Officially, we Britons have been Christians
for more than 1,500 years...
.. but scratch the surface,
and you'll find our ancestors believed in far more
than Christ and the cross.
Pagan gods, witches, demons, evil spirits,
were all proclaimed as terrifying fact.
Now I want to uncover what beliefs and fears really built Britain.
'This week, along with a team of top historians,
' I'm investigating the dark superstitions we once had about dead bodies.'
I'll be discovering why our ancestors were
so scared of corpses they'd mutilate them in their graves.
What power enabled a dead body to convict a murderer?
If at any point the corpse began to bleed, this would be seen as a sign of guilt.
Why would our forefathers think a corpse was full of life?
It's almost breathing.
'And when did you need to kill someone a second time?'
He's certainly not going to rise from the dead again now.
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life
through Our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God,
our brother Anthony,
and we commit his body to the ground.
Earth to earth.
Ashes to ashes.
Dust to dust...
What happens to us when we die is a question that's intrigued
and perplexed humankind more than any other.
Even today when scientists paint a bleak picture of death
being the end of everything,
there are still millions of people
who cliing to a belief in the afterlife.
But for our ancestors, this didn't just mean an everlasting soul.
It meant the body lived on too.
The idea of the body being needed after death is age-old.
Thousands of years ago, the ancient Egyptians lavished fortunes
mummifying the deceased for the next world.
But here in Britain we had a nasty habit
of attacking dead bodies, rather than preserving them.
It's a tradition that started back in pagan times,
and continued right through to the 19th century.
'I want to find out what this macabre practice was all about
'and why our ancestors thought it was necessary.
'So I've come to London's East End to meet historian Dr Mark Robson.
'He's been researching one of the last known cases
'of corpse mutilation.
'Just 200 years ago, the body of a dead man
'was paraded along these streets...
'..and then staked through the heart'
We're talking about someone called John Williams.
He was thought to have been the murderer of at least seven people.
Where this blue partition now is, next to the pub,
used to be a draper's shop of the Marr family,
and that was the first set of victims.
John Williams was arrested,
but before his trial, he committed suicide in prison.
His corpse was then subjected to a barbaric centuries-old practice.
The ritual began with his corpse being loaded on a cart.
It was then paraded through the streets
in front of thousands of people.
So, this is the place where the most important event of all
happened in this parade.
Because once Williams's body reached this point,
a particular kind of ritual had been prepared for it.
This is where the body gets staked.
So the staking took place on this crossroads?
Yeah. Right in the middle there.
By the time the parade arrived coming up this street,
the grave had already been dug in preparation for it.
But this isn't a proper grave.
This is a small hole into which the body had to be forced.
At that point, the stake is driven through your back...
..then you're quickly buried again, first in quicklime...
..then in soil.
It's quite extraordinary, isn't it,
to think that 200 years ago, slap-bang there in the middle
of this crossroads, there's some bloke with a stake?
Absolutely.
How high up did the stake stick?
There was enough of the stake left to still appear above ground level,
to act as a constant reminder of what it was
that had happened on this spot.
But what makes this macabre story even more astonishing
is that this wasn't an isolated incident.
We know of at least seven other stakings,
bizarrely all suicides, that took place around the same time.
BELLS PEAL
And as the parliamentary archives reveal,
the British Government was well aware of what was going on.
There's lots of evidence, particularly in the East Anglia region,
where there are at least half a dozen that are recorded.
What have you got?
This is a piece from the Ipswich Journal from 1779
in which it takes us through the case of Sell and Carter
and it tells us that Sell "took a dose of arsenic
"and he expired about seven o'clock in the evening.
"The coroner's inquest sat on the body and brought in
"their verdict self - murder, in consequence of which
"he was buried in the King's highway
"and a stake driven through his body."
Got another one here, Mary Turrel.
"The unfortunate wretch took poison. A coroner's inquest was held.
"When the jury gave their verdict, on the same evening
"she was buried in the highroad with a stake driven through her body."
What intrigues me is that it's not just kind of daft old peasants
who are believing this.
You've got the coroner, you've got the jury all buying into it.
