Without a Friend? Burial of the Destitute Poor in Cork, 1830–1900

Abstract

Burying the very poor presented a recurring challenge to communities, parishes, and local government yet the burial practices of the destitute remain an understudied area of Irish funerary culture. ‘Friends’ – family and community who claimed bodies and petitioned for coffins – negotiated a network of private alms and publicly funded poor relief to secure burial for their dead. The city's medical schools, whose dissection of corpses was deeply unpopular, shaped institutional and private burial practices. After the Famine, the popular fear of dissection joined to a horror of the newly established workhouse burial grounds that physically segregated the institutional dead. Extensive claiming of corpses by friends and Anglican parishes from the workhouse in post-Famine Cork shows that the symbolic power of the pauper grave was manifest in the burial landscape rather than cheap coffins and common graves.