The mall of the Middle Ages

The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariès has been on my shelves for many years, and a couple of weeks ago I finally began reading it. The most intriguing part of it for me has been the section called “The Social Functions of the Cemetery” in the chapter “Place of Burial.”

The medieval cemetery was not only a place where the dead were buried.... The cemetery, together with the church, was the center of social life. It took the place of the forum....

The function of sanctuary transformed the cemetery, sometimes into a place of residence, always into a public meeting place, whether or not it continued to be used to bury the dead.

Sometimes the refugees who asked for asylum in the cemetery settled there and refused to leave. Some were content with rooms over the charnels [where bones were stored]. Others built houses…

The people who lived in the cemetery were utterly oblivious to the sight of burials or to the proximity of the large common graves, which were left uncovered until they were full....

The cemetery was the place for strolling, socializing, and merrymaking. It took the place of a mall.... In 1231 the Council of Rouen prohibited “dancing in the cemetery or in the church under pain of excommunication.” This prohibition reappears almost unchanged in 1405, when it was forbidden for anyone to dance in the cemetery or to take part in any sot of game; or for mimes, jugglers, mummers, strolling musicians, or mountebanks to pursue their dubious professions there. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, les Innocents [in Paris] was a kind of commercial arcade. Idlers strolled there just as they did in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, where there were also booksellers and people selling notions and linens.... Two out of the four charnels were named after the kinds of business that were done there; the charnel of the linen drapers and the charnel of the writers, that is, the public letter writers....

“In the midst of all this confusion, a funeral was going on. [According to a traveler in 1657.] The gravediggers proceeded to open a grave and take out bodies that had not yet decomposed, although even in the heart of winter the soil of the cemetery gave off noisome odors.”