The authorities seem to be colluding in this practice.
Absolutely, yeah.
And in the end it has to be a higher authority which puts an end to it.
And so in 1823, we actually get an act passed which specifically
outlaws this part of the punishment of criminals.
And it talks very specifically about the stake.
So what's it say?
"That such coroner or other officer shall give directions for
"the private interment of the remains of such person, "felo de se".
"Without any stake being driven through the body." Yeah.
It's this mark of a superstitious attitude towards the body
that gets outlawed.
These stakings were some of the last cases
in the macabre history of British corpse mutilation.
I want to find out where this tradition came from.
Why did our ancestors fear the dead?
And what was it about suicide in particular
that could make your corpse an object of terror?
To uncover the answers, I need to go back in time
to see when this practice of corpse mutilation first started.
'So I'm on my way to see two remarkable Scottish skeletons
'from the 2nd century AD...
'..a time when we were resolutely pagan.
'Archaeologist Sue Anderson was one of the team
'that excavated these two decapitated men.'
These are so weirdly laid out. I s this how they were found?
Yes, pretty much so. This one had his head between his legs.
The other one was holding his skull.
We've seen bodies like this down south before, in England, in the fourth century.
These ones are 2nd century, which is quite early
for a decapitated body.
Any idea how old this person was?
I think he's in his fifties, possibly slightly older.
Have you any idea whether the head was chopped off
before they were killed, or whether it was severed after they were dead?
Well, the evidence suggests that they were cut off after death.
And, the reason for that is we've got several small cuts
which don't go right through the neck,
just as deep as the bone to begin with,
and then the final cut goes through.
It would be difficult to do that
if somebody was still alive and kicking.
So, if you were killing me in that way...
It would be three small cuts, one of which went through,
but the other two didn't. It would have been very bloody,
if the person had been alive, but we believe that they were dead at the time,
and because, if you cut somebody through there when they're alive,
then you get a lot of blood
and you wouldn't be able to see what you were doing.
So if you wanted to kill them by removing their head,
you'd do the traditional chopping their head off that way.
Yeah. What about the other one?
This one, he's the same age,
but in this case, he was actually buried holding his head to one side.
Why?
Well, it may be something to do with the Celtic religions
where a severed head was seen as quite a powerful object,
possibly to do with magic, possibly to do with healing,
but there are other theories about that.
Like what?
Well, the suggestion that he might have had his head cut off
to stop him walking among the living, as a ghost.
That's quite a popular theory.
So the practice of mutilating a corpse to prevent it
rising from the dead could date back more than 2.000 years,
and the stakings suggest it lasted deep into the 19th century.
'So what was going on in the minds of our ancestors?
'Why did they believe a corpse could live again?
'And what did they fear it would do?
'I've come to Northumberland
'to meet Professor John Blair at Alnwick Castle.'
Morning, Tony!
'He thinks an account of a servant's death in the 12th century
'could yield vital clues.
'It was written by a contemporary historian, William of Newburgh,
'when Britain wasn't pagan, but so fervently Christian
'that Richard the Lionheart was spreading the faith through the bloody Crusades.'
Here is William of Newburgh's story,
and he describes how a man of bad life came to the castle
and then he married, but William says that
that was actually a disaster for him, because he heard things
about his wife and became suspicious, and so he told her
he was going to go away for a few days, but in fact,
he crept back secretly and cliimbed into the room
and got up and hid in the rafters.
All right, I'm this bloke.
Yep, you go up to the roof.
Up here we've got the rafters.
Right, I'm the bloke watching his wife.
The wife's committing adultery, with a young man
and you get so angry that you forget you're perched on a rafter,
you fall off and you crash down into the room.
You're horribly injured.
Not dead?
Not dead, just injured,
and his wife pretends to be anxious
and she comforts him, but he pushes her away.
"Oh, go away, you adulterous whore!"
And the wife says,"You've hit your head and you're seeing things."
Oh, I am!
So you're carried off to bed and the priest comes
and offers you the last rites.
I don't want them! I'll have them tomorrow.
Yes,... but by tomorrow, he's dead.
