The Northern Graveyard

The northern graveyard of the Abbey has been used to bury Dunfermline’s dead for nearly a thousand years, the area to the south of the Abbey not being used for burials until the early nineteenth century. The small church which existed before the building of the first Abbey church in the twelfth century may have had graves on both north and south sides, but once the Abbey was established the cloisters were built on the south side of the new church, leaving the only the north side to be used for the town’s burials.

At first the monks and the people worshipped in the same church, the monks part being the ‘choir’ at the east end and the people having the western section for their parish church. In the thirteenth century the monks built a shrine to St Margaret at the eastern extremity of their choir. After the Reformation of 1560, which established Protestantism in Scotland, the parish church continued in use but the monks’ choir was abandoned and fell into decay. The space within the ruins became known as the Setter kirkyard and a few important people were buried there but it was not in general use for burials. The cloisters also decayed but their site was not used for burials until the early nineteenth century.

Where did all the bodies go?

In order to understand how so many burials could have been fitted into the northern kirkyard over the years there are two main things to keep in mind. In the first place, medieval Dunfermline was a very small town. The earliest reliable record of its size is a ‘feu roll’ of about 1510 - a list made by the burgh council of all the properties in the town and the feu duty payable on each one. According to this list there were only about 250 domiciles in Dunfermline at that time. In earlier days, before the suburbs of East Port, New Row and the Netherton were developed there would have been half that number or even fewer. If, as is probable, each inhabited building in 1510 contained an average of  three families, this represents an adult population of about 1500, and this number had only doubled by the mid-eighteenth century. For a population of that size the northern kirkyard was a perfectly adequate burying ground.

We also need to adjust our idea of what a graveyard should look like. We are used to the Victorian model, with corpses  buried six feet down in substantial coffins. The graves are lined up in neat rows with a space between each plot and a substantial headstone to mark the spot. In Medieval and later times the picture was very different. No neat rows here – archaeologists who have dug in old graveyards have commented on the difficulties this caused them. Graves were crammed tightly together, often with the later ones intercutting the earlier. The only common feature is that all were orientated east to west, so that on the Last Day all the faithful would be able to stand up and face Christ, who would appear in the east.

Headstones were only for the wealthy. Ordinary people would have a small wooden marker or no marker at all, so after a number of years no-one would remember the exact position of the grave. Not everyone was buried in a coffin, many were just wrapped in a linen or woollen shroud and if there was a coffin it was knocked up cheaply by the local wright from a soft wood like pine, which would quickly decay. It was standard practice to dig a new grave extra deep so that burials could be piled one on top of another. As bodies, bones and coffins decayed, any remains would sink to the bottom of the grave, leaving room for many new corpses to be placed in the initial excavation over the years.

If the natural processes of decay were not sufficiently rapid, people had no problem about digging up old graves and starting again. Reverence for human remains is a comparatively modern phenomenon, initiated by the Victorians, who began founding separate cemeteries, where the dead could be guaranteed perpetual rest. Their attitude has been reinforced more recently by the adoption of New Age notions of respect for ‘the ancestors’. In former times the graves of the great and the good were revered because these were people everyone wanted to remember. For ordinary folk, once their immediate relatives had joined them they were largely forgotten, so there was no problem with digging up their remains to make space for newcomers. Even in more recent times the practice of re-using grave plots has been universal. Elsewhere on this site is a list of burial plots in the northern kirkyard, assigned by the Kirk Session between 1761 and 1800. Few of these plots are now identifiable, most having been re-used during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.