We have
frequent requests to identify the exact position of the Brontë grave(s) in St
Michael’s, Haworth.
Indeed, we are often
pressed for access to what enquiries incorrectly assume (and often state definitively
that they know) is a crypt.
The answer
isn’t fundamentally difficult to work out – and may well have been worked out
by others in the past – because the application for formal permission to build
the present church in 1880 includes a plan which clearly shows the footprints
of the old existing church and the proposed new church imposed upon one
another, a plan which outlines a number of graves which might be disturbed during
the building work including a neighbouring pair in the part of the church where
we know the Brontë graves to be.
We are certain
these graves are not a ‘vault’ in the sense of a large space under the floor
but only in the sense of standard eighteenth century and early nineteenth century
burials of this sort: single grave cuts often deep and often brick lined.
There is in
fact some detail of the manner intended for Patrick Bronte’s burial. It is contained in the 1857 legal document
which ended general burial rights at the church
reserving,
however, to the Reverend Patrick Brontè [sic] the right of interment for
himself in his family vault in the Chancel, on condition that the coffin be
imbedded in a layer of powdered charcoal four inches thick, and be separately
entombed in brick or stone work, cemented in an airtight manner, and that no
other interment shall take place within the church.
There is
also a record (from the son of Patrick Brontë’s successor) that in the building
of the new church
the Brontë
grave was in no way interfered with, and the remains were left where they were
placed at their funerals. . . . . Over their grave, as over the others, was
laid a thick layer of concrete (how necessary those who knew the old church
will remember!), upon which the present edifice stands ..... I will repeat as
emphatically as I can, on the authority of my father spoken scores of times in
my hearing, that undisturbed in their original burial place that gifted family
were left.
This suggests two separate layers of concrete – that which was required at the time
of Patrick Brontë’s burial and that which was added at the rebuilding of the
church – both apparently intended to prevent the smell of decomposition filtering
upwards.
Anyway, this
morning it was local historian Steven Wood who took the initiative to bring in
a friend who is the Diocesan Archaeologist and who knows the building well, and
their careful measuring from the plan resulted in the suggestion marked out by
tape in the picture. The inscription on the neighbouring pillar correctly points to this area, and there is photographic evidence that the marble memorial now in the neighbouring chapel originally stood over it - but the more modern brass memorial to Emily and Charlotte in the floor nearby is slightly misdirecting.
Patrick
Brontë’s wife Maria was buried here in 1821, and, in due course, two infant
children of theirs, three of their remaining four adult children (including Emily and
Charlotte, but not
Anne who is buried in Scarborough), Maria’s sister (who
helped bring the children up after Maria’s death) and then Patrick himself.
And, not untypically, while we were at work on this project this morning, among the flow of Japanese visitors there was one in tears at the emotion of finally being on the spot ('I never thought I would be, and now I am').