So he never gets the sacrament, and he dies during the night,
but despite that, he's given Christian burial
and he's taken off to the churchyard.
Dying without taking the last rites was considered
a terrible thing in 12th-century Britain.
It meant the soul couldn't pass securely through to the next life.
Newburgh's account reveals that the people of Alnwick
were about to find out just how terrifying
the consequences could be.
The night after the funeral,
the dead man got up out of the grave and he walked around the town.
And what did the people of the town think of that?
They ran into their houses and they bolted the doors.
I'm not surprised!
But it didn't do them any good
because the air became infected by the putrid corpse...
.. so that there was a plague.
Many people died and quite a lot more got ill
and those who survived mostly ran away.
So, after a few days, the town was almost deserted.
The walking corpse appeared to be hellbent on killing
all who lived here.
But what could the villagers do to slay this unholy monster?
Their solution was truly gruesome.
Two young men whose father had died because of this
took the law into their own hands and they got a mattock,
came down to the graveyard and started to open the grave.
It's like a Hammer horror, isn't it?
William then says that when they uncovered the corpse,
they found that it was horribly bloated and swollen
and the face was red.
Yes?
And, the shroud in which the body had been wrapped was torn to shreds.
And this is where the story ends, because the two brothers carried
the body out of the town and they built a big pyre to burn it.
But then they realised they couldn't burn the body
until they'd taken the heart out.
So they got their mattock,...
cut open the side of the body...
..took out the heart..
and throw it on the fire.
And as the heart burnt, all the bad air blew away
and the sick people recovered
and the town was back again on its feet after this awful plague.
This isn't a ghost story.
This is about a fear that the dead can physically rise
out of their graves in order to harm people.
When the people here in Alnwick
opened the coffin of their plague- breathing corpse,
they believed they had physical evidence
that this was a fact and not fiction.
I want to find out exactly what it was they saw
and what they thought their undead creature really was.
'I'm about to conduct my own gruesome experiment
'to find out why a corpse can seem very much alive.'
I'm trying to uncover why we Britons
have such a lurid history of corpse mutilation.
From the Romans right up until the 19th century,
our ancestors butchered dead bodies to keep the living safe.
My quest has led me to 12th-century Alnwick -
a town that was terrorised by a plague- breathing corpse.
When the good people of Alnwick dug up the body
in order to slay the corpse, they saw something
that made them believe that body had lived on after death.
But what was it they saw that made them believe that that was possible?
To find out,
I'm going to dig up a body that's been buried for three weeks.
Doctor Anna Williams and Doctor Karl Harrison, of the forensic department
at Cranfield University, have come along to help me examine the corpse.
There's a three-week-old pig under here,... somewhere.
We've chosen a pig...
because apparently it decays in a similar way to...
a human being.
It's one that was shot because its leg was broken.
I've no idea what it's going to be like.
I've never done anything like this before.
Oh, the lid's coming up. Oof!
Shall I take it off?
Yes.
'The pig has been wrapped in a cotton shroud and buried in earth,
'like most 12th-century corpses.
'Our box is simply to stop animals eating it.'
These mildew patches...
If you, er, if you feel the top, you feel there's still...
a lot of tension there, of gaseous decomposition.
It's taut, isn't it, under the shroud? Like a big balloon.
Ooh! Oof... There it goes.
There we go.
Oh, I got a handful of maggots here, look.
It's crawling with them down this end.
Phwoar! Oh, I got a fair sniff.
I think you're down at the snout end.
Oh, dear. Dear, oh, dear. Yeah.
Eurgh...
Ugh.
Very taut and bloated.
Yeah. Every time I breathe in, it makes me want to gag.
'Rather than wasting away, the pig i s actually surprisingly big.
'This is due to the gases produced when flesh decomposes
'getting trapped within the carcass, causing it to swell.'
What happens to all this gas that's inside it?
Well, there are only really one or two places that it can come out,
and that could make it sound as though it was still alive.
If it comes out the mouth, it might grunt...or the other end.
That would be creepy, wouldn't it?
If you'd dug up a body and it farted! Oh, my, oh, my!
