Many of the churches in London are old. Very, very old. Several go back to the medieval period. The Victorians didn't want to tear them down- they were sacred spaces, after all, but the fact remains that they were kind of falling apart. So they'd try to fix them. They'd bolster the walls, redo the roofs, and relay the floors. The floors were a particular issue because of how uneven they were. It was almost as though they'd been dug up a lot and never really carefully redone.
This is exactly what happened. See, the medieval folks used the space outside of their buildings to graze animals, not for burying bodies. That would be undignified, so if you could pay for it, you'd do what you could to get buried in... alternate sacred space. This meant the floor of the church. Bodies would be piled atop of bodies, some going as far as twenty-five to thirty feet down. When the Victorians figured this out, they kinda freaked out. Victorian sensibilities couldn't deal with bodies under the floor. That was gross. Bodies led to cholera, and that was terrible. So they typically would dig them up, probably making grossed-out faces the whole time, and move them. With most of these bodies, it was a pretty easy decision about where to put them. They assumed that all the bodies were Christian and buried them in the nearest churchyard, often in a mass grave. It's kind of like how they treated poor and/or foreign (Irish) bodies. Little status in life, little status in death.
But what did happen to the high-statused bodies? If you look at the bodies of St. Peter Ad Vincula, seven still remain in the floor. All of them were connected to the Tudor dynasty in some way- Anne Boleyn, her brother, Lady Jane Grey, and several others. This is a small but visible sign of the way postmortem status was assigned to certain bodies. George Boleyn wasn't as important as other prisoners executed at the tower, but because of his family ties, he was included in the burials. It is interesting, though, to notice that those bodies remained in the floor and weren't vaulted. While they might have status, they were still traitors to the crown. They couldn't be treated like the other burials conducted in Peter Ad Vincula and given an above-ground memorial.
In some situations, the above-ground memorial was impractical, yet bodies were too important to go into the graveyard. This is incredibly evident in Westminster Abbey, which is filled with floor burials, wall burials, and monuments. Space in this ancient space is honestly pretty limited, especially with the huge memorials of the past, so the Victorians did continue to bury people in the floor. It'd be nice to find out more about the decision-making process when it came to Westminster burials, I think.
With the eventual creation of large, park-like graveyards, the tradition of burials in churches pretty much died out. The Dean of Westminster's got to give permission for any more burials in the Abbey, and, furthermore, there's no bodies allowed. Only ashes. People who have served the Abbey in an official capacity, such as an Organist or Surveyor of the Fabric (I... don't actually know what that is) may be buried here and important British artists and scientists and such can be considered as well. The most recent burial was Sir Laurence Olivier in 1991.
One of the interesting problems about living on an island has always been the disposal of dead bodies. This only gets more complicated when your religion, culture, or ideas about sanitation prevent cremation. In Haiti, they tend to do reusable above-ground concrete vaults, similar to the solution worked out in New Orleans. In London, they've tried a number of things to deal with the problem, from literally building bodies into the infrastructure of their churches to artificially raising the terrain level of their Victorian cemeteries to keep reusing them. At Kensal Greens, for example, some of the ground is six to ten feet higher than it was back when it opened so that they can keep using the space. It's been interesting tracing funerary trends as the economy shifted from agricultural (any extra land goes to animal grazing) to industrial (creation of big sprawly class-distinct graveyards) to service (blurring of class lines in graveyards). I might end up doing more with this as a smaller project, or including it in my marginalization thesis as a sort of ending bit.
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