Body Snatchers at Greensted.

The Hon. Secretary recalled that a former parishioner of his, the late Mr. J. W. Burningham, of Saffron Walden, told him that his father watched the grave of his grandmother in South Weald churchyard for three nights to prevent body snatchers from exhuming the corpse.

Reference to the ‘Essex Chronicle’ shows “resurrectionists” were busy in the neighbourhood in 1824; they managed to disinter a body at Shelley, but were disturbed when opening a grave at Greensted churchyard.¹²⁶