The man who cuts the grass in the churchyard of St Nicholas’, Fyfield, recently had the alarming experience of stepping back and falling into a hole which opened beneath him. Thankfully, he was not injured but investigation into how the accident occurred revealed a grave which was far from commonplace. These notes describe what was found and from other sources, it has been possible to piece together some facts about the people involved. First, however, some background notes about the churchyard provide the context for what follows, and they include a small mystery of their own.
The ground in which the departed of Fyfield are buried today was only brought into use as a burial ground as recently as forty years ago. Expansion of the original graveyard surrounding St Nicholas’ church had started in 1904 and since then the boundary has been moved again twice to bring additional land into use for burials¹. The boundary line of the original, medieval graveyard can be established by reference to surviving memorials² and therein lies the first thread of the puzzle.
The original graveyard extended only fifty feet south of the church building, giving a total area of just over half an acre. The church built here by the Normans and its considerable extension through the fourteenth century are on a scale which indicates that Fyfield was a significant village in mediaeval times and it is surprising to find that it was served by such a small burial ground, in an age when the norm was for double this area; popularly referred to as ‘God’s Acre’. This leads to the second element of the mystery. It has always been the practice in the English church to reuse grave spaces after a decent interval – around a century – when the remains of earlier occupants have settled. This efficient use of the land had the practical advantage that it seldom did a graveyard run out of space for fresh burials. However, continually adding new dust to the old eventually had a noticeable effect upon the sheer bulk of the earth into which it was all being placed and mediaeval churchyards are typically characterised by a significant elevation of the ground level, which can impart a sunken appearance to adjacent features, such as the path to the porch and even the church building itself. For a burial ground as unusually cramped as that serving Fyfield, it would be reasonable to expect this effect to be especially marked; a view reinforced by crude extrapolation of the parish registers, which suggests that it is probably the resting place for eight-thousand or more departed souls. Despite this, the mediaeval graveyard surrounding St Nicholas’ church exhibits no obvious signs of increased bulk.
Exploration of this puzzle is beyond the scope of these brief notes but there is no doubt that the old burial ground was still in full and active use until a century ago, when the boundary was moved to enclose the first new piece of farmland acquired for future graves and at that point burials in the old ground were discontinued. Some twenty years after the new ground came into use, in order to ease maintenance, it was decided in 1923 to level all the burial mounds and to lay flat on the ground all the gravestones in the old burial ground, except for “modern” ones and those with a continuing family connection³. The headstones so laid down are still there, the turf having closed over them in the intervening years.
Curiously, the grave involved in the recent accident was not one of that majority which had been laid flat in 1923, but neither was it then a modern one and Grout, the family name it commemorates, appears to have died out in Fyfield before the end of the eighteenth century.
Thomas Grout was born in about 1710. With his wife Grace, some eight years his junior, and their daughter Mary, who was born around 1739, he came to Fyfield as the schoolmaster⁴; the year of his arrival is not recorded. It is a reasonable assumption that they lived in School House, one of fifteen separate houses which were then in the village main street⁵, and which had been established as the schoolmaster’s residence in 1692 by the will of the late rector, Anthony Walker. Before she had reached the age of thirty, Grace was dead, being buried in March 1747⁶ in a plot in the north-east corner of the churchyard. The limestone headstone which marked her resting place was of modest size and the epitaph which her grieving husband put on it expressed his desire eventually to be reunited with her.
This is the grave which opened unexpectedly one day recently. Apart from the small, partially sunken headstone which marks its position, the ground it occupied was completely level, with grass growing over it, as it does over most of the plots in the old churchyard and there was nothing to indicate that it was other than a conventional, earth-filled grave. However, Thomas Grout had gone to some trouble over his wife’s final resting place and, instead of it simply being backfilled with the earth removed when it was dug, he had it lined with brickwork almost up to ground level. This comprised more than twenty courses of bricks laid in stretcher-bond. The grave was narrow at the head, with curved sides broadening to about twenty inches wide at the shoulder position, before following a curved taper down to about nine inches at the feet. The result was a coffin-shaped hole more reminiscent of mediaeval graves constructed under church floors⁷ and it is unusual as an eighteenth-century churchyard burial. But this is not the end of the story.
