09/28/2026
🕯️ For about fifteen years in Scotland, burying someone was not the end of the family's work. It was the start of a fortnight of night shifts.
The anatomy schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow were among the best in Europe, and they had a problem they could not solve honestly. The law allowed them almost no bodies. The demand was enormous. So a trade grew up in the gap, and men went into kirkyards at night with wooden spades, which made far less noise than iron, and took the newly buried away.
Ordinary families answered it themselves, because nobody else was going to.
Some parishes bought a mortsafe, a cage or a heavy slab of iron that was locked down over the coffin and left in place for six weeks or so, until the body was of no use to anybody, then lifted, cleaned off and passed to the next family that needed it. Some built a watch house at the kirkyard gate with a fireplace in it. And in a great many places there was no iron and no building, and so the men of the family simply went out and sat there.
Two or three at a time. A lantern. A brazier if they could get coals. A fortnight of nights in a Scottish autumn, taking turns.
That is the detail that stops me. Not the body snatchers, who were only doing something squalid for money. The fathers and brothers and sons sitting on a cold table stone at three in the morning because the alternative was unthinkable to them.
It ended in 1832, when the Anatomy Act finally gave the schools a lawful supply and the whole trade collapsed almost overnight. The mortsafes were left where they lay. You can still find them in kirkyards across the east and the north east, rusted down into the grass, and most people walk straight past without knowing what they are looking at. 🤍
We talk a great deal about how our ancestors honoured their dead. For a few years, honouring them meant staying awake.
