Hi AskHistorians! I study bones, and this is my first time working on an archaeological group rather than forensic cases. This does not relate to my study, but I’m extremely curious. Why am I seeing people buried inside a monastery rather than the adjoining cemetery?
I’m currently working on a group of skeletons who come from a monastery in Southern France, dated to about 1390 CE from coins. All of these individuals were buried inside the monastery, right along the walls of the church.
Almost all of the graves have multiple people inside, and have evidence of being opened up and having new individuals added. I assumed that since this church functioned as a monastery, it would all be men inside the graves. However, half of the graves are women and or children! The graves are not fancy, they're rock cut and they don't have a marker of any sort (although this could have been lost over time).
Now, there is a cemetery beside the church, and putting graves there seems way more logical than cutting them into the rock of the monastery. Why were these individuals buried inside the church? Why would women and children be in a monastic church?
Amazingly enough, I stumbled across a primary source yesterday that answers nearly all your questions here! It's a miracle story associated with Marguerite d'Oignt, a Carthusian prioress and mystical author from southern France who died in 1310.
It also happened another time that that same Guichard of Ars, the knight, and Monsieur Henri, his brother, a canon from Lyons, went to exhume the bodies of their father and mother, and of some other relatives and friends who had all been buried in the cemetery of Poleteins. They wanted to put them all into a tomb that they had built in the church.
...When the moment came when the remains of those who were buried in teh cmeetery were unearthed, the prioress Margaret...handled the bones with her bare hands...In everyone's presence she said that the skull of one of her nuns was missing (she had been the first cousin of Monsieur Guichard of Ars and Monsieur Henri of Ars and had been buried in the same tomb with her father.) And there was no one who knew how many bodies there were in this tomb, not Madame Marguerite nor anyone else.
Late medieval people are well known for zealous, consuming concern for their own souls (indulgences/"buying your way into heaven," which isn't actually correct but that's the common understanding today). In fact, lay support for monasteries going back centuries depended as much, perhaps more, on people's concern for their deceased loved ones. The primary function of monasteries in medival society was to pray for the dead, and financial donations to monasteries ensured that one's family would be remembered in the daily prayers and Masses of the monks or nuns. Burial inside the church rather than simply in consecrated ground created a more powerful tangible, material connection between humans and heaven.
Thus, in this case, Guichard and Henri are mentioned earlier as well known to Marguerite, in charge of Poleteins charterhouse--presumably as financial patrons. They've donated money to the convent for the construction of a family tomb within the church, to hold the remains of numerous friends and family. Some of those bodies were already buried together in the cemetery outside, but which/how many bodies were in the graves was more a matter of speculation than certainty (people know the one nun was buried with her father, but not how many others were with them).