In October of the following year, Thomas Grout remarried, taking as his wife Elizabeth Maynard⁸; and their marriage lasted until Elizabeth’s death twenty years later. Her husband seems to have had interests and skills beyond the modest demands made upon an eighteenth century village schoolmaster and his name occasionally crops up in matters unrelated to his formal position. In 1759, we find that both Thomas and Elizabeth Grout were witnesses to the will of John Young, a husbandman of Moreton⁹. Then, in 1764 he is named as the surveyor responsible for a map of Longbarns Farm in Abbess and Beauchamp Roding, property of Stephen Skinner Esq¹⁰, which is of some interest since eighteenth century landowners were not generally inclined to commission detailed surveys of their holdings which might one day constitute inconvenient evidence for tithe claims against them. The map is a first class piece of draughtsmanship, giving every indication that Grout was an experienced hand at such work. In April 1768, Elizabeth Grout died and was buried¹¹, in a plot of which no identifiable trace is left to us today. By her death, Elizabeth missed the marriage in Fyfield, the following July, of Grout’s daughter Mary to Robert Allaway, of the London parish of St Giles in the Fields¹². Witnesses to the marriage were Grout himself and John Chipperfield. Chipperfield seems to have been the parish clerk from around 1757 until his death in 1779 and he signed as a witness to virtually every marriage in Fyfield during that period¹³. In 1746 he had married Elizabeth Nichols but their only child, John, died in infancy in 1749. After the death of his wife in 1770, Chipperfield married Mary Wilson in October of the following year and Thomas Grout was one of the witnesses to that marriage¹⁴.
Following the death of his second wife, Thomas Grout grieved for a much shorter period than after his earlier loss of Grace, and only four months later he married Martha Devenill¹⁵. However, he now had only three years left himself and he died in July 1774, aged sixty-four¹⁶. With his death, we return to the collapsed grave in the churchyard, for a feature of its brick construction suggests that Grout may always have intended to be buried in it with his first wife, Grace. Nine courses of brick up from the bottom of the grave, the curvature of the walls had been increased to accommodate Thomas Grout’s broader frame. The result was that, at the shoulders, the grave space for him was about four inches wider than the space below, in which rested Grace. Two holes were left in the brickwork on each side to allow insertion of a pair of wooden beams spanning the width of the grave, to provide support for Thomas’ body. This section of greater width has a height of six brick courses, above which, up to the surface, it resumes the narrower profile of the lower part of the grave.
It is unclear whether the grave was constructed originally with this modified profile, on Thomas’ instruction, or if it was rebuilt only on his death, perhaps when a decision was taken to bury him in the same plot as Grace and it was then found that he was too big for the grave which had been built twenty-seven years earlier. The uniformity of the bricks and bricklayer’s style throughout the walls lends support to the idea that it was built this way from the first. However, had it been modified later, the same bricks would have been re-laid with the walls further apart and so the brickwork alone is not a reliable indicator. The size of the headstone suggests that Thomas might not have intended his own name to be added to it. It is a small stone and the epitaph to Grace, although only partly legible, fills all the available space on its face, leaving no room for his own details. Eventually, when he died, the stone was turned over and the dedication to him was inscribed on the other side.
Scarcely had Grout been laid to rest than his daughter followed him to the grave, at the age of only thirty-five and she too was interred in what had, effectively become a family grave¹⁷. With Mary’s death, in October 1774, the grave was closed for the last time, by placing three sandstone blocks over the opening. The stones are of irregular shape and have not been worked by masons’ tools, indicating that they were not intended to be seen and were then covered with earth. They so lay for over two-hundred years until the recent accident, which happened when the centre stone broke in two. There was no obvious evidence in the grave upon which to determine other practical details of the manner of burial of the three occupants.
The Grout family connection with Fyfield now continued by a single thread. Mary’s widower, Robert Allaway seems to have stayed in the parish. He appears briefly in the registers in October 1777 when he was witness to the marriage of Richard Berwick and Elizabeth Netherstreet. Then, in May 1780, he remarried, his second wife being Mary Turner¹⁸. However, he did not enjoy his new-found happiness for long and he was buried in Fyfield in December 1782¹⁹, after which the registers contain no further mention of the names Grout or Allaway.
This leaves unanswered the question as to why, one hundred and forty years later, the Grout gravestone was not laid flat, along with all the other ones commemorating family names long extinct in the parish. It may simply have been overlooked but a more pleasing possibility suggests itself. I like to imagine the man told to do the job scratching his head as he puzzled over which of the two inscribed faces of the Grout headstone should be condemned to face forever downwards and eventually deciding to offend neither Grace on one side, nor Thomas and Mary on the other and quietly retreating, leaving them all undisturbed, for eternity.
Marcus Dain
Churchwarden
St Nicholas, Fyfield
May, 2004