During the summer of 1931 some workmen were engaged in widening the road on the small triangle of land at the top of North Parade where Fromefield and Berkeley Road divide.
At the depth of about 2 feet they came across a human skeleton fully stretched out and buried face down. They contacted Rev. Arnold Cook who was the minister at Rook Lane Chapel and lived a short distance away at 33 Fromefield but by the time he arrived the site had been heavily disturbed and some of the bones had already been dumped.
Cook gathered up what he could which was most of the skull and some long bones and after consulting the police, who declared the bones to be ancient and not of interest to them, he popped them in the post to the Somerset Archaeological & Natural History Society in Taunton where they reached the desk of its curator Henry St.George Gray. Gray was somewhat at a loss as to what to do with this unexpected gift so he parcelled them up once more and sent them to his friend Sir Arthur Keith at the Royal College of Surgeons. Keith was one of the country’s foremost anthropologists and his opinion was that, “The size of the bones favour a Saxon burial but I think the remains are those of a Romano Britain.”
Gray had enclosed a ninepenny stamp so that the bones could be returned to Rev. Cook and there the matter could have ended – except that the reasoning behind Keith’s conclusion that the remains were from the Roman period would not be accepted today without further evidence and Keith was one of the leading advocates of the fraudulent Piltdown skull being genuine. There was another possibility which does not seem to have been considered at the time.
Suicide was one of the most heinous crimes in the Christian lexicon but gave the church the problem of how to punish someone who was already dead and they arrived at an ingenious solution. A suicide would be tried by a coroner’s jury of twelve local people and for the suicide to have been a crime the deceased had to have been of sound mind and to have understood what he was doing. An alternative verdict was that the death had occurred while they were mentally ill or disturbed in which case no blame was attached and the event was treated pretty much as an accident.
If ‘self murder’ was the verdict the corpse was treated with a form of religious barbarism. Instead of a normal burial in a churchyard or ‘consecrated’ ground with a service and mourners, suicides were buried by the roadside at night, sometimes at the crossroads but not always, a wooden stake was driven through the body and into the ground to prevent the resurrection of the offender on the day of judgement, either physically or symbolically. No prayers and no mourners, the grave was unmarked, and their very existence forgotten, – the very antithesis of a Christian burial.
The irony in all this is that the suicide often had their place of burial named after them and sometimes even a pub, especially if buried at a crossroads! This was unofficial of course but once the locals started using the burial to refer to a particular spot it was only a matter of time before the name appeared on a map and became adopted.
Immortality was denied by Church & State but the names of these unfortunate people have lived on long after those that condemned them. These macabre rites were abolished by the Burial of Suicide Act of 1823 which forbade roadside burials.
The best known example is of course Tucker’s Grave at Faulkland where suicide Edward Tucker was buried at the crossroads in 1747. Another example could be Hellikar’s Grave at the junction of Whitewell Rd and Marston Lane. The name goes back to at least 1694 but nothing else is known. A card maker named Samuel Laverton hanged himself at The Trooper pub in what is now Trinity Street in 1764 and was ordered to be buried at the cross roads and John Adams hanged himself in the stable of a pub called The Crooked Fish in Frome in 1753. He was ordered “to be buried in the common highway and to have a stake drove through his body.”
Could the skeleton at North Hill have been one of these? Once the remains were returned to Rev. Cook the probability is that he had them reburied quietly in a local churchyard and sadly his story will never be known..
Mick Davis & David Lassman