You can see it's bloody bubbles
that are actually coming out of the nose, can't you?
It's almost breathing.
I magine if you're a 12th-century peasant
and you saw someone who had been in a grave for three weeks
and their mouth was bubbling with this bloody stuff.
Actually the hair hasn't decayed or broken up or anything, has it?
Not at all. Very resilient in the grave
and would be around for some time, as would the skin be.
And I believe that people used to think that the hair
continued to grow after death
because it looked longer than when they'd last seen the person alive,
And,... but that's just caused
by the skin shrinking back, due to dehydration.
The same thing with the nails.
The skin around the cuticles shrinks back, making the nails look longer.
But you can see why, if you'd just dug up a person
and all this was going on,
you'd think that under the ground they'd been chomping at the shroud
and trying to get it off, and still bleeding...
When the two brothers dug up the corpse at Alnwick,
they cut open the body to take out the heart
But slicing the flesh may have given them even more reason
to think this corpse was still alive.
Oh, that's really bubbling, i sn't it?
You can see the amount of gas that's still trapped within the tissues.
Yeah, yeah. You can really see, can't you,
what it would have been like if that was coming out of the mouth
of a dead body that had been underground for three weeks?
You'd be really freaked out, wouldn't you?
Absolutely.
It's easy to understand why, 800 or 900 years ago,
our ancestors would have thought there was still life in corpses.
You've got the bubbling blood round the mouth and the nose,
lots of hair.
If it had been a human being,
the nails would have been appearing to grow,
and this bloating is really quite interesting
because it makes the body really look quite sleek and alive.
This pig may be dead,
but it wouldn't be difficult to believe it was still alive.
So it was our ancestors' lack of knowledge
of how the human body decays after death
that helped fuel beliefs that corpses can live on.
But what was it the two brothers thought
this undead creature actually was
when they uncovered it?
Today, the word zombie springs to mind.
But this is the language of 20th-century horror films,
and, of course, our medieval ancestors didn't go to the movies.
What they did have as a reference, though, was a book.
A book in which a body rose from the dead. Not as a ghost,
but - just like their corpse - as real flesh and blood.
And it was a book they would have known well,
because it's one of the most influential in the whole of history.
I'm trying to find out why our ancestors were
so afraid of dead bodies that they'd mutilate them in their graves.
I've discovered that a corpse doesn't always
decompose as you might think.
And this fuelled the belief our bodies can live on in death.
But what intrigues me i s what else was behind this belief?
And when it comes to ideas about what happens to the body
and soul in the afterlife, there's only one place to go, the Church.
In medieval times, the doctrine of the Church wasn't open to question.
Doubt was heresy.
People believed what they heard here was fact
This is where we could discover the truth about our creation
and the ends of our mortal lives.
The key part of the medieval religious service was the mass.
It was based on the idea
of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ,
a man who had miraculously risen from the grave.
To show me what this has to do with the un-dead in Britain,
Professor Peter Marshall has invited me to
St Andrew's Church in Chesterton.
Every mass is the performance of a miracle,
through the words of the mass,
the priest repeating the words of Jesus from the last supper.
The priest transforms the bread and wine
into the literal physical body and blood of Christ.
At the high point of the mass a bell is rung,
the bread is lifted aloft?
the congregation looks at it and they are seeing their God.
Jesus's body has become literally, physically present.
So the Church isn't just interested in spirituality,
it's interested in the body?
Oh, absolutely. I mean you can't have Christianity without the body.
Its central idea, of course, is that God takes a body
in becoming Jesus Christ,
the idea of the incarnation, and that that body of Jesus,
when it dies on the cross is, three days later, raised again.
But our ancestors weren't just told
that the corpse of Jesus could live again,
they too could rise from the dead when the time came.
If you're looking in that direction, you would have seen
this fantastic mural
in all its glory, which is, it's all about bodies, isn't it?
Absolutely, and this is extending the story of Christ's resurrection
to the general resurrection of all the dead.
This is what is called a doom painting
and the word"doom" here means judgement.
The end of time, when Jesus returns in majesty,
the graves open and the bodies rise up,
and the bodies of those who are saved
are reunited with their souls and led off to bliss in heaven.
