked in with his uncle (say) as the best that could be done.....
 
Frideswide said:
In the UK it was hard to get a respectable Christian burial for a baby born prematurely - perhaps stillborn and unbaptised. You were looking at the northside of the church with suicides and murderers....

My guess is that this is a family member who came too soon and was tucked in with his uncle (say) as the best that could be done.....
Click to expand...
I had the same thoughts too.
 
Quite possible, though it takes something extra to do this to a bishop going in a crypt instead your average peasant in a coffin.
 
Frideswide said:
...My guess is that this is a family member who came too soon and was tucked in with his uncle (say) as the best that could be done.....
Click to expand...

I'd guess something like this too. Although, I was also thinking along the lines of the child maybe being connected to one of the stonemasons, carpenters and labourers who installed the tomb.

There's a chapter in a fantastic book called Agnes Bowker's Cat - Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (by historian David Cressy) which deals with the surreptitious burial of excommunicants by their families and friends - people breaking into graveyards at dead of night in order to bury their own.

There's a really engaging sense of rebelliousness about it all - common people using pragmatic, common sense solutions to cock a snook at the established order of things. I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere (although I'm not sure if it was Cressy's book) that it was also very common for the parents of children who had never lived long enough to be baptised to bury their children illicitly in consecrated ground - sometimes with the blind-eyed approval of the local clergy.

Edit: Just registered that the bishop was in a crypt, rather than a tomb - which would possibly have made his coffin much more accesible to someone wishing to perform a surreptitious interment.
 
Xanatic* said:
Quite possible, though it takes something extra to do this to a bishop going in a crypt instead your average peasant in a coffin.
Click to expand...

Actually, I'm not so sure. Many poor people - at least in the England of that period - were buried in shrouds, with no coffin (I think I'm right in saying that there were even laws governing what the shrouds should be made of); digging them up would have been messy and there'd be no box to put your loved one in at the end of it. Crypts tend to be accesible by a hatch or removable stone and are reopened and revisited over time as more bodies are interred. I think it would have to be someone connected with the church or its workings, rather than a member of the public, who could do this - but I do think it's possible.
 
Yes, wool shrouds to support england's wool industry :)
 
I meant more as in it needing some extra chutzpah, to do it to a "holy man". Not so much the practicality of it.
 
He may not have been unwilling, especially if he they were related :)

Edit to add: are your story antennae twitching?
 
Is that the one in my pants?
 
Frideswide said:
...Edit to add: are your story antennae twitching?
Click to expand...

Always the first thing to go when I hear stuff like this.

I was thinking along the lines of a parent, distraught at some high church official's attitude to the burial of their unbaptised innocent, who decides to solve the problem of the child's burial in unconsecrated ground by hitching a lift into paradise at the bishop's expense. Or a wronged woman secreting a tragic little gift to be explained upon the bishop's heavenly entrance examination.
 
Yes, it must have made for an awkward moment when the bishop arrived at the pearly gates with a baby spirit next to him.
 
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