Quick question:
Has anyone ever dug a grave and found a coffin was already there?
Freaky!
Cheers.
Plenty of times. It was standard practice in large European cities to allow bodies to lie for a few decades and then dig up the bones and place them elsewhere. The hole used to remove the bones became the next grave. So I suspect that most graves that have been dug already contained a coffin.
I worked as a G.O. on an archaeological dig when I was in college. One of the digs was a 12th century christian burial ground. As is still the practice, the various plots of land were sold off by the church. The closer the plot of land was to the church itself, the more expensive it was.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, this principle was taken to the max by the local priest and his gang. To wit: about 15 - 20 meters from the church wall, there was a pretty well defined “skeletal level” with well defined skeletal remains. As you got closer to the walls of the church, the skeletons got more and more jumbled and mixed and much harder to draw and catalog and make sense of.
Anyway, the reason was that in order to make more money, the priest would re-sell the same plots of land close to the church, to the wealthy locals - when they dug the grave, they just scrunched the bones to one side and threw in the new body - literally.
Hope that helps,
Churches often had a Charnel House to put the bones into.
Speaking of charnel houses, check out the Bone Chapel of Sedlec in the Czech Republic. Containing the bones of 40,000 corpses dating to the 13th century, the entire chapel is decorated with human bones, including a chandelier made of bones.
Plenty of times. Vaults would shift, intruding into their neighbor’s vacant plots, and if the vault on the other side had done the same thing, you’d haved to reposition two graves in order to fill the center one. This usually happened when a husband would die and his wife had outlived him by a long time.
But we never found an entire grave already filled - the parish records were accurate enough to prevent that. However, we always thought that a fresh gave would be an ideal place to hide a body.