The bodies of those who are damned
are reunited with their souls for even more intense torments in hell.
And those good and bad are actually real human beings with real bodies?
Absolutely, it's not, of course, a doctrine of the Church that
the dead would walk again physically before the day of the resurrection,
but if we remember that people here are every week,
looking at these scenes, the idea of the body
and the body rising from the tomb is going to be a pretty familiar one.
For our ancestors, death clearly wasn't the end of the human body,
it had a vital role to play in the afterlife.
To let us physically meet our maker on the day of judgement.
But this didn't necessarily mean
that a human corpse would remain motionless in its grave until then,
because many people believed that even after its death it retained
some kind of force or spirit and that energy could get it
to do amazing things,
like communicate with the living from the other side.
That's incredible, because it actually feels quite clammy,
although if he was really dead there would be rigor mortis.
It's a superstition portrayed in 1591 by Britain's greatest writer,
William Shakespeare, in the tragedy Richard III.
Actress Annabelle Apsion and a special effects team
are helping me look at the scene in which the future King Richard III
approaches the corpse of Henry VI, the man he murdered.
Annabelle researched this superstition
for her role of Lady Anne with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
We're about to take the body off to have him buried
and you make them put him down.
- I'm Richard III? - Yes, you are.
You're, you're bad.
"Stay, you that bear the corpse, and set it down."
And then you say...
"My lord, stand back and let the coffin pass.
"Unmannered dog!
"Stand thou when I command!
"Advance thy halberd higher than my breast,
"or by St Paul I'll strike thee to my foot."
That wasn't bad, was it?
Very good.
And now I tell you to go away.
"Avaunt, thou dreadful minister of hell, thou has but power
"over his mortal body, his soul thou canst not have, therefore be gone!"
Which means?
So what she said is that you could have power over his body,
but not over his soul.
But what now happens, suggests that his soul is still
in his body because he starts to bleed when his murderer comes near.
So now the big reveal.
Yes. So now I'm going to say, OK,
if you want to hang around, see what you've done.
" If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds
"behold this pattern of thy butcheries."
So now the blood starts to come out, which he wasn't expecting.
"Oh, gentlemen, see, see,
"dead Henry's wounds open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh.
"Blush, blush thou lump of foul deformity,
for'tis"thy presence that exhales this blood, from cold
"and empty veins where no blood dwells."
It would be extraordinary, wouldn't it,
if you were a really confident person, you'd killed someone,
you came in to look at their body and then it started bleeding?
It proves to her that you were the murderer of her father.
"Thy deed inhuman and unnatural provokes this deluge most unnatural."
So she's saying this is proof that you're the killer.
Do you think that the audience in those days
would have realised the significance of this,
that it was pointing the finger at me as the murderer?
Yes, definitely, because this was a commonly held superstition,
that if you murdered somebody and you went close and they bled,
that was proof that you were indeed the murderer. So, yes, they would get that.
I magine how you would feel if you saw that.
Came into a room, there was a dead body, and that's what you saw.
So, Shakespeare wasn't using dramatic licence.
The belief that the corpse of a murder victim
had the power to identify its killer was so deeply held,
it was used as evidence in murder trials,
right up to the 19th Century.
It's an incredible belief.
So what did people think was actually going on?
Historian Doctor Lindsey Fitzharris,
and pathologist Doctor Stuart Hamilton are going to show me.'
This idea that the corpse would bleed in the presence
of a murderer goes all the way back to the 6th Century,
just after the fall of the Roman empire,
and it persists well into the 19th Century.
So these ideas were very prevalent and, in fact,
they were given legal recognition,
starting in the 9th Century.
OK, so how did that work?
If I could just step you through it.
If you were the suspect and you were entering,
you would slowly approach the corpse.
Rather like Richard III did?
Absolutely, and you would call out his name
as you circled the bier two or three times.
Henry, Henry! Yeah.
And then at the end you would touch the wounds,
or you would even prod the wounds.
Oh, really? No wonder it started bleeding if I'm prodding them.
Yeah?!
