Charnel Houses

A charnel house is a building, chamber, or other area in which bodies or bones are deposited, also known as a mortuary chapel. Charnel houses arose as a result of the limited areas available for cemeteries. When cemetery usage had reached its limits, the bodies, by then only bones, would be dug up and deposited in the charnel house, thus making room for new burials. For example, at St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai, where thousands of monks have lived and died over the centuries, the monks are buried in the small cemetery, later exhumed, and their bones placed in the crypt below the Chapel of St. Trifonio. The pile of skulls presents an imposing sight.

Charnel houses are fairly common. A Cornish (England) folktale tells of a wager in which a man offers to go into the parish charnel house and come out with a skull. As he picks one up a ghostly voice says, "That's mine." He drops it, and tries again a second and third time. Finally the man replies, "They can't all be yours," picks up another, and dashes out with it, winning the wager. His discomfited opponent then drops from the rafters. By speaking of the "parish" charnel house the story illustrates the widespread usage of such repositories.

Charnel houses can be found in many cultures and in many time periods, including the present. Late prehistoric peoples of Maryland saved the dead in charnel houses and periodically disposed of them in large mass graves. In Iroquoian and southeastern Algonquian Native American tribes corpses were first allowed to decompose and then placed in mortuaries, or charnel houses. They were then interred in an ossuary, a communal burial place for the bones, after a period of eight to twelve years (Blick 1994). In the Spitalfields section of London, a 1999 archaeological dig uncovered a medieval vaulted charnel house, used until the seventeenth century. The charnel house was beneath a chapel built between 1389 and 1391. In 1925 a memorial charnel house was built in Bukovik, Serbia (now the town of Arandjelovac) to contain the remains of several thousand soldiers, both Serbian and Austro-Hungarian, who died in nearby battles during World War I. In 1938 Italians completed a charnel house in Kobarid, Slovenia, to contain the remains of 1,014 Italian soldiers who also had been killed in World War I. Along the main staircase are niches with the remains of 1,748 unknown soldiers. Charnel houses still exist in the twenty-first century. A Korean manufacturer, for example, sells natural jade funeral urns and funeral caskets for use in charnel houses.

See also: Burial Grounds; Catacombs; Cremation

Bibliography

Hunt, Robert. Popular Romances of the West of England. 1865. Reprint, New York: B. Blom, 1968.

Stevens, Mark. "War Stories." New York Magazine, 22 February 1999.

Internet Resources

Blick, Jeffrey P. "The Quiyoughcohannock Ossuary Ritual and the Feast of the Dead." In the 6th Internet World Congress for Biomedical Sciences [web site]. Available from www.uclm.es/inabis2000/symposia/files/133/index.htm.

SAM SILVERMAN

CHARNEL HOUSE

In the Middle Ages, a structure (called carnarium, oss [u ]arium ) attached to a church, to the churchyard wall, or free standing, used for depositing bones, especially painted or inscribed skulls, that might be thrown up when new graves were being opened. The use of charnel houses was obligatory in certain parts of Germany (synods of Münster, 1279 and Cologne, 1280), and customary throughout Christian Europe. Very early, chantry chapels were attached to the charnel houses, sometimes as an upper story, where Masses for the dead were read and a sanctuary light was kept burning. The walls were usually painted with scenes representing purgatory, the Last Judgment, and similar subjects. The chapels were usually tended by members of pious societies or brotherhoods. There were several architectural forms for charnel houses: chapels, niches, and crypts. Many of them were destroyed during the Reformation, and then rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries, but during the Enlightenment they fell into desuetude. In popular belief, charnel houses were the meeting place of the poor souls who were supposedly freed from purgatory from Saturday night until Monday morning and during Embertide.

See Also: cemeteries, canon law of.

Bibliography: h. bÄchtold-stÄubli, ed., Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 v. (Leipzig 1927–42) 5:1427. Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, ed. o. schmitt (Stuttgart 1937–) v. 2. w. pessler, Handbuch der deutschen Volkskunde, 3v. (Potsdam 1938). a. l. veit and l. lenhart, Kirche und Volksfrömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock (Freiburg 1956) 138. h. schauerte, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner, 10 v. (2d, new ed. Freiburg 1957–65) 2:133–134.

[m. f. laughlin]

char·nel house • n. hist. a building or vault in which corpses or bones are piled. ∎ fig. a place associated with violent death.

charnel house a building or vault in which corpses or bones are piled; in extended usage, a place associated with violent death.

The term comes (in the mid 16th century) from Middle English charnel ‘burying place’, and ultimately via Old French and medieval Latin, from late Latin carnalis ‘relating to flesh’, from Latin caro, carn- ‘flesh’.