WorldWithoutEnd.Amen. 409
but in a place of dishonor, tossed on the trash heap like the carcasses of
animals. A hanged criminal was to be buried under his gallows. But in all
such cases, should the dying have sought confession and the ministry of a
priest, an exception might be made for a Christian burial.^186 The excommu-
nicated could not rest in consecrated ground, at least until a judge relaxed
the ban or restitution was made, as the excommunicate’s heirs could do for
withheld tithes.^187 The Lateran Council forbade, absolutely and irrevocably,
the burial of heretics in holy ground. The community of the sleeping dead,
like that of the living, should be an orthodox and pious commonwealth.^188
Exhumation of heretics buried in holy ground reflected a desire for commu-
nal purity even in death more than an urge to inflict punishment on dead
dissenters.^189
If a good Catholic Christian could not be buried in a cemetery, the
Church provided ceremonies to render an individual grave as holy as that of
the parish’s consecrated ground. A priest blessed the isolated grave with holy
water and erected a cross, that all might know a Christian had been buried
there and that the demons might tremble. When a Catholic died at sea,
money for a proper funeral and burial was sewn into the shroud, in the hope
that a proper funeral would be conducted if the body should be found.^190
Nearly all citizens of the communes went to rest in the chapel cemetery.
Christian cemeteries had been, from time immemorial, blessed with sacred
rites and marked out by sacred symbols.^191 Earth burial, after the model of
Jesus, was the universal norm. The medieval cemetery was free of private
monuments, its ground covered with symbolic plants. Vines and laurel, by
their green foliage, recalled the immortality of the soul. The favorite tree
was the cypress, whose sweet odor recalled holiness and hid any stench of
decay. It was an evergreen that recalled the resurrection to everlasting life as
it grew straight up. It symbolized, too, the finality of death in this age, since,
unlike other trees, it died completely when cut down, rather than sending up
new shoots.^192 The body was laid in the grave with the feet to the east,
toward the rising sun, the direction from which Christ would come at the
end of the world. The bodies of Christians would then rise from the grave to
greet him. Bishop Sicardo the liturgist discouraged separate burials of head
- Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , cols. 429 – 30.
- Aquileia,Aquilejense Concilium a Raymundo Patriarca Aquilejensi Anno 1282 Habitum( 1282 ), Mansi 24 :
- Michele Maccarrone, ‘‘ ‘Cura animarum’ e ‘parochialis sacerdos’ nelle costituzioni delivCon-
cilio Lateranense ( 1215 ): Applicazioni in Italia nel sec.xiii,’’Pievi e parrocchie,ed. Erba et al., 1 : 97 , citing
Lateraniv,c. 66. - Gabriele Zanella, ‘‘L’eresia catara fraxiiiexivsecolo: In margine al disagio di una storio-
grafia,’’Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio muratoriano 88 ( 1979 ): 244. - See Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , col. 430 , on these practices.
- On the blessing of cemeteries in medieval canon law, see Marantonio Sguerzo,Evoluzione, 86 – 93.
- So suggests Sicardo,Mitrale, 9. 50 , col. 428.