And if at any point the corpse began to bleed,
this would be seen as a sign of guilt.
It's all a bit of a lottery.
You could have five people walking around the body and feeling it,
who knows when it's going to bleed?
Absolutely, it depends on what injury they touch themselves,
it depends on how much blood has accumulated in that injury.
So, if you're stood on the left not the right,
you're the one who goes to jail.
I suppose the big question is, why did people believe that a corpse
might deli berately bleed in order to point the finger at their murderer?
It revolved around this idea that as humans we have three parts to us.
Our body, which is corporeal.
Our soul, which is incorporeal
and this middling substance that connects everything
and it's a life force.
It's this life force that contains the memories
and the passion of the person
and if a person's life is cut short,
that life force lingering around the body after death,
might become enraged in the presence of a murderer
and this might cause the corpse to bleed.
So if a life force or energy was believed to linger after death,
it wasn't that big a step to think that a murderer could be
identified by the body of his victim.
Or that a corpse might need to be physically staked to the ground
to prevent it coming back to life.
And that's not all.
Some of our ancestors believed the vitality in a corpse was so real
it could be physically harvested and then used in an extraordinary way.
When consumed, it had healing powers.
Yes, I'm about to find out why our ancestors believed in
eating the bodies of the un-dead.
I'm finding out why our ancestors wanted to protect the living
by mutilating corpses.
I've learnt that many people believed
a life force remained in the body after death.
It could enable a corpse to denounce a murderer,
but this wasn't all.
Some people thought this supernatural energy
also had the power to heal the sick...
if you could get it inside you.
Medical historian Dr Richard Sugg is going to show me
some of the stomach-churning recipes our ancestors used
to transform dead bodies into medicine.
Astonishingly, cannibal cures were in widespread use from Roman times,
right up until the 18th Century.
And the key ingredient, not surprisingly,
was a corpse full of life force.
Ideally, if you had a young man and he died of a violent death, er...,
and preferably if he hadn't bled out his blood,
then you had in his body...
the prime essence of human vitality.
There was even a belief that if he'd lived, say...
He was supposed to live to say, 80,
and he died when he was 20 - because he died prematurely,
you could absorb those extra 60 years of vitality
from that man's body.
To us, nowadays, it just seems like cannibalism, doesn't it?
It was. One of the strange things about this subject
is it's been almost whitewashed out of history books,
because people are embarrassed about it.
Medicinal cannibalism may be a historical embarrassment
but, in the past, people would do anything for a cure from the grave.
The sick, for instance, were often to be found at public executions -
not just to see the blood, but to drink it.
There are numerous accounts of people drinking blood
at the scaffolds in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria,
and even Italy, actually, as well.
Certainly, there's one account, at least, of someone at a scaffold
cliutching the dying body with the neck severed from the head
and just drinking it from the neck of the criminal in Germany.
OK, you ready?
So here we go.
Gently does it.
'By the 17th Century,
'people thought that distilling blood
'could make the life force within it even more potent.'
This is it. This is it. It is a very different colour
from what we started with. We're getting that kind of gold.
This, allegedly, is the colour they associated
with the spirits of the soul. The blood... The soul in the blood
was supposed to be something like this colour.
Whoa! Ho- ho- ho!
You can see why people might have thought they were potent.
You're right - the idea is power. It smells powerful
and maybe it's powerful. It's medicine, it tastes bad.
Shall I try it?
I think the smell is nature's way of telling us,"Don't" really.
Actually, I don't even know why I asked -
it does smell fairly disgusting.
I guess, if you were desperate enough, you might do it.
'But the blood was just the aperitif.
'The life force of a corpse
'could be extracted from all manner of different body parts.
'Luckily, today we're using a pig skull, rather than a human one.'
This is coming away really nicely, actually. I thought that
I'd be no good at this but I've got loads of shavings already.
What do you think the logic was behind eating grated skull?
Well, although a skull looks very dead and very dry -
more than anything from a corpse, I suppose -
they still believed you could get vitality out of it, at this stage.
If it had died a violent death, which was the common instruction
for the type of skull you needed, then they believed
that this violent death had conditioned the body of the person,
and the soul had kind of been forced up into the skull and trapped there,
and it could be trapped for quite a long time and then tapped.
Who would have looked to human body parts for a cure?
Far as we know, pretty much everyone.
We know that Charles II,
Mary - Queen Mary - and William III
were all given preparations of human skull, for example,
particularly on their deathbeds.
It was so closely associated with Charles, how was called "the king's drops",...
everyone knew it as "the king's drops".
But for some, the richest source of this mysterious curative vitality
was the soft, bloody organ inside the skull.
This is my favourite now - something called cerebral pate. And...
I think you just said "cerebral pate".
Strange, but true. What we've got here is a pig's brain -
it would have been a human brain - and we've got some hearts,
not for the heart itself but for the arteries.
And veins and nerves also get mashed up into this pate,
in our pestle and mortar here.
The brain is all prepared earlier, which is nice,
and we'd like an artery or two out of there.
I can see it sticking out there.
It's waiting for you. It's begging to be taken out.
There we go.
- Bit of spinal marrow. - Yeah.
That's the finishing touch - lovely.
So, er, spoons at the ready and let's go.
I'm not sure I'd be crazy about eating spoonfuls of this.
'The final stage was to take this truly organic mush
'and distil it into an even more concentrated and potent form.'
So we've taken human brain, spinal cord, heart, lungs.
This is the "creme de la creme" of the human body, isn't it?
People actually believed in the soul.
They believed the soul was very much in the body.
It was a power, it was an entity, and this is
the distillation of the soul.
The belief in the curative power of the human body was so strong
that in the 15th Century, even the dying pope Innocent VIII
was believed to have drunk the blood of living children,
in a desperate bid to prolong his life.
But this vitality, or life force, ironically wasn't so popular
with those about to die.
They wanted full separation of body and soul.
The only time they wanted to rise from their grave
was on the day of judgement - certainly not before.
So, how could you ensure your soul went to heaven,
while your body remained undisturbed below ground?
In other words, how could you avoid becoming one of the undead?
Well, apparently, the answer was all down to what you did
in those final precious moments.
Let's say that I'm a medieval man and I'm about to die...
although, actually, I'd have been one of the lucky ones
because, in those days, most people would be dead by their mid '30s.
So I'd be a really old bloke.
So I've had this long life
but, nevertheless, I'm really worried about dying...
not because, like nowadays,
you're concerned that it's going to take a long time
and it'll be painful and messy, but because of the procedures.
If I don't get them right, my soul could be in big trouble.
(INHALES DEEPLY) OK, this is it!
I'm about to meet my maker.
Goodbye.
'Now that I'm facing my final hours as a medieval man,
'Professor Peter Marshall has agreed to guide me
'through the correct religious protocols to ensure a good death.'
Right, well I'm going to need you, aren't I?
- You certainly are! - OK.
So I'm now representing the church.
I'm the village priest,
and here we are in your bed chamber.
Yeah!
Quite a lot of people here, probably,
all gathered around the deathbed here
to encourage you to make the best possible death.
What do you mean, "the best possible death"?
Well, one that means that your soul is ready to be received
by God up in heaven. And this is more difficult than it sounds,
because though this may just look like an ordinary bed chamber,
this is in fact a battleground - a spiritual battleground -
and all around us are invisible forces.
Well, invisible to me, but probably visible to you, as the dying person.
So while everybody else is going,
"Oh, poor dear, we'll miss him," I'm hallucinating this apocalypse?
Either you're hallucinating or you, in fact, can see these realities
that are usually hidden from the rest of us.
It was thought that a medieval person on their deathbed
could sometimes see the devil,
or demons that would stop the spirit leaving the body in peace.
Correct religious protocols known as the last rites
could be a way to protect your spirit
and ensure you didn't become one of the undead.
And there are really three of these.
Three sacraments, or special rituals,
the first of which is confession. Confession of sins.
You've done this before, many times, but this is the big one -
this is the final opportunity to get off your chest
anything that is weighing down your conscience.
OK.
Right, so let's hear it.
I was a bit grouchy this morning.
(INHALES SHARPLY) OK, that's pretty bad,
but I think, in the circumstances, we can... We can forgive it.
So I now absolve you,...
- Yep, yep. - ..as God's representative.
Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
- OK, we've done that. - I feel lighter already.
Excellent.
My soul would now be cleansed, but for our ancestors,
the physical flesh needed to be sin-free, as well.
Er..., we now move to the next stage, which involves these -
special oils, with which I am going to consecrate parts of your body.
This is the ritual known, rather alarmingly, as "extreme unction".
Why's it extreme?
It's extreme because it's final. It just means"the last" -
the last anointing of the body. "Unction" is"anointing".
And where do you anoint me?
Well, we anoint the various parts of your body
representing the opportunities for sin, provided by the senses.
- Yeah? - So we start with the eyes. Yeah.
Nose, mouth, ears, hands.
Even, perhaps, the groin area, which is an area...
- I'll leave you to do that one, possibly. - Yes.
And while we do this, we ask God to forgive you all the sins
that you've caused through misuse of your senses.
So now we've strengthened the body,
symbolically strengthened the soul,
and the final of the last rites -
the final sacrament - is the giving of communion.
So I have here in this special container the consecrated wafer.
Remember, of course, that this is physically, literally, the body of Christ.
So can I die now? Feel free.
Actually, I'm feeling quite well now - I don't think I'm going to...
No, no, time to go.
With all the protocols followed,
my soul, or spirit, should go to heaven.
My physical body should now be at rest.
I'd be happy, and those left on Earth
would know they wouldn't be troubled by my corpse or spirit.
But what if these procedures weren't followed?
What happened to you if you had a bad death?
Well, you might be less likely to go to heaven, for a start
And a lot of the worry around bad deaths
seems to reflect a fear of ghosts returning, to haunt the living -
of spirits that could not be at rest.
Many ghost stories from the Middle Ages -
and, indeed, for centuries afterwards -
involved murder victims, suicides,
various forms of these bad deaths.
- Like Hamlet's father. - Absolutely! That's a wonderful example.
Hamlet, of course, returns to his son, describing his murder
and emphasising how he hasn't had an opportunity to make a good death.
He's been cut off, even in the blossoms of his sin.
"Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled."
What does that mean?
That means precisely that he hadn't received
the three last rites of the church -
confession, communion, and extreme unction.
And I now realise
that it's the difference between a good death and a bad death,
that's the key to the whole mystery of corpse mutilation.
The 19th Century stakings,
where my journey into this macabre practice began,
were done on people who had committed suicide.
They'd cut their own lives short and died bad deaths.
This meant their souls, and even their corpses,
were to be feared.
And the only way for the living to protect themselves
was to pin their dead bodies and their restless spirits
firmly to the ground.
There's something very physical and very final about this act.
It's a real"job done" moment.
You can imagine that the person who ran the stake through John Williams
must have thought:
"He's certainly not going to rise from the dead again now."
In 1823, the British government finally tried
to lay the superstitious practice of corpse mutilation to rest.
The afterlife was now supposed to be a purely spiritual affair.
The physical body would no longer play a role after death,
and the idea of cremation gradually became more and more acceptable.
But despite these measures,
there are still echoes of our superstitious fear of dead bodies.
Even today, we tend to associate the corpse with the soul.
For instance, we'll go back to the departed's grave
in order to talk to their spirit.
And even when they're nothing but ashes,
we think very carefully about where we're going to place them.
Because that's where we believe their spirit lingers, too.
In sure and certain hope
of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord...
And remember, next time you see a black veil at a funeral,
it's actually intended to protect the living, not honour the dead,
because a veil... can stop the deceased's lingering spirit
recognising you,... and so, hopefully, it will leave you alone.
The Lord make his face to shine upon him, and be gracious unto him,
and give him peace. Amen.
Perhaps unknowingly, our fear of the undead lives on.
'Next week, evil spirits.
'I'll be finding out why our ancestors lived in terror
'of demons and fairies.
'How could an evil spirit enter your body and control you from within?'
It's really scary.
And why would a fairy drive you to murder?
No!
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd